My two cents:
I’ve been following the LW ever since I started playing last year, and I personally have noticed quite a lot of disparity in the quality and ‘bulk’ of different releases. For instance, I loved ‘Bazaar of the Four Winds’ (Leif Chappelle, I adored your work on this release) for the varied nature of what you were doing – new mechanics, a new and different style of map with lots of stuff going on and great rewards (please bring this back soon!!). Same with Super Adventure Box, Crown Pavilion, the Southsun content, and the majority of Flame and Frost.
Then there are events like Dragon Bash that feel very lacking in substance and creativity (go here, click 100 of these, click that, use some tokens or whatever). Cut-Throat Politics in particular felt like a half-baked filler between two of my favorite releases, with (what I felt to be) very little player influence. Even if we did influence the outcome of that event, how can you account for all the people that spammed the badges just to get the achievement points? I know of very few people that actually supported one of the candidates outright, which seems completely contradictory to the whole point of the event.
Like many other posters here, I have noticed that certain releases keep players engaged for the duration of the event, while others drive people away completely. There will always be people like myself who just want the achievement points, but please, could ya make the grind a little more interesting?
Then there is the issue of permanence. A lot of people here are QQing about how there isn’t enough content that stays, and while I agree that there are certain bits of content that I have been sad to see go, I feel that the content that does stay permanent (Karka Queen events and the new TA path, to name just two) gets forgotten after players have got all the achievements and the LW aspect has finished. It wasn’t until fairly recently that my server started to run the Southsun meta regularly, after a gap of around 3-4 months where Southsun was practically deserted 24/7. Then there is Tequatl. I think the raid style re-vamp is fantastic – content that is always available, that requires a considerable effort on the part of every player that attends the event. But it’s just that; the amount of co-ordination a server needs to actually have a chance of taking this dragon down is often too extensive, and players look to other areas of content to get their dose of GW2. Since the Teq stuff finished, Sparkfly seems to be deserted most of the time, and I suspect that it will remain that way until some kind of nerf.
That’s enough from me. Thanks for reading and I hope this is helpful.
