ArenaNet's official event page has just been updated with info on the slightly less-momentous-than-its-predecessors January update to the game. Primarily a systems/feature update, it will include:

• Hints of a larger story that will unfold over several monthly updates (Jormag vs. Primordius?).
• For the week of January 28th to February 4th, the current eight-team paid sPvP tournaments will be replaced with two-team, single-round tournaments which will all take place on the newish Temple of the Silent Storm map. After that, Temple will be added to regular tournament rotation.
• Daily achievements will now change every day of the week, and more convenient achievement tracker is also coming.
• Daily and monthly achievements will now reward the "laurel" currency, which for now may be exchanged for things like ascended gear and infusions.
• 5 utility infusions and 30 ascended-tier amulets are being added to the game.
• Guesting is (finally) coming!!! Go read ArenaNet's blog post or my too-long summary for additional details.
• Nebulous "improvements" are also coming to WvW performance, dynamic level adjustment, and the UI.
• A bunch more stuff in the gem store so they can keep the lights on over there. Speaking of which, I'll just leave you with this...

• new items in the Black Lion Trading Post
• Matt Wuerffel explains the new achievements and laurels
• Robert Hrouda on the ongoing dungeons' revamp
• many legendaries have had new particle effects and footprints added
• there's waaay too much to summarize here, so go read the Gaelic epic that is the patch notes

I'm pretty excited about the reward system. The dailies quickly became tedious when you were able to go to the same zones every day (Gendarren fields and Orr) to complete them as fast as possible, so having more variety and reasons to actually visit other areas should be fun, as well as actually receiving more of a substantial reward from doing them. Hopefully leading to the Legendaries becoming less of a grind.

I'm also impressed by how much free content is being regularly added into the game, most subscription based games don't see this much. It'll be interesting to see how they handle this one though, after the Lost Shores event was a bit of a disaster. Although for the record, Regina did confirm that it wouldn't involve the dragons, Cantha or mounts in any way, I'm pretty sure we'll be waiting a lot longer before we bring down another one of the dragons. I think they'll wait until the tengu are made playable, at least.

Any word on the fractal changes? I'd really like to get my Warrior up to lvl 20 without much lfg hassle.

MASSIVE UPDOOT! Everything's been added to the OP.

Rather happy with what they've done with the laurel system of rewards along with the living story (very curious to see what that does to add to the overall world), glad they are doing all this for the overall game. Now back to getting one step closer to getting ahold of Chauncey von Snuffles III in the game.