"There are indeed!

We’ve had a lot of feedback from folks asking for more difficult places in the game that can be more rewarding to play in. Our intent with Orr (and Southsun) is to create areas that are more fun/difficult for groups to play through event chains, with events that scale better when larger groups of players show up than the rest of the game, rather than the old versions that fell apart when more than a group or so of players showed up.

Thus the continual updates this year to make the creatures in Orr have more varied skills, the swap over to the new event scaling system that creates veterans/champions as content scales up, and the updates to Southsun to have more playable content. The one thing that’s really missing is the rewards to help make playing in these locations more even exciting and rewarding than they are now.

 

We want champions to be more rewarding, so places like Orr/Southsun where events can scale up to create champions become one of the more fun and rewarding places in the game to play, since events there can be champion on demand generators to an extent. We’d also like to tie in additional unique rewards to the temple chains, to make those more worthwhile and differentiate them from the giant boss encounters (which we’ll also be upgrading to be more exciting) to give a reason to do each in a day. We’d also like to add more value and use to blue/green items, so things like killing vets feels more rewarding when those type of items drop when doing those events in Orr as well.

 

And of course, we’d like to remove culling from PvE as well so you can experience these events in all their glory when they do scale up.

 

We’ll go into specifics on all of this in an updated version of the Gw2 in 2013 blog post sometime in July focusing on our plan for the 2nd half of the year and how we plan to improve the core game experience. As a reminder, you can find the original detailing our high level plan here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/"

"We feel like our fractals dungeon is the perfect fit for this kind of “historical” experience, similar to the way the BMP worked in Gw1. Even better, it already exists and has explanations behind why these slices of time are available to discover and experience within.
 

In the future, you’ll see certain types of content that was part of larger story experiences be updated to work within the fractals dungeon and return there where it makes sense to do so. Of course, the specific rewards and achievements will not return since those are intended to be completed as the story unfolds, but the content itself will be used to expand out our fractals experience and serve as a place to continue to experience great (and strange) moments in history."

"Any updates to the fractals will need to include additional update to the reward systems as well, agreed.

As for the jet pack, those specific rewards are intended as limited rewards you can only earn during that time, thus making them valuable. It wouldn’t be fair to the people who did earn jet packs for us to bring them back, and suddenly undercut their value entirely.
 

And yeah that F&F dungeon updated for size would make a good fractal wouldn’t it? =)