I don't want it to be an expansion. Of course, I would love to play new zones and races and fight new world bosses because I think nobody has done it better than ANet with GW2, but there's still plenty of fun to be had elsewhere, and the idea of cosmic justice makes me giddy. I would gladly sacrifice my 1200 hours and gem store contributions to see the world's worst fanboys get stuck celebrating more LS chapters while other games actually release numerous zones, permanent story (including nearly fully-voiced story in SWTOR's case), new gameplay objectives and options, and even entire expansions over the same amount of time.
It really depends on the features. If it's more living story or double-speak, then i'll pass. If it's a transparent feature list, then i might give it a shot.
Yep there are plenty. Just head over to the Arena Net forums. You will get screamed at and told to go back to World of Warcraft for asking about an expansion.
Because don't you know? Only WoW makes expansions no other MMO ever has; I for one am glad GW2 fans have educated me on this matter LOL
I'm not saying all GW2 fans are this way - that would be trolling or beyond stupid. But I have personally never saw anything like it in an MMO - people having venom spewed at them for wanting an expansion.
Not a fan of the game but I have to admit; I had a alright time before I got bored (level 40ish). I'd probably come back to an expansion to check it out.. If and only they added a trinity system.
I don't understand modern people. Gw2 is getting expanded every 2 weeks. And then people cry for expansion like its going to be the holy grail or something. Would you appreciate a dump labeled an expansion? I know I wouldn't. But then again I'm a realist. I don't wear pink-tinted glasses when I speak
P.S: A rhetorical question. How many expansions have ruined the base game? Don't answer that. The list is too long. And I wouldn't want something like Mists of Pandaria or NGE to happen to Guild Wars 2.
These live events every 2 weeks are in no way considered to have "expanded" the game by any sense of the imagination. The game needs new whether it be a class, a race, something. This is the same game as it was at release, and just stepping into T1 WvW proves the population is nowhere near what it used to be.
So just for the record....many of us don't understand you either. If you think this game is sooooooooooooooooo great......why do you have zero faith an expansion would great as well? Your logic is baffling.
Plenty of examples of expacks ruining otherwise great games. As the guy said, Mists of Pandaria almost killed WoW, sinking the subs to all-time-low for the game. Good thing they got their shit together and hooked people up on WoD.
CCP has had awful expacks to EVE which crippled the population and that game is STILL recovering from that.
I'm just as wary when I hear for expansions for ANY game, not just Gw2.
The worst thing about expacks is that they overwrite the base game. Even if i like the base game, I'm screwed.
Gw1 had it well. You choose the campaign. And every campaign was almost a standalone game. Even if i don't like the campaign, I can go back to whatever I enjoyed at first.
Then there's the people who don't like change Technically speaking that's the general human population. This is well-proven fact.
There are many awful MMOS that have better look skins for gear (armor, weapons..etc.)
Guild Wars 2 is fantastic but a skin revamp will make it more attractive .
Besides this aspect .an expansion would be awesome I'd like to see some open world PVP ( RVR or GVG ) and many other challenges in PVE.
The number of only 5 players for a group ( party) is too small.
Also would be nice to have raid groups and alliance groups.
There are also games with a lot worse looking armors (TESO comes to mind) Plus this is super opinionated. I like how my characters look. Then again I've sunk hundreds of gold and countless of hours into looks. You know, scavenger hunts and shit.
There is WvW o.O
GvG can be done in sPvP
5 player groups is the norm in modern MMOs
There are world boss raid alliances with daily runs. Gw2Community is for the EU region. Forgot the NA alliance name.
Given how anet has managed the game - I would not buy an expansion. The constant nerfs to world resource farming, loot drops, etc. plus the push to 100+ teams needed to take out new bosses (which then give green loot)... no thanks.
I just can't believe someone said this game is for those that want "challenge themselves". So you are saying that being pushed into using ranged weapons and never having any real strategy other than "watch out!" is challenging?
Or do you mean, those that like to challenge their mental stamina while they are playing one of the worst games to come out in a long time?
I just can't believe someone said this game is for those that want "challenge themselves". So you are saying that being pushed into using ranged weapons and never having any real strategy other than "watch out!" is challenging?
Or do you mean, those that like to challenge their mental stamina while they are playing one of the worst games to come out in a long time?
Hmm. Hmmmmmmm...
Try to solo some of the bosses in Arah.
If you fail to do it, you failed the challenge.
Me and my guildies solo all the paths. While PUGs wipe.
Challenge enough. You should try it. But don't feel too miserable when you fail.
You can find challenge fighting outnumbered in WvW too, granted you are not a carebear and you do PvP. My personal record is winning 4vs1 with a guardian.
Or you know, organize and successfully complete the harder world bosses, like Tequatl and the great jungle wurm.
Yeah ... i know its easier to just turn blind eye and call the game easy. But frankly, people like you, are the ones I leech WvW kills for WxP
I'll be super disappointed if they don’t announce an expac. But I'll prob log in that one day to do the story then go back to leveling in some other game. I wish the LS content was filler between expacs. It would have been a great strategy but I think Anet got full of themselves thinking this was some revolutionary way of delivering content and are hopefully realizing now, you still need an expac to deliver many different types of content at once.
But who knows. We will see what the announcement is and debate after I'm sure. Looking forward to seeing the fall out explode on the internet.
I just can't believe someone said this game is for those that want "challenge themselves". So you are saying that being pushed into using ranged weapons and never having any real strategy other than "watch out!" is challenging?
Or do you mean, those that like to challenge their mental stamina while they are playing one of the worst games to come out in a long time?
Hmm. Hmmmmmmm...
Try to solo some of the bosses in Arah.
If you fail to do it, you failed the challenge.
Me and my guildies solo all the paths. While PUGs wipe.
Challenge enough. You should try it. But don't feel too miserable when you fail.
You can find challenge fighting outnumbered in WvW too, granted you are not a carebear and you do PvP. My personal record is winning 4vs1 with a guardian.
Or you know, organize and successfully complete the harder world bosses, like Tequatl and the great jungle wurm.
Yeah ... i know its easier to just turn blind eye and call the game easy. But frankly, people like you, are the ones I leech WvW kills for WxP
Unfortunately for you I don't PVP. I have 0 interest in it. It's who can twitch better than the other(s). Twitch is not the kind of challenge I look for in a game...if I wanted to play a twitch based game, Id play dance revolution.
I'm really only interested if it is an expansion. Or at least something with similar feature-based content. No new race, weapons/skills, or class = probably not interested.
Am I the only one who still remembers how much they insisted that they never wanted to do traditional expansion packs? And how, even after Season 1 had ended in what most folks concluded to be a dismal failure, they still insisted that they believed in the Living Story and how they were going to stick with it? Or, most of all, how they wanted to avoid expansion packs because it isolated certain regions and classes, keeping everyone from being able to experience everything?
I'm amazed at those of you clamoring for an expansion pack, to be honest, considering it would be pretty much the final nail in the coffin of GW2's claims towards being "different" from every other MMO out there. I mean, I get it. I truly do. GW2 is starved for content, and expansions fix that itch like no other....but only for a short period of time. And then you've got large portions of content that returning players can't play because it's behind a pay wall.
Ultimately, I bought GW2 because it promised to be different from other MMOs. I quit playing when it started rapidly becoming just like other MMOs. If they announce an expansion, it'll probably be my cue to uninstall the game for good.
GW1 had paid expansions even though each one was a stand alone campaign. So yeah, a full fledged paid expansion for GW2 is what they need to reveal at pax. I hope thats it, but its not a deal breaker to me if it isnt.
GW1 - in terms of numbers - was a huge success with its slogan of buy once, play forever. I remember one NCSoft advertisment touting sales of over 20M. And it had many expansions, big and small, all critically well received that sold. And later there were the bundles ... financially (based on NCSoft's reports) it did OK but - for there is a but.
Clearly NCSoft believed they could do "better" with GW2 financially and so they opted out of the expansions and went with a cash shop. We can speculate why but the "obvious" answer is that "retail box sales" don't make the publisher that much money: 20%-30% say. On many millions of sales of course It mounts up. With online sales however profits can be up to say 70%. (Taxes, transaction charges etc. - they don't get 100%).
And GW2 has done OK - especially at first. And subsequently the game has generated additional revenue at very little cost. Outside of its new markets however it is in decline.
One of the things that expansions generate is publicity - for the brand. GW1's expansions did this - and each one will have resulted in some additional GW1 sales. And sales of the other expansions. Other games have done this as well - it is how brands work.
So an expansion makes sense.
Now the question: will it be DLC only or retail and DLC? And if they go retail will it be: xpac only or GW2+xpac?
Whilst DLC gives them a higher profit per sale retail will maximise publicity leading to higher sales.
My bet is on a stand alone retail expansion - which will also be on sale of course online. (And more to come).
Am I the only one who still remembers how much they insisted that they never wanted to do traditional expansion packs? And how, even after Season 1 had ended in what most folks concluded to be a dismal failure, they still insisted that they believed in the Living Story and how they were going to stick with it? Or, most of all, how they wanted to avoid expansion packs because it isolated certain regions and classes, keeping everyone from being able to experience everything?
I'm amazed at those of you clamoring for an expansion pack, to be honest, considering it would be pretty much the final nail in the coffin of GW2's claims towards being "different" from every other MMO out there. I mean, I get it. I truly do. GW2 is starved for content, and expansions fix that itch like no other....but only for a short period of time. And then you've got large portions of content that returning players can't play because it's behind a pay wall.
Ultimately, I bought GW2 because it promised to be different from other MMOs. I quit playing when it started rapidly becoming just like other MMOs. If they announce an expansion, it'll probably be my cue to uninstall the game for good.
Pre-release they never said there would not be an expansion. Most expected it.
They had an expansion planned from the get go, it was talked at the release time and NCSoft even mentioned it in their first couple financial quarterly reports.
Then the cash shop numbers came in.
And they were better than expected.
Suddenly there was no time pressure to release an expansion. In fact the cash shop revenue was so large (larger than GW1 expansions revenue) that Anet could have a dedicated Live team several times larger than GW1 live team and hence the Living Story was created - an opportunity to give junior (mostly) staff experience while the main worked in an expansion or expansion content.
With an expansion time frame of 2+ years after release there was no benefit into talking into one and any word about expansions died out and all the hype went into the Living Story.
Detractors and anti-fans of GW2 chose to believe that an expansion wasn't being made because there was no money for it and that GW2 was a failure, when the fact Arenanet kept their staff number (even increased it) and had 2+ years to work on an expansion is the best proof of GW2 commercial success.
Now suddenly an expansion is a bad thing. sigh.
5 years to develop a game. 2 years to develop an expansion.
How many publishers give that to a dev team/studio?
And we are talking of NCSoft here, one of the most ruthless publishers.
Currently playing: GW2 Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
Am I the only one who still remembers how much they insisted that they never wanted to do traditional expansion packs? And how, even after Season 1 had ended in what most folks concluded to be a dismal failure, they still insisted that they believed in the Living Story and how they were going to stick with it? Or, most of all, how they wanted to avoid expansion packs because it isolated certain regions and classes, keeping everyone from being able to experience everything?
I'm amazed at those of you clamoring for an expansion pack, to be honest, considering it would be pretty much the final nail in the coffin of GW2's claims towards being "different" from every other MMO out there. I mean, I get it. I truly do. GW2 is starved for content, and expansions fix that itch like no other....but only for a short period of time. And then you've got large portions of content that returning players can't play because it's behind a pay wall.
Ultimately, I bought GW2 because it promised to be different from other MMOs. I quit playing when it started rapidly becoming just like other MMOs. If they announce an expansion, it'll probably be my cue to uninstall the game for good.
Pre-release they never said there would not be an expansion. Most expected it.
They had an expansion planned from the get go, it was talked at the release time and NCSoft even mentioned it in their first couple financial quarterly reports.
Then the cash shop numbers came in.
And they were better than expected.
Suddenly there was no time pressure to release an expansion. In fact the cash shop revenue was so large (larger than GW1 expansions revenue) that Anet could have a dedicated Live team several times larger than GW1 live team and hence the Living Story was created - an opportunity to give junior (mostly) staff experience while the main worked in an expansion or expansion content.
With an expansion time frame of 2+ years after release there was no benefit into talking into one and any word about expansions died out and all the hype went into the Living Story.
Detractors and anti-fans of GW2 chose to believe that an expansion wasn't being made because there was no money for it and that GW2 was a failure, when the fact Arenanet kept their staff number (even increased it) and had 2+ years to work on an expansion is the best proof of GW2 commercial success.
Now suddenly an expansion is a bad thing. sigh.
5 years to develop a game. 2 years to develop an expansion.
How many publishers give that to a dev team/studio?
And we are talking of NCSoft here, one of the most ruthless publishers.
You are mistaken on a few matters.
1) It's true that they never technically said "there will never be an expansion". But that's playing to verbal technicalities, like they did when they released Ascended tier equipment. "We never said there wouldn't be more tiers!" was the defining battle cry of a dev team struggling to rationalize why the game needed "more progression" two months out of the release gate.
They made it very clear that they didn't want to make an expansion, and that the Living Story was their replacement for such a thing. They stated many times the reasons why they didn't like the traditional expansion model that other MMOs employed. Ergo, the announcement of an expansion would effectively be them backpedaling on over two years of monologue about how they were going to do things differently and blaze their own trail.
You can argue "they never technically said that exact combination of words" until you're blue in the face, but it doesn't change the fact that people didn't just fabricate the "no expansion" concept out of thin air. It was directly inspired by the words of the devs, how often they said they weren't looking at expansions, and how often they made their opposition to expansions clear.
2) The devs were not working on an expansion for 2 years. The dev team wasn't even large enough to accommodate that sort of thing at the time of the game's release. They had to commit to several new hirings in order to expand the team to a size large enough to push the Living Story to a two-week process. And we have several quotes from ANet devs last year which suggested that they weren't even looking at the idea, and felt no pressure to make one. So if this is an expansion announcement, they've been working on it for no more than a year (or else they've been lying to the media and their players about it).
3) THEY set the expectation, not us. I'm going to repeat that dev quote again, this time with bold for emphasis. "If we do this right, we will probably never do an expansion and everything will be going into this Living World strategy." So, by their own words, if they are indeed releasing an expansion, then they failed. They are admitting that they failed to deliver a compelling Living Story that kept players engaged and satisfied. They are admitting that they failed to deliver the significant content updates that they promised. And they are admitting that they are hypocrites for criticizing the gaming industry, but ultimately being forced to follow in its footsteps in order to stay alive.
I can think of no more sincere evidence of failure than the devs of GW2 being forced to eat their own words. And they've been doing an awful lot of that over the last two years. Plenty of things they promised or at least hinted at doing, but never delivered.
Oh, I'm sure that some folks will flood back to the game, at least for a little while, and everyone will praise how great the new expansion is (if indeed that's what this is). But I won't be one of those people. For me, this would be the final straw that breaks the camel's back, so to speak. It effectively indicates that they've admitted total failure with the Living Story, and instead of fixing the mistakes they've made and delivering on promised content that has been missing since beta, they will just go for the quick money of an expansion instead. Guess we can wait another two years for guild halls, more expansive PvP, support for guild-vs-guild, extensions to the precursor and legendary mechanics, etc, right? After all, I really want to hear more about how wonderful Scarlet was, how she was really right all along, and how I should feel bad for hating her. That's what good story looks like....right?
If you want to salivate all over a new expansion, have at it, but don't you dare criticize me for calling them out on their own hypocrisy. They were the ones who set the unreasonable expectations upon their shoulders. Now they have to bear that weight, and folks like me who remember the lofty goals they set for themselves are not going to support them in their efforts to abandon everything that made them unique. If this is an expansion, then they've finally given up the last major strand of uniqueness they had....and in that case, I have no reason to ever come back, because all of the story and the content that I'd want to explore when I got back will be locked behind paywalls.
I bought GW2 because it promised to be different. I ultimately stopped playing GW2 because it started becoming all of the things it said it wasn't going to be. An expansion would be justification enough to finally give up hope that GW2 will keep to its unique approach to the MMO genre.
I also want them to add in more Humanoid Races. Especially an Elf like race. I also want to see them add in more classes especially hybrid class styles like the Dervish or whatever other things they had in GW1. I also want to see loot progression. And finally I want to see them add the ability to pick and choose which skills I put on my hotbar.
It will need all those things before I even remotely consider returning.
You can pick and choose your skills. Unless you mean weapon skills? If so... how would you exactly use a bow skill with a sword anyway?
Comments
I don't want it to be an expansion. Of course, I would love to play new zones and races and fight new world bosses because I think nobody has done it better than ANet with GW2, but there's still plenty of fun to be had elsewhere, and the idea of cosmic justice makes me giddy. I would gladly sacrifice my 1200 hours and gem store contributions to see the world's worst fanboys get stuck celebrating more LS chapters while other games actually release numerous zones, permanent story (including nearly fully-voiced story in SWTOR's case), new gameplay objectives and options, and even entire expansions over the same amount of time.
Yep there are plenty. Just head over to the Arena Net forums. You will get screamed at and told to go back to World of Warcraft for asking about an expansion.
Because don't you know? Only WoW makes expansions no other MMO ever has; I for one am glad GW2 fans have educated me on this matter LOL
I'm not saying all GW2 fans are this way - that would be trolling or beyond stupid. But I have personally never saw anything like it in an MMO - people having venom spewed at them for wanting an expansion.
Not a fan of the game but I have to admit; I had a alright time before I got bored (level 40ish). I'd probably come back to an expansion to check it out.. If and only they added a trinity system.
Plenty of examples of expacks ruining otherwise great games. As the guy said, Mists of Pandaria almost killed WoW, sinking the subs to all-time-low for the game. Good thing they got their shit together and hooked people up on WoD.
CCP has had awful expacks to EVE which crippled the population and that game is STILL recovering from that.
I'm just as wary when I hear for expansions for ANY game, not just Gw2.
The worst thing about expacks is that they overwrite the base game. Even if i like the base game, I'm screwed.
Gw1 had it well. You choose the campaign. And every campaign was almost a standalone game. Even if i don't like the campaign, I can go back to whatever I enjoyed at first.
Then there's the people who don't like change
Technically speaking that's the general human population. This is well-proven fact.
A skin revamp would be awesome.
There are many awful MMOS that have better look skins for gear (armor, weapons..etc.)
Guild Wars 2 is fantastic but a skin revamp will make it more attractive .
Besides this aspect .an expansion would be awesome I'd like to see some open world PVP ( RVR or GVG ) and many other challenges in PVE.
The number of only 5 players for a group ( party) is too small.
Also would be nice to have raid groups and alliance groups.
There are also games with a lot worse looking armors (TESO comes to mind) Plus this is super opinionated. I like how my characters look. Then again I've sunk hundreds of gold and countless of hours into looks. You know, scavenger hunts and shit.
There is WvW o.O
GvG can be done in sPvP
5 player groups is the norm in modern MMOs
There are world boss raid alliances with daily runs. Gw2Community is for the EU region. Forgot the NA alliance name.
I am not hoping for an Expac. . .
. . .I'm hoping for a full game shut down and Arenanet announcing City of Heroes 2. . .
I just can't believe someone said this game is for those that want "challenge themselves". So you are saying that being pushed into using ranged weapons and never having any real strategy other than "watch out!" is challenging?
Or do you mean, those that like to challenge their mental stamina while they are playing one of the worst games to come out in a long time?
Hmm. Hmmmmmmm...
Try to solo some of the bosses in Arah.
If you fail to do it, you failed the challenge.
Me and my guildies solo all the paths. While PUGs wipe.
Challenge enough. You should try it. But don't feel too miserable when you fail.
You can find challenge fighting outnumbered in WvW too, granted you are not a carebear and you do PvP. My personal record is winning 4vs1 with a guardian.
Or you know, organize and successfully complete the harder world bosses, like Tequatl and the great jungle wurm.
Yeah ... i know its easier to just turn blind eye and call the game easy. But frankly, people like you, are the ones I leech WvW kills for WxP
I'll be super disappointed if they don’t announce an expac. But I'll prob log in that one day to do the story then go back to leveling in some other game. I wish the LS content was filler between expacs. It would have been a great strategy but I think Anet got full of themselves thinking this was some revolutionary way of delivering content and are hopefully realizing now, you still need an expac to deliver many different types of content at once.
But who knows. We will see what the announcement is and debate after I'm sure. Looking forward to seeing the fall out explode on the internet.
Unfortunately for you I don't PVP. I have 0 interest in it. It's who can twitch better than the other(s). Twitch is not the kind of challenge I look for in a game...if I wanted to play a twitch based game, Id play dance revolution.
Am I the only one who still remembers how much they insisted that they never wanted to do traditional expansion packs? And how, even after Season 1 had ended in what most folks concluded to be a dismal failure, they still insisted that they believed in the Living Story and how they were going to stick with it? Or, most of all, how they wanted to avoid expansion packs because it isolated certain regions and classes, keeping everyone from being able to experience everything?
I'm amazed at those of you clamoring for an expansion pack, to be honest, considering it would be pretty much the final nail in the coffin of GW2's claims towards being "different" from every other MMO out there. I mean, I get it. I truly do. GW2 is starved for content, and expansions fix that itch like no other....but only for a short period of time. And then you've got large portions of content that returning players can't play because it's behind a pay wall.
Ultimately, I bought GW2 because it promised to be different from other MMOs. I quit playing when it started rapidly becoming just like other MMOs. If they announce an expansion, it'll probably be my cue to uninstall the game for good.
I can assure you that you most certainly are not alone.
GW1 was my first true mmo and will always be my first love. Needless to say I still struggle to find the words that express my disappointment with GW2
How about paid expansion in game with cash shop, box price and subscription, like World of Warcraft?
GW1 - in terms of numbers - was a huge success with its slogan of buy once, play forever. I remember one NCSoft advertisment touting sales of over 20M. And it had many expansions, big and small, all critically well received that sold. And later there were the bundles ... financially (based on NCSoft's reports) it did OK but - for there is a but.
Clearly NCSoft believed they could do "better" with GW2 financially and so they opted out of the expansions and went with a cash shop. We can speculate why but the "obvious" answer is that "retail box sales" don't make the publisher that much money: 20%-30% say. On many millions of sales of course It mounts up. With online sales however profits can be up to say 70%. (Taxes, transaction charges etc. - they don't get 100%).
And GW2 has done OK - especially at first. And subsequently the game has generated additional revenue at very little cost. Outside of its new markets however it is in decline.
One of the things that expansions generate is publicity - for the brand. GW1's expansions did this - and each one will have resulted in some additional GW1 sales. And sales of the other expansions. Other games have done this as well - it is how brands work.
So an expansion makes sense.
Now the question: will it be DLC only or retail and DLC? And if they go retail will it be: xpac only or GW2+xpac?
Whilst DLC gives them a higher profit per sale retail will maximise publicity leading to higher sales.
My bet is on a stand alone retail expansion - which will also be on sale of course online. (And more to come).
Pre-release they never said there would not be an expansion. Most expected it.
They had an expansion planned from the get go, it was talked at the release time and NCSoft even mentioned it in their first couple financial quarterly reports.
Then the cash shop numbers came in.
And they were better than expected.
Suddenly there was no time pressure to release an expansion. In fact the cash shop revenue was so large (larger than GW1 expansions revenue) that Anet could have a dedicated Live team several times larger than GW1 live team and hence the Living Story was created - an opportunity to give junior (mostly) staff experience while the main worked in an expansion or expansion content.
With an expansion time frame of 2+ years after release there was no benefit into talking into one and any word about expansions died out and all the hype went into the Living Story.
Detractors and anti-fans of GW2 chose to believe that an expansion wasn't being made because there was no money for it and that GW2 was a failure, when the fact Arenanet kept their staff number (even increased it) and had 2+ years to work on an expansion is the best proof of GW2 commercial success.
Now suddenly an expansion is a bad thing. sigh.
5 years to develop a game. 2 years to develop an expansion.
How many publishers give that to a dev team/studio?
And we are talking of NCSoft here, one of the most ruthless publishers.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
I don't want it to be an expansion that I have to pay for, but that's because I'm a cheap bastard. :P
If it is a paid expansion though I wouldn't mind. Just as long as it doesn't screw up balance in pvp and world vs world.
You are mistaken on a few matters.
1) It's true that they never technically said "there will never be an expansion". But that's playing to verbal technicalities, like they did when they released Ascended tier equipment. "We never said there wouldn't be more tiers!" was the defining battle cry of a dev team struggling to rationalize why the game needed "more progression" two months out of the release gate.
They made it very clear that they didn't want to make an expansion, and that the Living Story was their replacement for such a thing. They stated many times the reasons why they didn't like the traditional expansion model that other MMOs employed. Ergo, the announcement of an expansion would effectively be them backpedaling on over two years of monologue about how they were going to do things differently and blaze their own trail.
Not to mention, we have a direct quote from a dev from last year which states that "If we do this right, we will probably never do an expansion and everything will be going into this Living World strategy." Which, again, isn't technically saying "never", but it sure as hell isn't saying "we're definitely making one" either.
You can argue "they never technically said that exact combination of words" until you're blue in the face, but it doesn't change the fact that people didn't just fabricate the "no expansion" concept out of thin air. It was directly inspired by the words of the devs, how often they said they weren't looking at expansions, and how often they made their opposition to expansions clear.
2) The devs were not working on an expansion for 2 years. The dev team wasn't even large enough to accommodate that sort of thing at the time of the game's release. They had to commit to several new hirings in order to expand the team to a size large enough to push the Living Story to a two-week process. And we have several quotes from ANet devs last year which suggested that they weren't even looking at the idea, and felt no pressure to make one. So if this is an expansion announcement, they've been working on it for no more than a year (or else they've been lying to the media and their players about it).
3) THEY set the expectation, not us. I'm going to repeat that dev quote again, this time with bold for emphasis. "If we do this right, we will probably never do an expansion and everything will be going into this Living World strategy." So, by their own words, if they are indeed releasing an expansion, then they failed. They are admitting that they failed to deliver a compelling Living Story that kept players engaged and satisfied. They are admitting that they failed to deliver the significant content updates that they promised. And they are admitting that they are hypocrites for criticizing the gaming industry, but ultimately being forced to follow in its footsteps in order to stay alive.
I can think of no more sincere evidence of failure than the devs of GW2 being forced to eat their own words. And they've been doing an awful lot of that over the last two years. Plenty of things they promised or at least hinted at doing, but never delivered.
Oh, I'm sure that some folks will flood back to the game, at least for a little while, and everyone will praise how great the new expansion is (if indeed that's what this is). But I won't be one of those people. For me, this would be the final straw that breaks the camel's back, so to speak. It effectively indicates that they've admitted total failure with the Living Story, and instead of fixing the mistakes they've made and delivering on promised content that has been missing since beta, they will just go for the quick money of an expansion instead. Guess we can wait another two years for guild halls, more expansive PvP, support for guild-vs-guild, extensions to the precursor and legendary mechanics, etc, right? After all, I really want to hear more about how wonderful Scarlet was, how she was really right all along, and how I should feel bad for hating her. That's what good story looks like....right?
If you want to salivate all over a new expansion, have at it, but don't you dare criticize me for calling them out on their own hypocrisy. They were the ones who set the unreasonable expectations upon their shoulders. Now they have to bear that weight, and folks like me who remember the lofty goals they set for themselves are not going to support them in their efforts to abandon everything that made them unique. If this is an expansion, then they've finally given up the last major strand of uniqueness they had....and in that case, I have no reason to ever come back, because all of the story and the content that I'd want to explore when I got back will be locked behind paywalls.
I bought GW2 because it promised to be different. I ultimately stopped playing GW2 because it started becoming all of the things it said it wasn't going to be. An expansion would be justification enough to finally give up hope that GW2 will keep to its unique approach to the MMO genre.
You can pick and choose your skills. Unless you mean weapon skills? If so... how would you exactly use a bow skill with a sword anyway?