Ritualist

It didn't! There was also a barbeque!

PS: Could someone please find enough Dredge technicians to remove those useless, immortal, and annoying sonic turrets? The war is over, right?

Oh. I've seen a few, believe me.

There's also the fact that GW1 was the second most successful MMO in western markets during its time, and it achieved that without the massive advantages WoW had (WoW used a well-known and well-loved IP while Tyria was brand new, Blizzard was a well-known and, then, pretty much universally well-respected company while ArenaNet was pretty much unknown and untested, Blizzard had good marketing while Guild Wars had near zilch - it's likely that I would never have known about the Guild Wars franchise if I hadn't known Gaile from, ironically, a Warcraft 3 community). Part of what distinguished it was the low-grind attitude, and the core audience for the sequel is, naturally, going to be people coming over from Guild Wars 1 that are used to the same low-grind attitude. A friend of mine said recently that one of the marketing maxims is "It's easier to keep an existing customer than win a new one, and it's easier to win a new customer than win back one that you've (kittened) off."

In other words, if you're going to annoy your core base in order to reach for a supposed wider audience, you need to be pretty sure that you're going to draw in more than you lose.

And I say 'supposed' there because the MMO community has a massive selection bias in its attitudes. With the exception of Guild Wars, most people playing MMOs are people who can at least tolerate the idea of the continuous gear treadmill, because everyone "knows" that MMOs mean continuous treadmills. People who wouldn't touch a gear treadmill with a twenty-foot pointy stick but who might otherwise be interested in the idea of an MMO, by and large, aren't represented in a typical census of MMO players. And, given that ArenaNet and NCSoft have pretty much failed when it comes to publicising either Guild Wars games, the we still don't know how many people would be attracted to a low-grind MMO if they knew about it.

One metric we do have, though, is the number of people complaining about grind in GW2 forums and the number of people supporting it. I would acknowledge that the official forums are probably a better place to gather statistics there, though, since Guru probably has the selection bias of being favoured by people who played GW1 and thereby used Guru back in the day.

@Sebrent: Didn't think to mention earlier that so far my main inventory problems have been from storing gear for my characters that have not yet hit 80, rather than different sets for my 80s. That might come later, though - so far, I've pretty much just been getting one reasonably all-purpose set for each of my characters. Once they all hit 80 and are equipped to what I consider to be a minimum standard, though, that might start to change.

I was thinking about ALL the events, not just the dragons. That would make exploring a map much more enjoyable since you'd know when and where events will happen in a map. ^^

milk them via lottery boxes?

This is how I feel also. And to make the situation even worse, I absolutely hate the zoom level: the camera is way to close to the action, further limiting your understanding of the battle.

Guild Wars 1 was not an MMORPG, it was CORPG, or RPG with multiplayer elements, and let's not lie to people who didn't play GW1, after some time everyone started playing alone with their heroes. I remember how hard was to find group to do missions, since everyone had heroes and I didn't at that time.

This is how it worked in Guild Wars... Diamonds were never really any more useful than say, a ruby or a glob of ectoplasm, because they all served a different purpose. How can ArenaNet go back on so much that they did?! I don't understand how they could have missed all of the elements that Guild Wars such a fun and addictive game!