I think the main issue would be bloating up the world.
If they keep releasing new stuff every two weeks and never remove it, sooner or later the world will just be a massive mess due to massively amount of content that people don’t even bother doing after the first month.
If [insert thing here]was open people would play it for a month, then they would come here and demand something new because “[insert thing here] is so boring!”.
While there is some validity to this, it’s an extreme position that doesn’t reflect how most people actually play.
In my memory of GW1, there was very little of the content that was completely abandoned – it may be hard to find groups at times, but missions, dungeons, UW/FoW, DoA… there were people doing those up until GW2 released.
Yes, there will be a natural dropoff in participation as the ‘newness’ of content rubs off. As a balancing factor, though, when people are playing the cat out of one piece of content and barely touching anything else because they’re rushing to play temporary content while it’s there, they get burnt out – and that could be getting burnt out on the temporary content or on the game as a whole. Permanent content, on the other hand, always allows the opportunity to come back and do it later when the inclination strikes. It might be harder to get a group together to PUG it, but with a good guild and/or friend list, there’s always the option to get the gang together and do it regardless of whether it’s popular among the wider community at the time. For instance, I and a few others in one of my guilds miss the Molten Facility dungeon, but short of getting lucky in a fractal run that’s not something we can do any more, and even if we DID get lucky in a fractal, the dungeon’s been chopped into bits rather than remaining as an intact whole.
To avoid accusations of rose-tinted glasses, let’s look at GW2. People are still doing dungeons, fractals, world events, and so on – even though most of this content was either available at release or shortly afterwards. Where are the people still doing Battle for Lion’s Arch, or Tower of Nightmares? They don’t exist, because that was temporary content that’s no longer available. Where are the people who might otherwise be doing that temporary content? Some of them will be in other parts of the game, doing other things. Others, though, will simply be not playing.
And that’s the thing the ‘bloated’ argument misses: Player distribution among regions is not a zero-sum game. Yes, giving people more things to do will mean they’re more spread out. However, giving people more things to do keeps retention rates up and players in the game, so while players may be less concentrated, there is also more of them. At worst, you get the same result as temporary content, with players congregating at whatever part is new… but if pre-existing content is in a form that doesn’t require zergs, or even if it does require zergs but a guild is big enough to form its own, it still adds more to the game to leave content in that may be mostly abandoned but can still be played if a group gets together than removing it entirely.
At the bottom line… it’s past eighteen months in. Eighteen months into GW1, the world had tripled in size and content, and I still had lots to do. Even now, there are things that were on my to-do list that I never actually got to.
Compare to GW2… the feeling of ‘lots to do’ is steadily fading. It’d be an exaggeration to say it’s fading fast, but another year or so of the same direction it’s been going, and I could see myself growing bored of doing the same things over and over again (punctuated by the occasional spate of doing the same temporary content over and over again while it’s available) and leaving. And from what other people are saying, I don’t think I’m alone in this respect.
GW1 had its flaws and complaints, yes, but running out of things to do was rarely one of them until well after most development had ceased entirely, apart from the minority who blitz through the content with a single character and then complain they’ve done it (and they’re always going to outpace development, nothing can be done to appease those). Here, you’ve got the people who play through with multiple characters complaining, because it’s been long enough that those people are finishing up. It’s sad but true that GW:Beyond could almost be said to have added more to GW1 than LS has to GW2, when GW:B was basically just marking time on a game that was planned to be abandoned while GW2 is what ArenaNet is focused on.
The world needs to grow, or it’s going to to become increasingly stale.
