I won’t buy HoT because it’s a desperate gambit to try to save a sinking ship, and it’s obvious it’s a very rushed product as a result.
ArenaNet itself said, when talking about the Living World: “If we do this right, we will probably never do an expansion and everything will be going into this Living World strategy”.
And here we are with an expansion.
Which means, ArenaNet realized they did not do the Living World right. This is obvious – they followed a model with the first season, then went in a completely different direction with the second season, and now, instead of a third season, we’re getting an expansion. Between that and the falling GW2 earnings during the LW seasons 1 and 2, it’s very easy to see that ArenaNet’s original intended model was a failure.
Now, is ArenaNet in trouble? We know NCSoft, which own 100% of ArenaNet, has already began trying to distance themselves from the company (which Mike O’Brien admited when he mentioned that NCSoft won’t publish GW2 anymore, now it’s ArenaNet itself which has to do it). GW2 was also earning less than Lineage and Blade & Soul, and more or less the same as Aion, which isn’t exactly a good sign.
Then we have the HoT content itself. It’s obviously extremely rushed – “we will release only 3 legendaries and more ‘later’”, “we will release only the first wing of the first raid with more to come ‘later’”, “we will add more specializations ‘later’”, and so on and so on – and we have no idea when that “later” will be.
Add to this that ArenaNet’s track record of “later” isn’t exactly nice – all the way back in 2013 ArenaNet said, “On top of this, you’ll also see new legendary weapons and new types of legendary gear in 2013”, and look at that, it’s two years later and we are still waiting, only to get three new weapon skins and more to come… “Later”? How much later? Two years, again? More?
This scarcity of content applies to many aspects of the game. Only 4 maps, with a few of those having multiple layers? Only a handful of new armors? Very few new weapon sets? Looks like ArenaNet has made more art for the Gem Store than for HoT.
It’s also very debatable how well tested the expansion content is. In one of the first beta, the main event chains were so broken that people couldn’t even test them properly, because they would simply get stuck. The specializations people played with were a complete mess, needing massive changes that, in some cases, have yet to be done (see Hunter, the Tempest, and so on).
And honestly, the latest content ArenaNet has been adding to the game is poor. The Silverwastes is a copy-paste map repeating the same events over and over. It’s the opposite of what ArenaNet claimed they would do, when they said: “The more persistent events we can provide in a specific area, the less often each of the events in that area needs to occur, which in turn adds to the sense of an ever-evolving open world”.
Looks like at some point ArenaNet gave up on creating a sense of an ever-evolving open world, and then decided to just leave us with the same two events repeating over and over, while we fight the same few kinds of enemy through the entire map.
What does HoT appear to be, then? A rushed, poorly tested small piece of content based on a system which tries to make players repeat the same few activities over and over, while promising more in a very vague “later” date.
In other words, it’s a low quality DLC. Trying to pretend it’s a season pass.
What amazes me is how people defend paying $50 for this mess. If you think wasting your time with this is a good deal, you should be in your house running in circles. You can waste 10.000 hours doing that too, and it’s actually for free – how great a deal is THAT? 
(edited by Test.8734)
I don’t know if five and a half million subscriptions was enough to make buy to play work for them, but it’s hard to argue that those kind of numbers weren’t successful on at least some level. As far as I know, WoW is the only other MMO to ever get numbers that high.
Half a million subscriptions would be more than enough to make GW2 a big success… But GW2 does not have subscriptions
We know the GW2 earnings. Notice how, no matter how many players bought the game, its earnings in the graphic I linked earlier were less than those of Blade & Soul (which has not even been released in the West yet) and very close to those of Aion (which has had a very poor reception around here).
Is WoW the only MMO out there that hasn’t gone F2P? I don’t mean free to play to 20 or whatever. I mean, free to play the whole game.
GW2’s F2P seems more restrictive than any I’ve experienced so far.
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn still has a monthly fee.
And try playing The Old Republic for something even more restrictive than GW2.
Asking for a zone to be nerfed is far more lazy than saying people need to be reasonable about their expectations.
Not really. Victim-blaming is, after all, the laziest possible approach to a given problem. Which pretty much describes the attitude of some people, who claim that nothing in the game is wrong and that it’s always the players’ fault that anything, from the smallest thing to the biggest outcry, appears to be wrong.
It’s rather obvious that, in an expansion for GW2, players would have expected content similar to that of GW2. To make HoT something so different that many players – for example, the one you were quoting (and not imaginary people like “everyone in my guild”) – do not enjoy it is completely on ArenaNet. They should have clarified it before the expansion was avaliable for sale, and the fact that some players weren’t aware of it is prood that ArenaNet wasn’t clear enough.
(edited by Test.8734)