As an ex-Wow player coming to GW2, I have to say I am quite happy with the laurel system. To compare with my WoW playing experience:
Having to spend an hour or less a day to get a laurel – that’s a tiny amount of commitment for the casual player like me. Last WoW expansion I played, every faction had it’s own list of 4-6 daily missions, each taking anything from 5 to 20 min each. There were at least 8 factions, and you had to do these dailies to gain reputation points only useable for that faction. The reputation gain from each daily mission was negligible, and you were also capped at 25 dailies/day, so you couldn’t run all your factions’ dailies on your day off for example, you had to commit several hours a day every day. Even doing that, it took weeks or months to get enough reputation to get access to the top-end gear from any one faction, no faction sold a complete gear set, so you had to gain reputation with multiple factions, and the top-end gear they sold was at best equivalent to “exotic” GW2 gear. Yes there were other ways to get faction rep, but for a casual player, grinding top-level dungeons with a random group of people (heavy proportion of jerks compared to the GW2 community) for hours a day was never a pleasant option. So spending an hour or less a day to get my laurel is diddly in comparison.
The laurel items aren’t that good – well, after just a week of doing the daily for a laurel, I got the heavy crafting bag each time, and had enough mats to make an exotic weapon AND a piece of exotic armour. Again, I’m a casual player, and grinding kills or running dungeons to get mats is just not something I have a ton of time for, or really enjoy. Despite the fact that the mats from bags are random, they give me a good way to get exotic level crafting mats with a minimum of effort, just some time and luck. Plus, there are lots of other items I can get for laurels, and at a pretty reasonable cost… 2 class-specific rare/exotic gear pieces for just 5 laurels? GREAT! In WoW, the daily grinds for reputation, items, etc. were far more time consuming, boring, and the rewards were less useful, more expensive, and more restricted.
It takes too long for players to get the legendary items – Just giving the casual player a way to get legendary stuff, even if it takes a while, is AMAZING! In Wow, I played for years, but because I didn’t constantly run raids or get into pvp tournaments, I never got a single piece of top-level gear. And as for it taking too much time or effort, well, this stuff is supposed to be legendary… if they sold it at the 7-11 it would kind of lose that feeling. I feel that it should take a fair bit of time and effort to acquire these top-end items, and if I’m not able to run a ton of dungeons or the highest level events all the time, then it should take me longer… at least I have a chance to someday get these things at all.
Overall I like the daily laurels. For a truly minor amount of time and effort, I can get fun and useful items, and I don’t feel like I’m being unfairly restricted because of my casual play-style.