The only part of the game that's catered to each individual are the player's home instance (a part of their starting city in which they live, have friends, etc.) and the Personal Story (which is also instanced). You can bring other players into both if you wish.
Cross-server is as simple as character transfers in WoW, except there's no wait and no fee.
The Dynamic Events scale based on the number of players actively participating (it ignores people just standing around), so they can still be done in a low pop area but will increase in difficulty if lots of people contribute.
Phasing is a terrible concept because it segregates your game population based on individual progress. Dynamic Events are not static quests that you can accept and then carry around for weeks; they start, advance, and end in realtime. Everyone around you will see what is happening and be able to contribute.
Dynamic events lead to change in the world, which was the promise of phasing, but without multiple phases occurring at once. If you save a town, it will stay saved. We've heard several stories out of the beta of players eliminating a threat and then villagers arriving shortly thereafter to set up a town. If you allow towns to be destroyed, they stay that way until saved. Dynamic events have multiple outcomes based on player input and branch across the zones. Failing an event doesn't just reset it, it leads to a failed state where another event begins to try and recover.
Dynamic events do not reset in hours either, ANet has said that several long chains will last months at a time.
Each zone is hard instanced through portals.
Awesome, can't wait. These have been really fun to do, hope everyone listening has found them as enjoyable.
I'm quite surprised at the lack of phasing technology. I don't think I've really seen any other MMO use this technology aside from WoW. But thanks for the info.
Like I said above, GW2 doesn't need phasing because what's going on in the world is actually happening, not just described in static quest text and then only for those in the right 'phase'. It's all going on now, and if you don't stop whatever nastiness is going on, it can and will spread. Fail to stop the undead army? It razes the village and spreads to another area. Fail to disarm the explosive? Stuff stays blown up.
Phasing, as I said, is terrible. In a genre that's all about playing with other people, traditional questing and phasing are both awesome at keeping you from doing exactly that.
Dude, even the menus ooze charm. They're so smooth and slick, it's crazy how nice and unified the whole game looks.
