Awesome, thanks so much for the replys guys! That's all I needed to hear, I'm definitely going to be picking it up tomorrow, and I'll be back once I start playing. Can't wait!
If I had to give advice, it would be to approach GW2 without any preconceptions. For better or worse, GW2 is very different from conventional MMOS, and in a way it as more in common with Dungeon Fighter Online than it does with WoW or FFXIV.
Even though games like ArcheAge, WoW, FFXIV and GW2 are all "MMORPGS", they're all very different in terms of how they approach things. I'm still working out my thoughts as to how to properly frame this, so bear with me:
Something I noticed about the the games mentioned above, is that each has a very different level of "player interaction conversion", for the lack of a better term. Player energy goes in, and an output of a certain quantity happens. This can vary depending on the type of interaction the player is putting into, but generally within each game it seems consistent across all types. If I had to put the games on a kind of scale, it would be this:
| High Input Low Output < --------------------|-------------------- > Low Input High Output |
| ArcheAge ------------------- FFXIV -------------------- WoW -------------------------------GW2 |
Basically, ArcheAge and FFXIV take a lot of player energy in, and puts out far less, compared to GW2 that requires very little input for a lot of output.
Using travel as an example, in ArcheAge and FFXIV, to get from A to B is (initially) a lot of work. Base movement speed is slow. You have no mount at the start, you don't have waypoints unlocked to teleport to, when you do get them unlocked they're rather costly for new players (FFXIV has the cheap Chocobo renting system that mitigates that somewhat, but the point stands). By contrast, GW2 has no mounts at all, the base movement speed is fast, and getting from A to B is rather easy at the start and only gets easier as you go. WoW sits kinda in the middle, with airships and mounts being accessible early.
Using crafting as an example, in ArcheAge and FFXIV, crafting is time-consuming, difficult, and very tedious. You have to work hard to get even simple things done. You don't gain multi-item crafting or bulk/batch crafting, until much later. This does have a benefit though: because of High In Low Out, the items produced have a lot of intrinsic value. GW2 on the other hand, its crafting is stupid simple, and you can output a lot very easily. You have multi-item crafting right at the start. However, the ease with which you can craft and output things, means they're cheap and worthless. Only later, with the time-gated crafting items, do you get to a point where it requires a lot of work to get not much out (but what you get out is worthwhile, in some respects).
Using combat as an example, the games to the left of the scale require more time to unlock skills than the games more to the right. FFXIV is a good example of this, where you only get one new skill or trait every few levels (but they tend to have a lot of impact), and you don't get all that many in total. WoW is kind of in the middle, you get a lot of skills, but you end up not using half of them. GW2 shoves everything at you as fast as it can (though it was slowed down a little with the recent New Player Experience changes to the early levelling), but you still level stupid fast compared to the games on the left. Getting from level 1 to 50 in FFXIV, takes probably about fives times as long as getting from 1 to 80 in GW2.
So, the point to all this I'm trying to make, is GW2 sacrifices a lot with its goal of being easy, accessible and fast. Things don't carry as much "weight", as they would in a more slow-tempo'ed MMO. There are some things in GW2 that take time and effort, like Ascended crafting and getting a Legendary, but the overall experience is one of "drop in, play as you will, drop out". It's way more action-centric, and way more focused on the moment-to-moment gameplay. By contrast, more sandboxy games like ArcheAge and FFXIV, have a kind of "minimum time investment" barrier where, if you don't spend enough time doing any one thing, it ends up not yielding much results. This isn't ironclad of course, there are ways to speed things up (FFXIV has an excellent Levequest system that acts like a "Daily To Do" list that rewards a lot of experience - but even there you're putting in quite a bit more work to get things done.
I often refer to GW2 as a kind of online brawler, like a spiritual successor to Golden Axe. Everyone does damage, everyone can heal, everyone can revive each other. It's "Unity" system keeps all the players on a very forward vector, compared to the Trinity system of defined roles (Tank, Healer, Damage). There's been a lot (a looot) of discussion of Unity vs Trinity, but I don't think it's important here. If you like Trinity, there's games for that. GW2 tries something different (with varying degrees of success - but it was always going to be rocky since it's an experiment), and if you enjoy what it's trying, it's a blast. But because GW2 focuses more on forward momentum and ease, it doesn't have that weighty permanence a lot of people expect out of an MMO. Games like FFXIV, even though it's more of a theme-park MMO than sandbox like Ultima Online, can still function as a kind of "live-a-life" simulator. The tedium, high-effort systems of FFXIV give what you do in it weight and meaning, so if you see someone who's a master rank Fisherman, you know they spent months or years getting to that point. In GW2, you reach a kind of "peak" very early (at 80, and perhaps a month after), more like what happens in a game like Team Fortress 2. And from there on out, it's all about taking your character through the content, seeing how you stack up and enjoying new things to try and fight.
Because GW2 is Low Input High Output (since there is no sub, the game doesn't *need* to slow things down to keep people playing, thus paying, every month), it means they need to have a much faster content update cycle to keep players engaged, because people can burn through content really fast. It's kind of like how the oldschool first person shooters needed a fresh influx of map packs for players to test their skills against. That's why I think the Living World is a good idea: smaller but more frequent updates works better with the style of game GW2 is. Waiting three months plus for a content update (like FFXIV), or years for an expansion (like WoW), would be just too long with the pacing of the game.
Anyway, tl;dr; don't think of GW2 as "another world to live in" but more as a "cooperative/competitive game client that logs into cool server that updates often with new content and a variety of activities".