Less content of worse quality, but much more aggressively monetized? Half the content at the same price?
Anet axed Living World, rebranded it as “Mini Expansions” and is reselling it to us at full price. Complex mount system gets sidelined in favour of A mount to rule them all. Class skills and mechanics that have existed for years and years and years without issue are suddenly a problem and get gutted, dumbed down or removed. Classes get homogenised and simplified. Very little actually new systems get created, instead the existing game gets switched around as a much easier alternative. More focus on easy and cheap to develop daily/weekly content for whatever the current’s expansion faction is.
I know that pattern.
I also know another pattern. SquareEnix. ActivisionBlizzard. NCNet.
I know we like to indulge in some FUD but I feel like you could have made that argument at any point after PoF, we’ve had very little changes to core gameplay besides balance since then. And it might not be necessarily a bad thing either if their current team can’t support it - we’d all love 9 perfectly balanced classes with each elite spec being useful and completely distinct but it is kinda obvious to anyone that this is just not possible, and maybe it never was in the first place.
If anything, I feel like the relic changes and addition of new weapons for every class is a pretty big change to the game, larger than what we’ve had in years. They are focusing on the skyscale and griffon for a flying sky-themed map, but that just says to me that they are finally focusing more on mounts and flying rather than making another formulaic ground meta-map where everyone just raptor-dashes or roller beetles around.