Guild Wars 2

Yes. The reason? I already have one. I called it “the poor man’s legendary”, because I had the skill points required and I completed the full world explore as soon as I started playing out of curiosity. I made The quip. Cost me about 500 gold in total probably. I never believed that I could make it, but I set my sights on it and by the end of the summer I had it.
Now I want Meterologicus. Still have one gift of exploration and gift of battle left. This time it will be slower. I know it. Mostly because a) I have university now so I can not spend as much time on it b) karma nerf. However if I made there the first time I can make it to there again.
Now if I would ever want a third one? Probably not. Reason? I would not want to bother getting the full map explore again.

Turtle Dragon.9241:

All of these require playing the game to get. Getting an ascended weapon drop also requires playing the game to get. Getting a Legendary does not.

Farming CoF = Playing the game.
Farming Shatterer = Playing the game.
Getting an Ascended Weapon drop = Playing the game.
Pulling out credit card = Not playing the game.

Therefore, no matter how little or pointless the Effort of getting an Ascended weapon is, it is greater than the Effort of getting a Legendary, simply because it involves playing the game.

You can be in the right place at the right time, place one hit on Tequatl and get it. I would argue that if you decided to get a legendary with a credit card it’s so much more effort, because you spend months in a work place 9 to 5 just to save up the money. Also you can’t equip a legendary unless you’re level 80, so you’ll still have to play the game. The fact that you could have hit tequatl once as a level 60 and got an ascended means that you could have put just as much effort for both.
I’m going to call troll post on this one.

proof that your precious ascended weapon didn’t drop from Tequatl, while you were lucky enough to leech the event off off a TSS, TKS, etc guild?
If legendary is 0 effort because you could have payed around 3000 dollars to get it, then ascended is 0 effort because you could have gotten it as a drop.

Fungalfoot.7213:

Mirta.5029:

look at my previous post. There’s nothing unpredictable about it.

I’ve personally observed the oozes following people without the buff rather than the people with it so I’m going to have to call bull on that. The fact that they retain their usual aggro mechanics means that things don’t always jive. The AI is known for being sluggish and the oozes are no exception. Sometimes they don’t pick up on the buff as quickly as they should.

I did not experience this problem at all. Had a lot of bugs happen to me at the last boss, but not on Oozes O_o you should probably report that.
That or did the person with the perfume on run away somewhere else? They stop following you if you’re too far away.

Machiavel.6042:

So….you elect someone, and since you don’t like his sudden change of views and aberrent use of his power, you should let him run the show for a while ?

Guess that explain the political clusterkitten in a few countries…

Nice mindset by the way.

1. Anet in no way is ruining my day to day life, they’re not stealing from me, they do not get to fire me and they don’t send me to war.
2. You payed the money and got your enjoyment out of the game. If you haven’t played it for a certain amount of hours you can still get a refund. You don’t elect book series, game series or TV series by buying their products. You do not suddenly become a share holder of the company.

Waar Kijk Je Naar.8713:

Zuckerhund.4179:

ArenaNet is still pumping out updates, listening to community feedback

Even the gem store has managed to stay consumer friendly and unimposing. If mistakes are made, the staff have no quarrel rectifying it in quick order.

Lol. Lol. And lol.
Anet has hardly listened to costumer feedback ever since launch.

Everything in the gemstore is either ridiculously overpriced or has a ton of RNG. And they don’t seem too keen on fixing that.

There’s only three things RNG – dyey packs, black lion chests and mini packs and the only thing remotely pricey is keeping your own custom arena, so I don’t get your complaint.

Stormcrow.7513:

Because there are no other MMOs out there to play.
When Black Desert or maybe ESO then I will be gone for sure.
We remain because we waited 6 years and HOPE for the game to improve.
The game has soooo much potential but is falling far far short.

There’s plenty of free MMOs out there and then there’s GW1 that you can still play. I personally love life sims. The sims 3 in my opinion is crap. Besides that and Kudos there’s essentially nothing in the market, yet I don’t sit in The Sims 3 forums complaining all day.

Fungalfoot.7213:

Having pugged this dungeon successfully several times now I can safely say that the oozes need to be changed. When the most frustrating part of a dungeon is the very first puzzle something is off. I love the dungeon and the boss fights but the ooze event just isn’t fun since you’re forced to rely on the sometimes unpredictable AI.

look at my previous post. There’s nothing unpredictable about it.

The explanation of it all did help a lot. Now I know how to avoid most of the things bugging me while a fix is on its way
Now you see the floor wouldn’t be as bad and we would be able to reset him with holos I guess if it wasn’t the whole floor surface electrocuted, because when it is, you can’t even enter the room without dying. However now that I know what causes it I think I could manage to avoid getting to that situation in the first place

pdg.8462:

I think that is faulty reasoning by equivalence.

Expansions, as I think most people use the term, introduce new areas, new classes, and often new races. Living Story does none of those things.

Living Story =/= Expansion

I don’t think the game needs expansions, but I do think expansions are desirable. One or two Living Story things between expansions seems quite reasonable to me.

Living story i going to introduce races and places. So expansion pack is not needed.

SiLENT.2346:

Or you know, you could do it the easy way?

when you get to the room have your 2 tankiest run in(1 on each path) before spaki lights the fires. After the elementals spawn the 2 beefy people should be able to agro and pull the eles to the end by the gears and kite while 2 of the 3 renaming group members freely kite the ooze with no issue.

Used this method every time and finished in 1 pull with pugs and guildies alike. It works.

Our group had a very similar strategy, but when oozes would get to 60% there eles would suddenly aggro oozes, so what we did was this – have 3 people run in, pull all eles to the door and slowly start DPSing. When all eles reach 10% those 3 people start kiting and 2 remaining people start pulling the oozes. When oozes reach half way there those 3 kiters pull all eles and burst them. There’s about 10 second gap before they start respawning, so ooze pullers can calmly finish their journey

Meglobob.8620:

You have to view WoW separate from every other MMO because WoW is awesomely successful and no other MMO as ever got near it.

WoW’s subscription base does show a constant decline over a period of years but every time a new expansion comes out they regain several million players. So expansions, at least in WoW ATTRACT players.

Last time I checked WoW still had 8 million subscription players which is AWESOME and any other MMO would love…

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1325466-WoW-MoP-down-to-only-6-15-million-active-subscribers

Well currently it’s 7.7 million subscriptions and 6.5 million players that logged in at least once a week.

Xcom.1926:

MoP brought at least 1 million additional subscribers. Eventually the subscribers went lower but MoP did bring them back.

The market is too competitive for games to retain players. No MMO is doing it, every MMO is losing players.

Did Mop really bring in one million players? Because all I’ve seen from blizzard since a bit after Cataclysm is a never ending drop.

Vaxx.3178:

People keep saying the Living World added a dungeon. Let me clear this up for you guys….

1. Replacing one path in an existing dungeon is not adding a dungeon to the game.
2. This content was finished for me personally in one run through, more or less in an hour.

yawn

I stand by my view on expansions. A good expansion gives more than all the temp content we have been given so far.

If you finish the path and don’t want to run it again, you would be one of those people that would finish an expansion in half a month and stand there demanding more.

dcypher.2590:

Meh…maybe. For the most part when expansions hit the original prices usually drop a decent amount. Maybe it scares you off but it seems a ton of people still buy expansions as many other games have shown. Expansions normally indicate pretty big changes and a whole lot of ‘new’ so people get intrigued and go get it.

From what I’ve seen MMOs tend to have a steady increase of players until they hit their peak and expansions are bought only by a portion of those players. Every single expansion normally sees less sales than the last one.

dcypher.2590:

All the content you just named is cool I guess but is just fluff really. An expansion would probably come with 4-5 now zones, a handful of new dungeons with multiple paths, new weapons for classes, new races with, new storylines. I’m just saying things off the top of my head from what I know of other games expansions. They can say whatever they want about living world but so far it’s been very underwhelming, imo.

If it was 4 or 5 new zones only I would be pretty disappointed really XD I expect them to release as much with just on going living story. Really I suppose it’s an argument of a big chunk versus lots of small chunks. We are going to get new weapons and dungeons paths. In small chunks. We’re already in one big storyline, but nobody seems to have noticed. Even the current living story. Scarlet knows a lot about Caithe. Scarlet seems to be progressing very similarly to an asura personal storyline. I’m guessing that Scarlet is Caithe from the dimension that your evil you showed up in asura personal story. I’m guessing that we’re seeing a very long and grand plan to unfold. After all the steam creatures are the exact same ones that came in asura storyline when you did bad things with portals. So we’re getting a new storyline. Slowly. Piece by piece.

Xcom.1926:

The players that quit GW2 will come back for an expansion. New players that never played GW2 will come back for an expansion. Right now if a player wants to play a new MMO he will pick between literally a dozen MMOs most of which are free to play. However, if GW2 had a new expansion with a reset new players are likely to come back since it is a new shiny thing.

I was looking for GW2 on Amazon yesterday and it was doing really bad in sales. There isn’t enough to attract new players. I hope we see an expansion by Spring 2014 or we are in for a hurting.

To be honest I never felt like purchasing an MMO that has expansions. It kind of feels like you’re buying a full game, but you’re missing 3/4rths of the content, so you have to buy the full game 4 times over.
How do you check how much of a certain product was sold on amazon recently exactly? Because judging from th in game population and more and more game shops agreeing to sell gem cards, the game still being on the shelves I do not see it as doing badly in sustaining itself.

Skan.5301:

Expansions bring more areas, races, skills, content that isn’t temporary along with it.

It was already said that living story does not equal temporary and no real content. The new dungeon path is permanent, the new tequatl is permanent, upcoming fractals will be permanent, upcoming extra skills will be permanent, upcoming extra weapons will be permanent and we were told that if they would decide to go with the no expansion model eventually living story will lead to opening new areas.

Xcom.1926:

This model might help with keeping players that play the game in game. But it will not attract new players to the game.

May I ask how would expansions help to increase the population? Instead of buying one game a new player would be forced to buy years of expansions, therefore chances are more people would be scared away from it.

I prefer this model. I don’t have to pay for anything extra if I don’t have the money on that particular month, yet I don’t feel guilty and behind for it (I get to experience the same content as everyone else) plus I don’t get to get bored and wait around for months with nothing to do

Tested out the new dungeon yesterday. In total, if it wasn’t buggy it would be a very good experience and I believe that this can be a very good path to run in the future. To all of those complaining that it’s hard – it requires coordination, but is not hard. Every single boss design mechanic is quite simplistic, however deadly if people don’t work together.
- ooze part. Loved it. Took us ages to figure out how to not brute force it, but rather to synchronize and flawlessly beat it. The strategy that we decided on. 3 people run to the door, lure all elementals and dps them down to 10%. When that’s done two people luring the oozes come out and start pulling oozes at the same time. When both oozes reach halfway the DPS team finish the elementals off. There’s a nice amount of time between the elementals dying and them respawning (you have about 10-15 seconds) plus there’s only 6 of them at any given time. Took us a while to figure it out, but it was really fun.
- The boss combo. Once again we got stuck. We thought that ooze was poisoning us lol. Once again coordination is required, because the person with the ooze luring perfume on them has to keep on leading the ooze to the oil spots.
- second boss, nothing special. It fires the electric puddles, sure and with the boss doing his circle, sometimes you will get caught in it. Really this boss is the one with the least unique mechanic, therefore is a bit meh.
- third boss. Oakheart. This is where the fun begins.
It’s not the boss that is at fault, but please Anet, fix its glitches. So then what prevented my party from completing it:
1. The holograms would randomly stop spawning at all
2. The 100% of the floor would turn to electricity and this would never go away. And I do mean it. Sometimes it would require 3 full party wipes for it to go away. As in we would wipe, the boss would reset, but the floor wouldn’t.
3. Weird teleportation (and it wasn’t our internet). You know how the oakheart does the stomp that throws you into the air? Well similar thing happens, except there’s no animation of him doing the stomp and you get literally teleported for seemingly no reason.
4. The teleportation can teleport you into the area where the oakheart was previously looked up in. You know that electric pad? Well if you get teleported there you essentially die there instantly and noone can revive you back up.
5. But that works in the players advantage – a person still in oakheart room can get out of combat, allowing all of his mates to respawn and then immediately hit oakheart again. Oakheart does not reset that way and you get teleported back in. At the same time it can work in the opposite way. All people are dragging the holos to the oakheart, suddenly oakheart deaggros for no reason and starts healing.

In total a good update, but the last boss fight should be fixed

lordkrall.7241:

Which is not the case.
Everything without specific language tags are international servers and thus have no official language.

Except that the International language is English, that’s why every single country learns it in schools. It helps for people from different countries to communicate with one another.

lordkrall.7241:

Mirta.5029:

It’s not against the rules, but if you’re on an English server people might dislike you for it. So best to either join a server that’s in your own language, or join a guild that speaks your language and avoid typing on the map chat. If you don’t care about a few angry people though then go ahead, they can’t get you banned for it

There are no English servers though.

I assume that anything without the [] is an English server.

Draco.2806:

Mirta.5029:

Also do any (except for elitist) dungeon run groups ever tell you “exotics or GTFO!”?

Usually the players themselves assume the role of gate-keepers and don’t join dungeons unless they’re in full Exotic gear. GW2 community is quite polite in many respects.

Well having in mind that most people that join are under-leveled, they’re under geared as well
And to be honest it doesn’t matter much unless you’re planning to run Arah.

It’s not against the rules, but if you’re on an English server people might dislike you for it. So best to either join a server that’s in your own language, or join a guild that speaks your language and avoid typing on the map chat. If you don’t care about a few angry people though then go ahead, they can’t get you banned for it

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Galen Grey.4709:

I am not sure why you feel that way? its most definitely is different strokes for different folks. You feel BiS is important to you, there is that in the game, you’re free to pursuit it. You dont want anything to do with BiS, ignore it you’ll not be missing out on any content and you will not die when facing another player because you neglected your armor. what more can the game do to provide content to both extremes then this?

Ascended weapons+trinkets already net around 15% more damage. With armor, I wouldn’t be surprised if it jumped to 25% more damage.

Sure, you can ignore BiS. But what happens when a good percentage of the population has ascended gear? They’ll have to buff the content to compensate. I’m sure that will be loads of fun to do in greens!

WvW? Don’t even bother. BiS or GTFO.

Doubt that. How many people in this game do you think have an alt? How much work do you think you have to put in to get BiS for alts? How many people (having in mind that the game was advertised for casual audience) do you think have that precious time to invest to work for it? BiS is just not worth the bother, because the only use out of it is in fractals. Not to mention sacrificing signets and runes for it… Really not worth it.
Also do any (except for elitist) dungeon run groups ever tell you “exotics or GTFO!”?

This isn’t a video game. It’s a community of sheep, all playing the same cash crop of lies where worth is determined by gear and achievements. That in itself just spits on any foundation this game may have had since it’s very inception.

Oh, hey look! Another topic that insults MMO players!

Easy answer:
you already have the game, there’s no sub fee, come back, check it out, if you decide that you still dislike it put it away and play something else

Skan.5301:

ESO has dodging, TERA does, TSW does as well.

Discussed Tera in the post above. I do like it.

Skan.5301:

Raiding might be something, but you’re basically zerging champs to grab mats to get the current highest gear for hours at a time.
Running Fractals a while back to get all the Ascended items.

I don’t think that we will get anything above ascended. For one thing it’s taking forever for them to even release the full tier. And even then I’m completely avoiding the tier. Just too costly to be worth it. And how do you know what I’m doing? Here I logged in to chat with my guildies, run a few dungeons, have some fun leveling yet another alt.

Skan.5301:

How long do you presume PUGs will be until they start asking you to ping all your Ascended gear before getting into the newest dungeon group?

Does it matter? There are elitist groups that do these kind of things and then there are groups that don’t. Not even once did I run CoF with a berserker warrior, even though that has been the most asked thing for months now.

Skan.5301:

I never said I hated the game. My taste are different from yours.
Nice try though.

So you saying that you rather it was never made shows how much you like it?

Skan.5301:

I hope you learn that if any company pitches you a game idea such as GW2, you have enough sense to put in your resignation letter.

medohgeuh.4650:

Mirta.5029:

Hmm. I still can’t dodge in other MMOs.

To be fair, TERA does action-oriented combat (dodging included) better than GW2, but GW2 is superior in every other way so it’s a fair compromise.

Yeah Tera is my fall back to MMO. I have a few characters there and I enjoy different aspects of GW2 and different aspects of Tera. For example I like their crossair ability targetting (because it’s more skillful than auto target and button mash), I prefer dodging in GW2 because it’s easier, I love Tera’s BAMs and think that GW2 would benefit from Veterans and Champions having different abilities to regular mobs (now veterans and champions just hit harder, but there’s nothing unique to them), however I love GW2s downscaling and no trinity (you can beat dungeons in Tera without a tank and a healer, but it seems that people will always seek the easy way out if there’s one presented, therefore convincing people to just go full damage and be skilled at it is quite hard).
All and all I like how both of these games are different from each other and different from other games on the market. One can hate one or the other, I don’t blame people for having a different taste, but I do believe that variety is good.

Skan.5301:

Amusing.

GW2 is phasing out of the uniqueness and going into the mainstream front.
It’s nice to disillusion yourself into thinking it’s not.

Hmm. I still can’t dodge in other MMOs. I still don’t have to raid non stop to have the highest gear. I am still not excluded from content just because I don’t have the said highest end gear.
Like I said, it’s fair enough if you don’t like it. You don’t have to be this bitter about it running around calling it the worst game ever. It’s obviously profitable enough for them to expand. Obviously some people like it. So why to leave all of those bitter comments about how the game is not catered to you?

Skan.5301:

Mirta.5029:

…am studying games design…

I hope you learn that if any company pitches you a game idea such as GW2, you have enough sense to put in your resignation letter.

Why? Because you personally do not like the game? One of my professors already told us that he hopes that we will create something unique, instead of repeating the same mainstream stagnant games. Why? Because variety is a good thing, all people in the world can not share the same opinion and the same taste. You don’t like it. Fair enough. Some of us do. Therefore we play it and you’re free to choose from a variety of other games.

Charak.9761:

It appears people haven’t bothered to look into the definition of skinner box

http://youtu.be/tWtvrPTbQ_c

By reinforcement I hope that you’re talking about people being rewarded with loot for a certain type of behavior, because if the reward is enjoyment (which is precisely why I play this game among many others and am studying games design) then I’m sorry but anyone that has gaming as their hobby is stuck “in a skinner box”. Other than that once again please stop insulting gamers and leave our hobby alone.

Charak.9761:

The people still defending/enjoying the game are trapped inside the skinner box

Really? So we can’t log in just to enjoy the game? Suddenly if we’re enjoying it we’re this or that. Don’t insult the player base please.
To the OP – plenty of free MMOs out there. Go and pick the one that you like.

The thing is who of us actually are those cash bags that can dish out money every time there’s a limited time gem store item? And why wouldn’t those people dish out that money if the item wasn’t limited?

Here is why. Bought World 1 boom box with my leisure money. Won’t have any more for another week. World 2 boom box expires in 2 days.

We failed accidentally and it did not even work, even though I did do the jump. So is it really there?

Should we do that with new players as well? 370 dailies remaining? How many of them should give laurels then? Laurel system wasn’t there from the start.

The question here is… NA or EU?

Let’s see. My legendary took me 3 months (so essentially the whole summer vacation) with me farming around 8-10 hours a day. You’re not doing anything wrong. Legendaries are a long time goal.

yup, yup, yup. It should be in an instance.

Found every single clue in Sparkfly without dulfy. At first day people were all scouting the map and calling out to each other on the map chat every time they would find one. It was fun!

Coffee.7058:

Yep, not for you.

So according to you a genre can’t change and should go stale? Saying “MMOs are not for you if you don’t like grind” is kind of the same as saying “platformers are not for you if you don’t like 2D”.

ombra.1987:

Even with the limited amount of people currently in beta there are numerous parties who seek only exp people and you know what will happen when they will do it all? That’s right people will lie just to be able to play.
Instead of focusing on hardcore vs casuals or elitist vs bads can we now provide feedback and hope that ArenaNet will fix the lfg in order to satisfy the greatest number of people?

And it’s no fault of the LFG. The same elitists were searching for people with the same requirements on http://www.gw2lfg.com/ and on the map chat. I don’t think that the LFG tool is broken, I think that people that are not elitist pricks shouldn’t be afraid to start their own parties. When I go to a section of LFG and all I see is “exp only” I start mine with the requirements of “Speak English, be relaxed and have fun. No further restrictions ^^”, sure the people that I run with might not be the best and the run itself might drag on sometimes, but at least people don’t rage and keep their mood up

moiraine.2753:

Mirta,

I think Geemo is right to some extent.Why?Have you read some of the posts in this thread Mirta?
What is the difference between automated LFG system and a LFG tool where you can write a post but noone will read it and just join?Because from everything that i read so far i can to this conclusion:
1.People don’t or can’t read the post
2.People join and don’t know where are they doing.(It happened to me twice)

There is no difference will a person be kicked before the dungeon is even opened or if using an automated LFG you kick him when the whole group is inside.

With the automated LFG tool i at least don’t expect from people a lot.
But when the LFG is manually used to form groups i expect from them at least to bloody read the post.
Otherwise there is 0 difference between the two systems if people just join randomly on a whim.

You see I have not yet seen a person that couldn’t read my LFGs. The only way to go around the problem would be to introduce elitist options and that’s not the way to go. I absolutely hated WoW’s system and would never use it. There are some particular people on GW2 that I would never want to run with and if it was automatic grouping I would probably stop using the LFG all together and go back to using http://www.gw2lfg.com/.

Geemo.6018:

What a joke. Next generation mmo content that is inferior to content that others created several years ago. Wow’s lfg > Gw2 lfg all day long.

May I ask why? because you get joined with random noobs there without having any choice or say in what qualities you’re searching for in people?
Why are you still here? And why so sour? That you got kicked from several parties? Well people kick others from parties in WoW too.

Ooooh another person that knows about Overgrowth!
Overgrowth is very progressive for its time with an engine handling actual bone breaks and stuff like that. Wait for it to leak to Action, FPS, RPG games before it will leak to MMOs

Coffee.7058:

It doesn’t seem like MMO’s fit you — try another style of game because <<O=grinding something ALWAYS, that’s half the fun for many.

I would disagree. There’s no real need for grind in MMOs and that’s why MMOs now try to minimize that. Speaking about that though GW2 is very not grindy.
I, myself, never thought that I could ever afford a legendary. Saved up some money. Started working towards what I called “a poor man’s legendary”. Took me about 3 months. Because I didn’t buy everything at once I did not even notice how much money I’ve spent. In those 3 months I probably got and spent about 500-600 gold. You CAN get it. Just focus on it and work towards it.
Speaking about that though I do disagree with the karma nerf. For one thing now you get zero karma for running dungeons and that’s the exact activity that I enjoy participating in.

Geemo do you want to get banned? Your other topic was already removed.
Let me shorten this down:
1. In my opinion it’s better. It doesn’t auto join you into a group or randoms, it allows you to pick what you want from people and put it in the description
2. The only complaint that you managed to provide in the other thread was that people kicked you for not being level 80. Well this was happening in every MMO in existence with LFG tool or without it. In WoW you will get kicked over gear score, over your build, sometimes over not being the full level. Like in any other MMO you were suggested to join a guild to counter that.
Now either provide valid claims of how it is inferior or just stop re-posting the same topic.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Sure, there are some people doing stuff for fun. However, where is the majority of the player-base? Right now, a lot of them are sitting in Sparkfly overflows. Players aren’t playing Teq to farm, they are doing it because it’s new. This will not continue.

Neither Teq, nor 4 hour dungeon runs are farm content. The farmers are running around FGS, maybe Queensdale, maybe CS doing Champ zergs. The dungeon farmers are doing speed runs, one per path per day, only the paths that can be done quickly enough.

And I don’t get the complaint here. Should we just remove all of the easier type of content from the game? Make it give nothing? I too like the Qeensdale farm train and the CoF P1. Right now it’s balanced pretty much nicely as well. Queensdale farm train doesn’t give as much as for example running dungeons does, but the full dungeon reward is capped at 1 a day per path as well. Should we just have a game of content like Tequatl? What should people that don’t have the time to stand around do then? The game is not centered around loot. It is balanced. There are faster ways to get money, sure, but there will always be some. Players that need cash will always find a way.

The tool is still beta for a reason. Report a bug.

^
I came to say what was already said. The LFG tool seems perfect. It functions just like I wanted it to function – you can type a custom message, select a dungeon, tell other people your criteria, it isn’t auto-grouping like WoW’s LFG is and it allows to express yourself.
My only complaint is that story and explorable isn’t separated. If it was, it would just bring a nice new level of cleanliness that I think the tool could use

Meili Ying.3820:

Having/obtaining rewards in themselves is not the bad thing. What’s bad is when a whole game model revolves around it, at the expense of fun.

The thing is whether the game revolves around it or not, isn’t that in the eyes of the beholder?
Like for example, Tequatl is a new living story with yet another backpack as a meta reward. I have 9 characters and even then I already have all their backpacks. I don’t need another backpack. Yet I did the living story.

When you run a dungeon and the run is unsuccessful, but you ran with a guild and you all had a lot of fun, is that 1G for 4 hours really that rewarding?

I don’t see anything wrong with rewards.
By the way every genre and every game does it. You do something in order to get something. You dig trough dirt in Minecraft in order to find coal, diamonds, any material that you need, you get your sim a job in The Sims in order to get that piece of furniture that you want, you want to play shooters longer because of all the special weapons and tags that you can unlock. Every game has always had some sort of reward system. You don’t bash bricks in Mario just because, you bash them because coins fall out.
Though I don’t like being compared to a dog.

Dragonar.1342:

Gear-Progression:
1: Stronger statts
2: Better looks

Better looks has nothing to do with that and how do you know that trinkets will have better stats? Did they say that anywhere? If to follow the logic of current legendaries then they will be as strong as ascended and will either provide extra functionality (like being able to switch stats) or will provide an extra effect. Extra effect would be cosmetic only so I really don’t see your problem.