>>314875628Guild Wars 1 began originally as a PvP system. They had the story there as a way of introducing players to the Magic the Gathering style card system that acted as slottable skills. A lot of people wanted to only play for the PvE though, and they found out that there was a lot of money in it, so they focused more and more on it as time went on. After expansions, managing skill balance was notoriously hell.
Guild Wars 2 was advertised as the MMO convention destroyer. GW1 players liked the idea because many played 1 because they hated MMOs for the grinding, simplistic combat, obsession over micropayments, subscriptions and general bullshit. Unfortunately, the lessons from 1 were that managing a real game is hard, and there's money in PvE. So the game was designed as a typical MMO with no skill system to worry about that markets itself as having no grind while simultaneously planting huge amounts of it late enough in the game that it's unnoticeable to ordinary MMO players.
Basically, they took the marketing and corpse of GW1 and put a typical MMO financial model on top of it.
It's not that GW1 didn't take itself seriously. GW1 just wasn't an MMO; it was a PvP game that was turned into a PvE expansion system. And that was in turn transformed into shit that had nothing to do with 1.
