>>715807928
Pros: It had good gameplay. The mounts feel great. They removed the holy trinity of MMO's which worked great for PvP. The exploration, music, atmosphere, and world events were all genuinely good.
Cons: The playerbase is full of sociopathic troon bullies. The story is absolute dogshit. They pissed off the fans of the first game before the word go by killing off the major human faction offscreen. The main story is a forced tale about fairy ents that the writer had been trying to get off the ground for years before finally using GW2 as a vehicle for her fanfic. The dungeons are bad. PvP doesn't get any updates. After the main story was finished they started killing off all the OG characters to tell a story about GW2's version of the Burger King Kid's Club, mockingly called "Diversity's Edge". It's tumblr-tier writing. The cash shop is egregious, you have to pay for bank tabs and inventory slots which are completely necessary in the late game as your inventory fills up with junk fast. You have to pay for episodic updates to the story called "living story" to progress the game. Living story is laughably bad and has poorly designed gameplay. Can't skip story segments because you have to click through dialogue boxes. It's full of dailies with way too many different currencies and that's all anyone does (logging in at sever reset to form a chain of daily completion groups). The end game gear treadmill is monotonous, tedious and boring. If you missed out on some segments of the living story (Scarlet Briar) they are discontinued and you can't experience them.
Recommendation: Play it for free, explore the world, check out the beautiful vistas, participate in the map events. This is where the good content is. Check out the PvP if only as a dead example of how good it could have been. Avoid interacting with the playerbase, don't buy anything. Don't buy GW3.

>>95868778
>New stuff legitimately feels like brainwashing. The entire corporatized saccharine aesthetic reeks of evil.
This has been a thing forever.