Crimsonbeak

The grind has become quite bad. Everything requires tremendous amounts of time or luck. And they gated things that should be built in features behind masteries like auto-looting.

All 4 of the new maps suffer from serious design flaws. All 4 zones are on a set timer, where the events start at a set time and the meta event or reset happens regardless of player interaction. In the first 3 maps the problem is there are not enough events to keep the map active for the entire time. Each map involves taking outposts, and each outpost has a set event chain. Once that event chain is complete then very few events happen. An organized map can get these quest chains done in about 30 mins, which leaves roughly an hour of this weird situation where there really isn't anything to do. Or if you finish an outposts quest chain you are left with ~1/4 of the map with nothing to do. So all you are left to do is grind, and since the maps are so large what little events that do happen it is tough to stumble across them, or get to them before they finish. There are no NPC's guiding you to event's or flagging you down as you run by saying "hey help some giant plant ate my best mate! Go over there and save him".

Because of this lack of events, and long timer you usually end up on a dead map. And it leads to basically all you do is pull up a website that has each zones timers (universal across all servers) and then go in to lfg and try to taxi in to whatever instance is organized. And if you get in great, but if not you are stuck and need to wait 2 hours for the next chance to even attempt it again. This is basically a re-imagining of EQ and camping named mobs. The thing that makes this more infuriating is all of these maps follow the design principles of an earlier map they released called Drytop. Where you had a 1 hour cycle where for 45 mins you do events (which were on a timer and new events would kick off across the zone every 5 mins) and build up a zone level. Then it would switch over to a 15 min sandstorm, that triggered new events with higher rewards, and uncovered chests that you could unlock. And depending on the level you achieved in the earlier cycle it would trigger optional boss events. But the cool thing was even if you were solo, or had 100 people in the zone you could still find stuff to do. Guild Wars then went on and further refined this with the Silverwaste zone. Where you had this zone wide meta event, that you would attack/defend forts and build up a zone wide bar. Once the bar reached 100% it would kick off the meta event, and then once the meta event ended there was the short run around and get loot do other things phase before it all reset and started over again. This was great because if you joined a big organized map you would quickly progress through the events, but still if you were alone you could do some events and still progress the event bar. And as you did events other people would join the map until you got near the 100% then people would taxi in to the map organize and do the meta event. It worked well because you always could be doing something, whether you had 5 hours to kill, or only 5 minutes. The new zones are a minimum of an hour plus commitment if and only if you happen to log in at the right time, and get lucky that you joined a full map.

How do I think they should fix the zones.
Verdant Brink, the map's gimmick is a day/night cycle that lends itself to the drytop model. However they need to add more events that are doable by a single person once an outpost is taken. Maybe pre-load some of the night-time events so you could rescue survivors/get supplies and build up the encampment level before nightfall (maybe not all the way to 4 but stop at 2).
Auric Basin, and Tangled depths. They need to move these to a Silverwastes type of map. Where instead a set timer once you fully complete all 4 outposts that it kicks off the meta event.
Dragon's Stand. Honestly I am not sure the best way to fix this map. It should be definitely moved off a timer and more to a SilverWastes style, but given the map construction I am not sure what you can do to make the map fun for people who aren't in massive groups.

And that is just the new maps, they also made tremendous errors with the Dungeons and Raids.