What's preventing you from coming back to/playing Guild Wars 2?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Well, the "open world"-ness of GW2 has been a big breath of fresh air after the claustrophobia-inducing design of WoW. I'm also really digging the art style and the mount system - it really feels like an actual world, rather than an incoherent patchwork of instances.

Really? I felt like it was GW2 that felt like a patchwork of instances rather than a coherent world. It is sectioned off into maps that have no visible connection to each other. There is little geographic continuity when traversing between maps. Inside the maps, the events repeat too often too quickly, and it is almost always the same event. You save a farm from bandits, and then you come back 20 minutes later and it's being raided by the same bandits again. You come back 10 years later and it's still being raided by the same bandits, with the exact same story and dialogue playing out each time. It felt artificial. WoW suffers a similar problem but to a lesser extent, as the recurring crisis usually only occupies a small part of the zone (ie the siege in Vol'dun, while the rest of the zone is just creatures or ghosts which isn't time sensitive and would plausibly be there at any period in time, even long after the story had ended) rather than the entire zone like in GW2. GW2's maps are nice for instant action gameplay, since there is an event you can immediately jump into and feel like you're progressing it and get mastery exp or hero points.

[Asmodias]

I don't know if I have already posted in this thread, but the thing stopping me from playing Guild Wars 2 is that I worked on it many years ago. I was a lowly Quality Assurance Analyst way back when... I tested the Shatterer ahead of the Gamescom that it was introduced at. I don't tend to want to play the games I work on.