@sombre: There's a fundamental question that needs to be asked before you take the dive: PvP or PvE?
As someone who still plays this game, albeit casually, it's hard to recommend GW2 for its PvE content. The world bosses and more engaging PvE encounters will probably feel fairly solid as spectacles, but there's not much longevity outside of farming them for rare drops that puts you at the mercy of RNG. Raiding was introduced at some point, and frankly, the raiding community in this game became an elitist shit hole somewhere down the line (the player base at large is probably way friendlier than many other MMOs, however). You could probably find a decent guild and roll with them for a while, but at some point GW2 began feeling like nothing more than a glorified chat room to me. Fractals (GW2 version of endgame dungeon instances) are a decent alternative, but it's also rather dependent on the group you run with. Achievement hunting is a fairly good pastime also, if that's you thing, but beware many of the rarer achievements are stupid tedious and require some hefty commitment.
PvP is where most people I know spend their time in GW2, or more specifically World versus World mode (WvWvW). If you dabbled in this mode back at release you know how fucking broken it was. Fortunately, most of the problems have been resolved and I find this mode a lot of fun. It's a healthy mix of PvP and PvE, where the objective is to capture fortified points on the maps and hold them for score accumulation. Players are divided based on their server ("world") and fight other servers for an ongoing period. At the end of the duration, the server with the highest score wins and moves onto a higher tier and the losers either stay in the current tier or gets dropped down. You can drop in or out at any point with no penalty, and when server "zergs" (big groups of players) meet one another the results are often thrilling and hilarious. The most fun I've ever had in the game is when all three zergs smack into one another and all hell breaks loose. I mean, there will probably be ridiculous lag and you'll likely disconnect or crash, but fucking a', it's great.
And I suppose there's another point worth mentioning: how much do you like to play dress-up? This game is affectionately called "Fashion Wars" by its players for good reason. There are a lot of cosmetics. A lot of them happen to cost real money, or no real money if you know good ways to make ingame money. This game sports one of the most robust cosmetic systems I've ever experienced, and I wish more games did this.
The core game mechanics are pretty much unchanged from launch, with the exception of the talent system receiving a significant overhaul. You still do world completion the same way and get the same completion rewards. There are more legendaries to craft, salvaging runes and sigils got a very recent change, Living Story is still a thing... It's still the same game, really, just with a lot more polish. Optimization is still utter garbage, though.
Ultimately, it's a free game. If you've got free time, go for it.
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