First of all I want to say that I don’t and can’t play GW2 on regular basis even like once a week due to my schedule and desire. I play this game once every few months or with longer breakes and so I missed most of previous LS events. Now, I see Anet made a good point saying that for those who missed, this content will be available for 200 gems (it’s not much but grinding it with gold is impossible for me at least), so we have to pay. I’m not complaining about this, I still see it as better option than just simply miss out on content, but this makes game more of a P2P model which isn’t good, since I have bougth this game with only cosmetic transaction, not full content. To be honest it doesn’t bother me, but I just pointed out the fact.
All previous LS I have played was coming down to boss train and instant grinding. Players even tend to forget about objectives, just grinded creatures who had better loot. All real story I saw was very short meaningless dialog and some fancy 3 min cutscene. How can we honestly call grinding events “Living Story”? I have finished vanilla Story with two characters of two different races and made different choices. I cannot say that story itself was superb, but it made sense at least, it had some tale to tell, logical beginning and conclusion. By MMO standarts it is of GREAT quality, I can surely say that.
Now, it’s no brainer that new LS doesn’t come even close to this in quality + Anet is trying to charge players for it’s content. Let’s be honest: long time passed since GW2 is out and we had very small bits of true new content that stays with game, that has some quality and everyone can enjoy. I mean new weapon/armor models and territories/dungeons (FoTW). For so long ppl have stuck with same classes and abilities. Every possible combination and experimentation, as Anet claims, doesn’t work, there are still guides on few very effective builds for certain events and they don’t change that much, and they don’t try to release something like this, that really worth to pay for. I’m not against full quality addons for high price, I’m against small transactions that looks like scamming.
Since I got this game many things have changes. Few months ago I could max gear my character within several weeks with endless customization abilities. Now I just have to pay real money for the same because I simply don’t have so much time for grinding and it’s impossible to me. If I pay, I get max gear within one 1-2 days.
I wish Anet preserved game in state where you only have to pay for fancy cosmetics. I understand they maintaining this game, it requires lots of resources and time, but why they don’t want to go honest? Launch real expansion with story of the same (or close) quality as original was, with new/prestige classes, price it same as basic game and you have my dollar in day 1. Why twisting out and trying to charge for what doesn’t worth anything, spending time and money on creating useless insignificant content?…
I really don’t know where this game is going…