Guild Wars 2

@ANet
Now that there’s an expansion out, I have a few questions as to the plans of integrating updates between expansions. (Sorry if these have already been asked and/or answered before.)

• Will all Living Story updates between 1 expansion and another be included in the purchase of said expansion (without need to log in during a time period to get it)?
  I assume/hope yes, because with base GW2, it was unknown if there would be expansions, so it was reasonable to say that the Living World was only free (well, included in the price of the base game) for a limited time, because it would be an important monetization aspect for the game. But now that expansions are a thing, will Living World be guaranteed with the purchase of the Expansions? I personally think it should be guaranteed, and not gated behind logging in during a certain period, because with the model evolving to the point of an expansion, it is now expected, I think, that when you buy the expansion, you WILL get all content from the expansion to the next, whereas before any expansions were expected, the model to only get it if you logged in made sense, because otherwise you (ANet) might not make any more sales for content ever again (I know this is redundantly worded).

• Will buying, for example, Expansion 3 include the Living World seasons from Expansions 1 and 2, or will you need to buy them separately (considering the otherwise base story of the expansion WILL be included in any future Expansion you buy, since that will just become the base game)?
  If you did need to buy them, the story would be incomplete/incohesive for each previous expansion. I may not have a preference, I suppose, but I would just like to know what to expect.

According to the HoT site, you will need to both own HoT and login to unlock the living story for free. The purpose behind the need for logging in is to keep players active. If they were going to just give it, it should have been a pre-purchase bonus. The alternative is to keep HoT at full price for the remainder of its life. The trick is, as the price of HoT goes down over time, the missed episodes will make up that difference. ArenaNet can make it appear cheaper, but it’s actually not. After season 3, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them bundle it and raise the price back to full.

As for next expansion, it’s safe to assume that they won’t be including past seasons for free. That’s the trick to giving away the past expansions for free.

Well next expansion is far away so i wouldn’t bother about asking questions more than to hot

You will be required to own HoT as well as log on at some point when a particular LS episode is active to unlock it. What I haven’t seen is whether HoT is required to unlock the episode.