1) Nobody told us. Anything. Not even a whisper.
Alright Anet, I get that you want to keep a special one-time-event under wraps. Fine. However, an entire tier of progression and an entirely new PvE feature? Why on earth would you say jack squat about it and then spring it on the playerbase? Certainly there were long, loud, lengthy discussions about gear treadmills that have been happening since the dawn of gear treadmills, but as far as I could tell the only thing we might possibly imply was that there may possibly be a treadmill sometime in the future.
What we can’t have possibly hoped to know are things like how to obtain the extra tier, the possiblity of new stats (Agony) etc. All of this was kept completely under wraps and was revealed TWO DAYS before the patch. No time for us to think about it, no time for us to talk about it, and no time for anybody to consider changing it. I fully recognize that there are arguments for every side of the issues, but it just seems wrong for such a big change to appear so suddenly.
With every other change I can possibly think of during development, people were told MONTHS in advance that things were changing. The removal of Potions/Energy. The Sylvari rework. Hearts instead of all-Events. We had TIME to digest the changes, TIME to deliberate them, TIME to consider alternatives.
This is not Beta, Anet. You can’t just throw content onto the server and then have us mess with it. In Beta, broken content gets reported, and you fix it. In Retail, broken content can quickly result in a complete mentality shift for the entire community. Which leads into my second point…
2) The implementation was brutally kitten
Again, I don’t have a problem with Ascended gear existing. I’m not even particularly hissy about Agony. What I do have a problem with is that you can only get Ascended gear with Infusions from FotM.
“But wait, they’ll add additional progression paths eventually!”
So what? The damage is already done. This lone move more or less completely invalidated every form of Exotic tier content in favour of shoving everyone into FotM. Even if Anet put Ascended gear into every existing Exotic source tommorow, that wouldn’t undo the damage of people having already mass-migrated to FotM. After implementation, the problem of people now being familiar with FotM and less familiar with the other content will still cause FotM to be the default source, as it would be easier to find competent groups to run FotM than it would be to find groups for specific dungeons, etc.
Of course, the alternative is tearing FotM rewards to shreds in order to force people away, but I hope I’m not alone in believing that such a decision would be a terrible mistake.
So, put simply, Anet has just dug a massive hole for themselves not by the nature of the content, but by the nature of deployment. Scarcely any advance notice for a patch that couldn’t even be considered as complete. Anet will need to work extremely hard to repair this damage, as it is both a systemic problem and a community relations issue.
Mods will probably can this thread as complaining, but I’ve said my piece.