All of this is my opinion, to anything you disagree with please mentaly add: “in my opinion”.
I’m rather disappointed by the recent living world updates, specifically the last two, Super Adventure Box 2 and Tequatl.
The problem with Super Adventure Box world 2 is simple, the worlds are too long and parts aren’t fun. I tried world 2 map 1 before the fixes after a few days and the geysers knocked me down when they went down while I was in the air. They where later changed to never go down, but things like this really show a severe lack of testing.
Worst were the instant death traps in the assassin (a word that will probably be filtered out by an overzealous word filter but I mean the ninja things) areas. Instant death is generally a bad mechanic, that might be useable in huge boss fights (and then preferably still not) but should never be used anywhere else; and certainly not from all directions, barely visible on the walls, in an area full of foes for which mobility is important in defeating them for several floors on top of each other (identical floors of course so the paths though them will be as hard as possible to remember).
And the same update introduced a hard mode, as far as I saw completely based on instant death traps discoverable only with trial and error, the entire difficulty of which seemed to be having enough continue coins (I didn’t get far, later parts might contain actual difficulty) and at the same time introduced a gem store infinite continue coin, although I will assume ArenaNet weren’t lying when they stated they didn’t make these areas/mode to sell it.
The same update intoduced account bound crafting, my opinion of which I have already given in a post in the suggestions part of the forums but will copy to here: Crafted items (like ascended weapons) and crafting materials (including charged quartz) should in my opinion never be account bound as that forces people who don’t want to to level a craft skill and prevents people who like to from crafting things to sell. I can’t see any reason why dropped ascended weapons should be account bound either.
I do like the new magic find system though.
The Tequatl update was also horrible, adding massive amounts of health and timers to bosses. Before this update I occasionally ran around with big groups of people doing world boss events but after a while I stopped doing the Claw of Jormag events because it was far too tedious (it took a very long time with no actual fun/challenge), now all world boss events seem to be rather tedious (and yet the only good source of the account bound Dragonite Ore) because they take a long time and I still don’t feel like there’s much I can do to screw up (probably partly because of the 30-100 other people around) and if the events fails the boss didn’t defeat the players, no, the timer just ran out (if you need to add some sort of time based loss possibility to the events the boss progressively getting stronger and disapearing only when it has actually won the battle (like there’s fewer than say 10 players fighting it or it’s back at full health after having recieved damage) might be a decent way, but just simple timers are just bad (unless there’s something to explain the timer like say the fire elemental exploding after 15 minutes)).
And then there’s the new Tequatl event which is apparently meant for groups of 80+ somewhat organised people. Today I tried it again around 23:00 for most of europe and 22:00 BST, at around 5 minutes in (and maybe 1% damage) I tried to count how many players there were, my best estimate was 10, I suppose Ruins of Surmia has just given up on it and I probably should too. I’ve never seen it go under 85% health (far short of the 75% required for any reward).
I really hope the next updates will be better een though the majority of earlier living world updates has been rather mediocre.