There’re too many unknowns here to outright accuse Anet of shady practices. Even though there’s a blog post saying it takes a month to complete a legendary not including the art for it, that could have changed. For instance, after implementing the system to the existing legendary weapons Anet was probably reasonably certain they could do so with future weapons and wrote that post. But after initial feedback and releasing the next 3 maybe they found out a host of bugs and problems like requiring failed events and such and that piled up to the point where they have to rework the whole system(weapons, events, collections, etc.), making it prohibitively long to implement. Thus now Mo saying they have “six developers working on that, who could work on it for years to come”. So what was originally (and reasonably) expected to take months now requires several years to implement, possibly beyond GW2’s expected life span.
A lot of players would then ask “why not just hire more people to the legendary team?” Well, projects often don’t work that way. Imagine an issue of a comic. You have a writer, a penciler, an inker, and a colorist. Each worker cannot start their work until the previous person does their job. Let’s say the penciler is typically where production slows the most since that is where most of the visual art is made. Hiring more inkers and colorists aren’t going to speed that up because they’re waiting for the pencils. And hiring more pencilers won’t do anything because, well, try having multiple people draw a cohesive image on the same page, or even match each others art styles on separate pages. Some jobs simply can’t be sped up with more people. Legendary Weapons might be one of them.
Then there’s the “why not take people from the 70 man xpac 2 team instead of legendary team?” Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were in completely different stages of production that require skill sets that simply don’t mix and match with each other. Who’s to say xpac 2 isn’t in a preproduction stage, and those 70 people are all concept artists, story boardists, script writers, people who specialize in coming up with new mechanics like gliding for HoT, you know, idea guys. While LW-like content is now in a production stage. They wouldn’t be idea guys, they’d be guys that make the ideas happen. Heck the 70 xpac people could have been LW people a few months ago while LW was in preproduction. If this is the case, it wouldn’t be surprising to take the legendary team that was in a stage of production, and fit them in a team that’s in production and it would be silly to take people off of the 70 man idea team and plop them in make idea happen team.
I’ve read a lot of posts saying HoT without the lengendaries is like being sold a car without wheels/engine/whatever components. I’d like to offer my own analogy. It’s like you wanted a red car, Anet said they could make it and give it to you. They have painted many cars already and are confident they can paint this one for you too. However, the red paint factory blows up, or the red paint making process is suddenly found to be substantially environmentally unfriendly and becomes illegal to produce, or a component of the red paint reacts poorly with the materials making up the body of this special car. Basically something that makes Anet red cars impossible to make for the foreseeable future. They offer you a blue car instead in the form of the OG legendary weapons crafting/collections. You still have all the functionality of the red car, you can make a legendary of any weapon type. You just can’t have the look you wanted.
Are you entitled to a refund in that situation? Yeah, I guess so. You paid for a red car, but Anet can’t provide it anymore. However, if you do ask for a refund I would hope you do so without being convinced that Mo/Anet are evil cash grabbers or that incompetence led to this, because this is not necessarily so. At least give them the benefit of the doubt.
If there’s any evidence whether or not Anet is evil cash-grabby or not, it’s that Mo took the time to tell us directly what is happening. If he were going for a cash grab, he would’ve stayed silent and continued clawing at gem sales till the game died. He didn’t, he wants us to know he will be honest with us.
Let’s also not forget Mo is a founder of Anet. He has led the team through core GW1, Factions, Nightfall, EotN, and core GW2. Even if HoT is a total flop (and I don’t think it’s a “total” flop), 1 flop after 5 fairly substantial successes should at least earn him the benefit of the doubt for a bit right?
