Bandit17

In no way, actually. With your gametime you will not gain nothing valuable to make you feel accomplished, at all. I doubt middle mediocrity is what you meant for accomplished. 30 minutes are not even enough for a fractal run, the major (and only) content you would find, playing alone wondering where in the hell is everyone. They are on Lion's Arch doing just this content and logoff lol.
Wrong game.
If i can suggest you something way funnier and where you can take your time and if and when possible play later better content with everything rewarding your time ingame, as fantasy game i can suggest you pso2. It's japanese now, but you can find easily a translation pack, and the game is playable. Be sure reading the guide to understand about eng community, which server, general suggestion to not be caugh playing a jap game as foreigner. Next weeks the game will be international full english , too
Also, if you're a deep lover of the rpg genre and you experienced games like Oblivion and SKyrim, you would love to know next weeks will arrive The Elder Scroll: Online , take a look at it

By far, who answer you is one of the pro you was asking who played this game to the fullest and tiniest part, without exploits, skipruns, no rush to be 80 at launch, learning this game in the deepest and fullest of it. Just to be sure you will give a proper weight to my answer, if someone is attempting to flame me because of some hate for some of my posts here a bit negative about how the company is handling the game. Something you, as new customer, would find quite disappointing, wondering why in the hell you wasted money.
If regardless of my suggestion you still want to give a shot to gw2, remember you have 6 months for a refund.
Enjoy

I hope some of the other paths are more manageable than that.  I'd hate to forsake Arah altogether.

Do you skip mobs? I noticed the NPCs bug out more often when you do.

I agree with this.  Save d/d for pvp.

I'm just tired of the BS now. Anyone else? Just tired of it.

1. Because if you were to waypoint as much as you wanted to, it'd bite into your cash supply. Keep in mind the utterly ridiculous prices of things like racial and order armour, and then re-evaluate your position. The fact of the matter is is that with the exponentially escalating costs of waypoints, they discourage travel more and more with each level you gain. And then there's that whole 'contested waypoints make travel impossible' bombshell too, but that's a topic for another time...

2. They encourage an isolationist mindset. The old 'massively single-player online game' scenario. The kind of thing that WoW had a problem with. If a waypoint was free, then a friend who was across the world might say 'Sure, I'll be right there!' if you were to ask them to run an event with you. But with waypoints costing as much as they do, they'd rather make an excuse and continue playing in the zone they're in. This is how it encourages a less fun, more isolationist playstyle. It segregates players by zone.

3. There are well designed gold sinks and then there are taxes. This is the latter. A gold sink stays static throughout the game, and often will give you something in exchange for your money. It'll give you a fun ride, or a new item. Now, if gold sinks came in the form of armour skins which you could buy with gold rather than just on the gem shop, then that's a valid gold sink. Transmutation stones purchasble with gold from vendors is also a valid gold sink. Putting a tax on something that people should be able to use in an uninhibited way is just bad game design. And it needs to be uninhibited considering how slow normal movement is.

4. He didn't say that waypoints violate the manifesto. Reading comprehension is helpful. He said that waypoint taxes did. ArenaNet spoke of creating a game for the player, where fun is paramount. Having taxes on things which inhibit your ability to do things is ridiculous and unfun. If they charged a gold tax for switching zones, would that be fun? What about a gold tax for every line spoken in map chat? The waypoint tax is ridiculous and does fly in the face of fun. It's something you should be able to use uninhibitedly, this ties into the above. And this is the kind of old MMO trick that GW2 was supposed to move away from.

Happy? Good. My tolerance is getting paper thin for this sort of thing. I swear, you just want to bend over and beg for poor treatment, you do. People like you. It just bothers me deeply that there are consumers who'll take poor treatment and believe that any hardship they encounter because of a product supplier is their own fault, and that they should attack anyone who has valid complaints about such.

It's BS. It's completely BS. You should have more pride.

Paying for travel and repairing armor sucks.

I hope people don't reply to this with ways around these charges like the travel to Lion's Arch through the mists trick

congrats to the whiners, they got their wish. Era of welfare legendary will begin soon...