Probably save to assume that they will keep selling half a season of Living World once a year for an almost full full box price, but I’ll wait until something is actually released. Maybe it’ll be more than 85% cannibalized and recycled mechanics and art assets.
I mean, it’s possible that they are currently doing all the refactoring and cleanup that has been neglected in previosu years. This would also explain, why they are not able to produce more content at the moment (and why it’s so costly). If this is actually the case, then there might be light at the end of the tunnel, i. e. future additions to the game might become less complicated and less likely to produce bugs/regressions.
Also, why would GW3 lead to players abandoning the franchise? This is not what happened with GW2, or did it? I always thought that a lot of former GW1 players are now playing GW2 and some maybe even still play GW1.
My theory is that whatever ArenaNet had in the working during IBS was not good/finished enough or too far off from the current francise that NCSoft pulled the plug and “condemned” ArenaNet to continue releasing content for GW2 (with a much smaller development team on a code base which is increasingly hard to maintain).
It did actually, but it didn’t matter, because GW1 was not a true mmorpg & the influx of new players more than made up for the loss. With GW3 it would be different, GW3 would be another MMO similar to GW2, but with a fresher coat of paint, but without all the amazing content Anet released over the last 10+ years. It would be a new game that’s not better than GW2, just -if we are very lucky- less buggy, but very lacking in content at launch & also EVERYONE would know for certain that Anet is going to abandon it for GW4 eventually. MMO veterans like stability, if you abandon them once, they will not trust you again.
I’m not sure whether this is entirely true or rather whether this is true for the more casual MMO player. You are describing the traditional Until Death Do Us Part way of playing MMOs. But GW2’s (mostly) lack of vertical progression makes it really easy to return to the game after taking a break or playing something else (another MMO, e. g. GW3), without feeling that you have missed out on a lot.
By the way, this is one of the things I do not like about the new daily system (wizard vault), because it kinda discourages playing something else or taking a break, unless you are able to …