I am troubled that development is shifting towards one of the areas you promised to stay away from as a selling point of the game. Whether you mean it to be or not, ascended armor is vertical progression, and as a WvW player I feel compelled to grind towards it even though I do not want to, because more stats is more stats. Furthermore you stated that you did not mean to devalue peoples time with the fractured update, but you did. You keep saying you mean one thing, but you are doing the other, and this needs to change.