The GW2 BWE Phase Three: Actual Gameplay

Guild Wars 2 is a persistence based MMORPG with a lot of activity.  If your world gets too full, instead of waiting in line, they put you on an overflow server temporarily unless you really want to wait in line.  Why would you want to wait in line offline when you can wait online while playing though?  There are some issues with overflow but those are a work in progress.

World Events and Currency

Scouts tell you where all the karma merchants are and, where there's karma, there are world events.

There are NPCs all over who are scouts (marked by spyglasses normally on the map) and tell you where there are NPCs who spawn world events (notorious monsters/bosses, battles, collection mini-activities) in their areas and who will sell you items for karma (essentially currency which is character-bound and only for NPC items).  Gold and Gems can be exchanged by players and, while you get gold for open-world drops/rewards, gems are like PLEX in EVE - you buy them for real currency and trade them for gold or buy certain items for them (some of which actually drop in the game).

World events vary - I've done everything from fighting monsters/invaders to stomping on things to escorting to harvesting apples.  There's even a fun "harvest" where there's this deranged wine-maker (if you follow her, the other NPCs talk about her being insane) who wants you to pick up ruined grapes - I love her.  They're more free-form than quests - you aren't stuck with a log of them.  They pop up on your screen if you're nearby and go away if you tell them to, leave the area or fail.  Failure isn't a big deal either and you can repeat them.  You don't need to group, just be in the area with people.  You get rewards based on your involvement too.

My Elementalist just got a silver award - I've seen silver and gold and I assume there's a lower one.

Personal Story

Every character has a personal story, based on how they answered the multiple choice questions during character creation.  My understanding is that the plots converge around level 30 but I don't have confirmation.  That said, there are a lot of options.  I won't go into spoilers but, if you were really curious, your choices matter a lot and you can always read my screencaps and do the math (I'm missing a lot of steps though so it won't help much).

Your personal story objectives (green text) have suggested levels and show up in the upper corner, above any world events (orange text).  It's fairly straightforward and there will always be map markers.