It is a sequel. However walk up to 20 people on the street and ask them if they've heard of Guild Wars or Star Wars. I'm willing to be a lot of money everyone will say Star Wars and you may get 1-2 people who say Guild Wars.
As for budgets, if you don't want to get into development budgets, then just look at marketing budgets. SWTOR's marketing budget absolutely destroyed GW2's in a major way.
Nope. But they're not all freeloaders. Freeloaders are a negative aspect to something. However free players are absolutely necessary and beneficial to a F2P MMO. Are they as beneficial as paying players? No. But they still provide a benefit to the game by providing populated worlds.
Indeed, many of these MMO's weren't great at launch so people left in droves. However F2P provided an opportunity people to come back and play for a bit for free or while paying small amounts (and for whales to drop some big cash), spurring revenue generation and allowing these games to improve where they would have ended up like Warhammer.
I wasn't aware of how both those games were designed, thanks for the clarification.
And all games are designed around their business model. That doesn't make them inherently better/worse/good/evil.
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It is a sequel. A sequel doesn't have to have identical gameplay to be a sequel. It's a numbered sequel to GW1 and has been described as a sequel by ArenaNet themselves.[/QUOTE]