18 Nov 2006 at 20:56 - 58
A little note on the grind. After getting "And a hero shall lead them" on 5 characters, I can confirm that only by doing the necessary quests, plus 2 of the side quests, and talking to every single priest you come along, will net you the needed sunspear points. It takes 2 hours, which is the time it takes to do the missions in the first place (The great escape, 2 Koss quests, and the 3 base building quests). If you talk to every priest you come across while doing these quests, you'll have enough if you do not run past mobs.
The second important point here is, that many are getting done with the game. It's old, it doesn't offer any new challenges. It's time to move on. This happens to every single game single-player on online. Everyone playing from start has been with the game for 18 months. That's a long long time for an MMO. Average time people stick with games is 6-9 months.
Lastly, for many Tyria (or Factions) holds special apeal, since it's comparably easy, and more importantly, since it was the first game. Just like everyone loved their first MMO best, no expansion has ever captured that spirit that original game had.
Simply put, there's nothing wrong with the game. Majority of complaints are completely natural and expected in a game that's aproaching 2 year anniversary.
GW has always lacked PvE end-game content. The only content there was was farming for FoW. The other was added later, namely the titles. All of these are strictly grind. While it's of course possible to do all the quests in FoW, as well as the Titan quests, they aren't repeatable either. One shot deal at a proven concept. Masters quests are comparable to Titan quests in Tyria.
In reality, the 10,000 faction needed in Factions took longer to collect than it does to reach the rank in NF. It also required more quests (around 7 in NF, at least 15 in Factions). And while it was shared among characters, that in itself enforced strict roadblock (get all characters to HzH, repeating those missions before without being able to advance on any character).