As I see it people will not excited about anything in an MMO, unless it provides them with a reason to do stuff in the game.
So if you have an incredible reward that is sooo good that people will start no-lifing your game just to get that reward. That's exciting, because rewards rarely fail to motivate people.
If you introduce a new gameplay layer, like adding in a complete new gathering/crafting system to your game, where you can find nodes in the game and send little NPC workers there to harvest plants, chop trees, mine ore etc that you then can sell for profit etc. This will make people to log in an spend the next 20+ hrs to explore the map all over again, to unlock these nodes and then spend the next 100+ hours theorycrafting and experimenting to find the best ways to make as much money as possible.
So, people will be excited about that because it wants to make them play the game.
And we've seen that indeed that's also true for GW2 community. Adding new gameplay layers like Mounts, that fundamentally change the gameplay in the open world, when they announced that, this got people incredibly excited, since they want to log in and unlock and find every single mount that there is and use their fun skills.
Exact same thing can be said about new elite specs. New gameplay layers added to the game.
But adding the same thing over and over and over again, sparsely spread out with a few releases over the entirety of the year, talking about living story maps and events, samey, generic and boring rewards. On top of that a story that is (imo and in the opinion of pretty much most of my gamer friends) even for MMO standards merely "okay" for the most part.
I am sorry, this does not get me excited at all. It's barely enough to open my client and download
I'd rather spend my time on playing an actual story driven singleplayer game or check out some other MMO update/patch that released with actual and meaningful content (like BDO releasing a new class for example), or just watch a movie/show instead
Afterall the reason I play MMOs is progression, customization and at least some form of social aspect.
And since all my characters have the best gear, the shiniest armors and weapons that fit my style exactly and the content that would be social is too much hassle for the reward, while the content that isn't social is far too easy for still no reward, I just can't get excited with living story.
And unless the new xpac has super cool cosmetics that I want, incredibly fun elite specs, super cool new gameplay layers, I won't get excited about that either
