I think there is certainly a number of very good points to be made here, if people can avoid casting this argument as some sort of black and white, casual vs hardcore thing.
Rather obviously, how accessible content is, how difficult it is and how long it takes to achieve a certain reward are all sliding scales. Sure, you can have “long term goals,” which players can choose to try and get to as fast as possible or work on casually. But there is also a point where the requirements are so high they become a practical impossibility for players with a casual time allotment to play.
I can think of a few changes over the life of GW2 which really does feel like ANet is turning the screws on the players who enjoyed the more free roaming, non-linear aspect of progression in GW2, because that is pretty much gone.
Note, I am not going to talk about how challenging content is, because I absolutely think varying levels of challenge across the game is a very good thing. That and doing the same task over and over for 100 hours is not challenging, but clearing a single difficult instance over 30 minutes can be.
1. Death of Multiple Ways to get Nice Things
The first is a sharp move away from being able to get the best gear in just about any way. Ascended brought in the age of crafting, where crafting is the only reliable way to ever get anything it seems. Yes, there are the boxes which can drop and for a while were for some unknown reason much nicer when dropped from Fractals (more stat choices) than anything else. But the only sure way is crafting. New guild skins even need 450 crafting.
It doesn’t matter if 450-500 crafting is hard or easy, before ascended I could do what I enjoyed and work my way to BiS gear. Now if I absolutely detest crafting, I force myself to do it or go without. And while there are some skins exclusive to other areas of the game (Glorious comes to mind), crafting has basically become ANet’s catch all way to make something “exclusive” or “hard to get.” Which is silly.
2 The Mighty Zerg Event of Raining Gold
This one started with the first Queen’s Jubilee. Before that was a time where getting the Golden achievement for having 100g was actually something. I made 100g inside a week that event, playing maybe a couple hours a night.
After that, periodically and then repeatedly with places like EotM, SW and so on ANet managed to thow some zerg train into the game that gave far and away better gold return than doing anything else. As in not even remotely close to what you would get doing any other thing.
That lead to a greater wealth gap between those who could and enjoyed surfing a zerg for 8 hours against those who preferred free roaming, taking on harder dungeon paths because they were more interesting and so on. Of course, this meant all the really nice things got more and more expensive on the TP. So you became a TP wizard, joined the zerg surfing, farmed another way or got left behind.
Surfing a zerg is far from hard, but it’s mind numbingly boring after more than 30 minutes for a lot of players.
3 HoT and its love of Checklisting
I call this “checklisting” and it’s something HoT abuses so much.
Masteries, though often complained about, are actually okay. There’s an argument that the XP values might be a bit ridiculous (see above about the zerg trains, that applies to XP too), but at least I can go about doing whatever it is I enjoy and make progress. Much like it was getting to 80 in core GW2. This is a good thing.
Many of the other things in HoT however, you either actively do right now or you get nowhere. Hero Points are the most heinous example. Unlocking a specialization is in no way part of the HoT experience. You don’t just play and explore the content and slowly work your way up to it. You either seek out and complete a list of very specific challenges or you don’t. It’s a checklist of which the only purpose is to delay the player from playing with the elite specialization.
Masteries, though set up well in terms of gaining XP, are guilty in that rather than being something which adds to the experience in HoT are instead a series of locks which gate off content. It’s another checklist of do this before that before that.
There’s nothing to discover, explore or free roam in that. It’s here’s the list with a bucket of XP or HPs to get, now go do it or don’t and get nowhere.
No, getting the HPs isn’t hard. But it is dull, boring and after the first set repetitive to the point of banality (which is a shame because some of the HP fights are pretty fun, at least once). Checklisting and gating this way is a cardinal sin of game design, whether your audience is casual or hardcore.
Conclusions and TL:DR
And I think that is where some of this backlash against HoT comes from. It is not all “it’s too hard” or “it’s too time consuming.” It’s much more this is far too repetitive and uninteresting. Please, absolutely send me on a grand quest which will take 6 months to get my Cool Item 27, by all means. But make it a quest with interesting things to see and do, and not just a list of grind. If you make it fun and engaging to do, the complaints tend to go away even if it still takes a long time.
Core GW2 got around this problem by allowing us to explore a very large world with many different maps, themes and enemy types. Sure leveling was all events and hearts from 0-80, but it felt different being in Snowden compared to Bloodtide; it stayed engaging. HoT does not have that with only 4 maps and honestly, the only reason I can think of for the gates, checklists and general sense of grind is because someone at Anet was acutely aware of the lack of content and decided padding it for launch was the best solution.
