Guild Wars 2 Event System

I was reading Eurogamer's preview of Guild Wars 2 when I ran across this interesting paragraph.

"We actually don't have a traditional RPG/MMO quest system," Flannum continues. "Instead what we've got are Events. Think of them as group-orientated activities. This is one of the many things that will encourage the player to explore the world - you can wander through and never quite know what you're going to see. You might come across a fortress that's being attacked by centaurs, or it might be that the centaurs attacked half an hour before you got there and they hold it now. You might start walking along a road you've walked a hundred times and suddenly there's a caravan travelling along that road that you may not have seen, and you can go help that caravan out."

Reading this puts GW2 on my gaming radar. If they can pull it off successfully, it could be the best quest system in any MMO to date. The thought of being able to run across these random events as they happen would really make the game world feel like a more real, dynamic place. In my mind, this is an evolution over WAR's Public Quests. The PQs provided a nice group event that anyone could join in and work torwards a goal, but it always ended up feeling repetitive and static because nothing ever changed. You could go back to the area at any point in time and the same exact thing would be happening.

At least with this events system, different things will be happening at different times. That well-traveled road could just end up providing you a completely new experience. I imagine that some players will struggle with wanting to do everything in the game, "complete it" so to say, but for me this is a new and exciting possibility.