From the very first time I logged on in Ascalon City pre-searing, I have loved Guild Wars. The music, the graphics, the story & lore, the character classes, all of it. I played the original game for years and had only minimal problems with it, and most of those could be blamed on my ISP anyway. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have that excuse.
Yes, I understand that this is supposed to be a “new” game, playable by people who never touched the first game, and that’s fine. I understand that the first game had several years’ worth of bug-fixes, patching and updates, not to mention the expansions. We won’t even go into comparisons of content quality and so forth, because that’s opinion anyway and we all know what those are like; everyone has one.
Instead, let’s talk about product quality control. I understand that tech evolves, and the various rendering engines and software routines used in A don’t necessarily translate to B. However, the underlying issues those engines and routines were designed to handle still exist and you need to address them with the new tools. Stuff like graphical and audio bugs, broken GUI elements, reward distribution and so forth need to “just work.” When a broken interface gets in the player’s way, it doesn’t matter what the content’s quality is — the player is now frustrated by a user-interface problem that should be essentially transparent during normal use. Your supposedly-immersive software is constantly breaking the fourth wall, which the first game almost never did.
If you use control X expecting result Y and instead get result 73, that’s got nothing to do with being a “new game.” That’s a broken GUI element that should have never gotten past pre-release debugging and QC. When you select a block of text and click the BOLD button in your word processor, the result should not be to apply boldface to other randomly selected text elsewhere in the document. How long do you think such a bug could survive in the MS-Word team at Microsoft, or even among the unpaid open-source coders working on OpenOffice? A few days, maybe a week at most before someone caught it and stomped it flat? In Guild Wars 2, bugs like that and worse have persisted since beta. They’re no longer even bugs, at this point they have enough seniority to be features (try GW2, with its new and exciting “combat-mechanics randomizing” feature, you’ll love it!).
Add to this the complicating factor of the Living World, and its unnecessarily frenetic 2-week release schedule. That is simply not enough time to develop quality content, much less thoroughly beta-test it and work out the inevitable bugs. As a result, bugs are introduced to the already-huge .DAT file and they just stay there. Two weeks later, another raft of bugs is introduced. Yes, some of the bugs from the earlier round are eliminated simply by eliminating the temporary content they affected, but others are persistent and affect the game engine, the GUI or any one of several other persistent elements. So they accumulate on top of the bugs that have existed since launch and before. You should know this already, you have Occam’s Razor as an item in the game!
Please suspend the Living World, Living Story, or whatever you want to call it. Work on going through your bug tracker (oldest to newest, prioritize GUI, then audiovisual, then bugged skills, then whatever is left), until you have killed the majority of them very dead. Currently what you have are loads of GUI issues on a list that just keeps getting bigger, a bunch of skills/traits/items that don’t do what they’re supposed to do, masses of other unaddressed bugs, and a story that could maybe develop into something interesting if the framework it was presented in wasn’t bugged all to hell and back.
TL:DR
Stop chasing a moving target! Suspend the Living World release schedule long enough to clean out the bugs. Then decide if the story was going where you wanted it to go, consider player feedback, and then re-introduce the Living World on a slightly less hectic schedule so you have more time to debug before release. A game with fewer bugs, mechanics that work as advertised and skills that do what they should will make the majority of your player base far happier than another few lackluster episodes of “Scarlet and the Grind.”