Guild Wars 2 in the Months Ahead

ArenaNet's Colin Johanson has cranked out a lengthy blog post covering the success of Guild Wars 2 in 2012 (over three million copies sold!), their plans for 2013, and the "key pillars" that are helping to propel the fantasy MMORPG sequel forward. A sampling:
To make playing in our open world worthwhile, we'll make it rewarding enough for players to spend their time there across all levels. It's extremely important that we stay true to our philosophy that you should be able to play Guild Wars 2 the way you want to play the game in order to reach the most powerful rewards.

One of our focuses is expanding and leveraging our achievement system. The concept behind this is to allow players to earn new rewards for achievements, as well as progressing down achievement paths that take advantage of the open world experience. We'll add tokens for your achievements that you can turn in to select from a list of rewards, including new reward types like Ascended gear and Infusions. We'll add support so daily achievements will be different each day of the week, which will help drive players to different areas of the world and play together. Later, we'll also be adding a system that lets you complete a subgroup of achievements to fulfill your daily. For example, if there are 6 daily achievements available, you'll only need to do 4 of the 6, so you can choose the achievements that you're most interested in.

We'll continue to offer cosmetic rewards such as titles, medals (such as map completion), unique skins, etc., which will remain prizes earned for completing specific parts of the game. These will show off the prestige of your character, but will not make your character more powerful than other characters.

As we look at developing new types of rewards further into 2013, we want to develop systems that are uniquely Guild Wars 2. Our reward systems need to be exciting, and include things you want to earn over time, but we don't want to force our players on endless gear treadmills for new tiers of gear we add every 6 months. You won't see another tier between Ascended and Legendary in 2013 for example. Our goal will be to use our existing reward systems and build new ones that are fun and exciting that step away from the stale gear grind reward systems you see elsewhere. Later in 2013, we'll begin to introduce more of these systems once we've finished rolling out the remaining Ascended gear and Infusions.