ArenaNet talk:Private explorable areas from GW1
I agree with that
Even given the technical limitations of running both perpetual and instanced worlds, I see a dismal future for GW2 if it is mostly perpetual. I left Everquest for that reason. I hated having to wait in line for a group in every zone, for hours at times, to run in and kill one group of enemies and then wait for them to spawn again so I could kill them again. It becomes not only boring, but the grind that one normally encounters to reach a goal is further enhanced by having to wait your turn to grind. In the end Persistant worlds only work as long as they are sparsely populated. Overcrowding causes most of the issue as players are all fighting over a limited number of hunting grounds. A dozen hunters in a forest a few square miles in area will kill off everything in it within a day. A single hunter may hunt for days in the same place and not get everything.
That said, the only way to find out is to actually wait to buy the game until a good bit of people are wealthy and higher level to see how the perpetual portions of the world react. In my prior experience that takes about a year to develop. I started playing Guild wars because I had the option of playing by myself or with others. If the second version requires that I have to stumble around over a ton of other players to find something I have to kill, then it's not worth it. Worse still is that questing usually requires you to go to point Y and kill monster group X. That will be difficult if you get the quest and find that wandering group Z has already killed monster group x because they have killed everything else too. Quest failed, abandon and retry again later. I may be way off base with thier intent of thier perpetual world. It may be a largely empty world where every mission or quest gives you an instance and there are no random mobs in the persistanced world to spawn camp or otherwise grief other players out of. I just say this as an experienced player that it is impossible to balance and maintain a perpetual world so that new players can make entry and gain a high status once the general player base begins to linger at "endgame" status and begins thier ritualistic farming expeditions.