I like the new content and story, but I'm starting to get annoyed with how bad the rewards are. It's almost like ArenaNet wants people to flock back to Frostgorge Sound, Cursed Shore and Queensdale as soon as they complete their achievements. That's what happened with the Halloween and Kessex Hills events in a lot of servers.
How often are the developers going to mess up this specific aspect of the game before they learn?
I feel like I'm opening a big ass can of worms replying to this, but here goes.
TLDR: Guild Wars 2 is just not the kind of game that forces you to chase after shiny rewards constantly.
ArenaNet just isn't making that kind of game. Apart from the addition of Ascended Gear (I'll come back to this in a sec), they haven't had anything even remotely approaching what could be considered a
mandatory grind. The mandatory part there is important, because while I would consider stuff like Dragon Bash pinatas, fireworks, and so on to be a grind, none of those things were required for any kind of item, cosmetic or otherwise.
As far as Ascended stuff goes, it was simply adding a new tier and nobody needed to rush out and get it ASAP unless they were fanatical about having the absolute 'best' gear. All the internet outrage over that died out quickly (most players knew what was going on) and it's pretty obvious looking back that it was a good move without any nefarious intent.
The rewards for the Nightmare tower are all cosmetic; a new mini, a new head skin for the meta, a chance at a few other cosmetic features. That's been, is and will likely continue to be the norm as long as the current team of developers remain in control of the game. New content comes out, you have fun with it for however long you want, then you go back to what you were doing or take a break for a week until something new comes out. Nothing is forcing you to play beyond missing out on the experience.
This flies in the face of a decade of MMO design where slightly better statistical gains were dangled just out of reach to keep players constantly playing. If you wanted to play the "end game" of a game like World of Warcraft, you would have to leap with both feet onto the gear treadmill, where you're constantly chasing after slightly-better gear with slightly-better stats so you can be ready for the next level of content with slightly-better rewards so you could be ready for the next level, and so on and so forth until an expansion resets everyone's gear and the process begins again.
Because of the way raiding worked, there were also a limited number of people who could participate. That made the game a competition with everyone else in your guild for a raid slot, and all the back stabbing, politics and bullshit that brings. If you weren't running the optimal gear with the optimal build, researching the content before you got to it, then someone else would and would prove themselves more valuable to the raid.
Not only that, but if you ever
stopped, everyone else would continue advancing and there'd be no way to catch up. The locus-like feeding habits of MMO players means that content is usually completely ignored as soon as something new hits. If you were done with Raid A and missed raid B, you'd likely have a horrible time convincing anyone to let you into Raid C and an even harder time finding anyone to help you go to Raid B. In fact, WoW even has built-in gear checks now where it won't even let you use their Looking for Raid tool unless your gearscore is at a certain threshold.
All of this (and more, like the social aspects of 'letting your guild down' or 'not keeping up with your friends') was more or less the result of developers trying to keep players paying a subscription fee. It's proven so successful that it's started to spread into other genres where that sort of thing doesn't make any sense at all (Call of Duty, Halo 4, etc.).
You can go look up "Skinner Box" on your own. It should go without saying that this kind of constant push and reward system can cause some serious behavioral problems without people really being aware of it because it's wrapped up in the shell of a game.
Back to Guild Wars 2. I would venture that the reason some people (and I would venture that it's a very very small percentage of the community) farm Frostgorge Sound, Cursed Shore and Queensdale champs is that they're still in the mindset that they must gain an advantage over everyone else around them, be it gold or stats. But from a purely gameplay perspective, there's very little beyond skill to distinguish the guy who just got to 80 and is in rares/exotics from the guy who's sitting in full exotics/ascended. As long as you're able to play the game, that's exactly what you should do.
It's not that ArenaNet wants those places to be the places where players go after they're done with the Living Story. It's that those places are the path of least resistance for people who are treating Guild Wars 2 like every other carrot-and-stick affair.
So, the developers aren't 'messing anything up'; the game seems to be more or less how they want it to be based on their stated goals, and outside of the champ farmers fucking with the economy, nobody really suffers for it. The content is there to be fun, not another batch of shiny rewards for you to chase. If that's all you're after, I'm sorry to say this game will inevitably prove to be a disappointment, but there are tons of games out there already that will give you that sort of experience if that's what you want.
Alright, now everyone come tell me how wrong I am.
Filled my inventory up with rares, uncommon champ boxes (shell pouch/heirloom seed pouch), and mat bags selling for 3s+ apiece. Plus I got a Mini Toxic Nimross on my second run through, and I actually haven't had the chance to open the tri-key chest once yet.