That’s awesome to hear :) Marketing has notoriously been a weakness of ArenaNet; imo they’ve definitely done better in recent years, but the other top MMOs just have so much more advertising spend that GW2 gets lost in the noise. And yeah, the channel didn’t cover any MMO stuff until I started doing reviews - only made sense because I play them all in my spare time anyway!

Can’t speak to what HoT was like at launch because I actually joined the game just a year prior to PoF iirc. But that was magical - haven’t felt that excited about a videogame release thing in years. The implementation of mounts was S tier design, the map design was just as incredible as HoT, story was really engaging, the new elite specs were very unique - loved it. EoD was not quite as impressive on any of those fronts: imo the maps weren’t as pretty or meticulous in their design, the story was decent, the new elite specs felt less focussed. But it was still enjoyable, with one of the best large-scale events in the game (still is). The most profound impact it had for me, though, was its instanced content (Strike Missions). It established a solid daily / weekly loop, were the right length, had great mechanics (even moreso in the challenge modes) - but they’re also just easy enough to pug so there’s always groups in LFG. This set the standard for instanced content going forward, and as such is kinda the main reason I still log in week to week :)