First of all, I need to admit that I haven’t been playing this game for very long. Not long enough to have seen Wintersday nor Halloween. I was, however, around for the Lucky event. But, from what I understand, that isn’t an official GW2 holiday.
I also understand, based on the wiki, that GW2 only has the two holidays mentioned above.
My suggestion is for ANet to implement a much more robust holiday schedule. Yo don’t have to base the holidays off of one specific country – the lucky ram event could act as a holiday on its own, based on the Chinese new year. You could bring in holidays based on other cultures, or make up your own based on GW lore.
You can even throw in some fun, shorter holidays. For example, WoW had a holiday that lasted for a single weekend (it didn’t give out any lasting rewards, just a couple fun things) that was based on talk like a pirate day (yes, it’s an actual holiday!).
The overall idea would to have holidays that we can look forward to, giving us content that we can expect. It would also significantly help with downtime, like the dry period we are experiencing while you, ANet, are busy developing HoT.
I imagine that if you implement holidays in a way where they fire off automatically, on schedule, without the need of any patches being pushed the ‘day of’, then these holidays could be very low maintenance in the long run. Just update them each year where you see fit (maybe new rewards based on the current living world theme or something), that way those who rushed and got everything possible out of a holiday still have something to look forward to year after year.
You could even create a whole meta-achievement for the holidays, for those who are dedicated. Give out unique rewards, skins etc per holiday. New JPs, etc. It would even be a great way to bring back Star of Gratitude. If your holidays are frequent enough (say, no more than one month in between holidays), then this would actually serve as a great way for players to get it.
I would highly consider doing this sooner than later. If you implement it correctly, it would serve as an excellent way to keep cycling content without much effort from your dev team, other than the initial creation/development of the holidays and schedule.
Oh, and give us an in game calendar. Put events on it, plus integrate it with guilds to schedule stuff!
