tl;dr - Do it, the population is healthy and the game is a lot of fun

I'm taking a break from ffxiv by playing gw2. I've only been playing about 3 weeks now, and have only been playing elementalist.

So far the character customization is nice in that you have 5 skills sets you get to expand upon, each of which are interchangable at the touch of a function button. Which i thought was pretty cool.

Gear comes by the way of drops, chest, or the marketboard, and coin comes quick enough to where you will always be in level gear if you choose so.

The questing is open outside of your main story which has only come up 3 times between r09 and r36 where I am at now. I have not done any raids yet but I am only aware of Ascalonian Catacombs being available so far.

The pvp is instanced ( as far as I know, this may change later in game) There is world vs. world called edge of the mist, then 5 different types of team pvp with specific goals.

The game is very active, and when you are not in an active area it prompts you to be ported to another server with more people, so its never really slow. The people I've come across so far have been very friendly and helpful, when there are world instanced events ( these are pve events that are generally done as a group) people will shout them in the /map chat and tag them with the location. I have had to shout for help and there was never a time where I didn't get several responses, and private messages asking if I figured it out or if I'd like it if someone would come along and give me a hand.

I havn't joined a guild so I cannot comment on those thing.

All in all I'm having a bunch of fun but am just shy of half way done with the r80 grind. I've gotten 9% completion of the map so far, but seem to spend more time in pvp than I do in pve. For the price I paid ($10) I think its been well worth the cost or even if it costed more. I dont know yet if it will take over as my main game or I will go back to ffxiv when the patch launches in June.