NOTE: This thread is not about praising ANET or bashing them (pun intented), I’ll try to be objective as much as I can, also consider I’m mostly open PvE and WvW player. Dungeons are not my thing, since I honestly think they aren’t well designed, but fractals, Molten and AR dungeons were awesome btw. Also I played little of sPvP.
I’ll use this blog post as reference if Anet achived what they said they wanted to do.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/
Leaderboards on our website where you can compare your abilities with other players to find out who is the best in the world.
Expanded and re-designed encounters for bosses in dungeons and the open world.
New types of achievements which tie into the new systems of achievement rewards.
Continuing to improve the security of the game fighting botters and hackers, as well as improving the games stability by addressing bugs as quickly as possible when they are reported.
Identifying existing parts of the game that can be improved and made more fun/exciting, and investing the time to ensure everything we’ve built really shines as we move forward.
Improving the new player experience to make it easier for new players to learn how to play GW2, enter the game world, and more quickly learn the game without being overwhelmed.
Improving the “looking for group” tool to make it easier to find other players to play with in the game.
The improvements and fixes to the Fractal dungeons, detailed in Isaiah Cartwright’s blog post here.
As far as I can tell they missed 2 goals from this, something that I wanted the most actually. Those are re-designed encounters for bosses in dungeons and the open world and lfg tool. If you look at it, they seem to have fulfilled most of their set goal, but imho not the ones that were most important. Of course they added observer mode, new maps to sPvP, new skills and progression to WvW. Culling was fixed in WvW, which made it much more enjoyable.
If you look at it, seems to me they have mostly done what they wanted to do, BUT failed in some other areas. I think they didn’t focus enough on evolving dynamic events. There are so many things you can do with them that I think it’s a shame they didn’t capitalize on it.
Living story: Now this is a touchy subject
I really love the concept of it, but I don’t love implementation of it. When I read about it and what they were going to do, I imagined it quite differently. I thought that they were going to add new dynamic events to the zone and that they will be perment addition of it, to show how that map has changed. For the record I have nothing against temporary content, I think it’s a good anti-grind concept, but we could use more permanent. I read that Colin said they will start adding more permanent content with living world so I’m happy they changed their minds.
Suggestion: Orr needs to be rebalanced, again :S, temple events need to scale properly and offer unique items, Southsun Cove, Karka queen needs to be rebalanced, it’s been 2 weeks on my server since it was done. Also please eliminate all group events that are not tied to meta-events. Population is spread enough and I think that only meta-events should have group events.
tl dr: All in all, Anet have done most of the stuff they said they would. But I think they could have done a little more I’m looking forward to what the future will bring to GW2, hopefully expansion next year