My premise is that Gold Sellers & Bots exist for one main reason. To power level through grind. Grind = Player Time and Time = Money. So if I have a job that pays $30 hour, then every hour I spend grinding and not having fun is work and so that equates to $30 an hour I could be grinding at a job. This means it would be easier to pay for gold or bot in order to get back to having fun.
The core creator of grind in GW2 is crafting. Combine this with the trading post and you have the perfect recipe for gold sellers and bots. By tier 2 certain crafting is very difficult and grind kicks in. For example when you need 8 small fangs to make 1 item and you need 80 of the items to level your crafting, you are looking at 640 small fangs. There are plenty of trees, mines and food items, but when it comes to items that drop off creatures, you have to spend hours and hours in the same area farming to just get enough of them, to be able to get your crafting up high enough. It is so boring that you will find yourself going out and adventuring. This means all items you craft are useless to you, except maybe backpacks when you first get to a new tier.
The Trading Post makes it easy to get supplies, but supplies that are in demand are expensive. So that small fang will cost you almost 2 silver x 640 = 1,280 silver or 12 gold, 8 silver. As a low level character you aren’t making that much money from adventuring. By 50th you might be able to start drumming that up. So GW2 actually encourages you to pay them to buy gems, to buy gold as the legit way, to avoid grind. But if you were to calculate prices, gold sellers give you twice as much gold as GW2 does for the same money. So what does GW2 mean when they say it is legal, they mean they get your money and not someone else. But if they really want our money, they should fix the game so it works in their favor.
What this has done is cause HUGE numbers of gold sellers to appear in the game as there is a HUGE demand to be able to buy crafting supplies. Not just crafting supplies, also the desire to have the best equipment in the game, especially when there is competitive PVP. The bots come from gold sellers, but also from players who don’t want to sit around grind killing creatures for 8 hours to get the supplies. Or they don’t have the money to spend on gold and so the bot grinds the gold for them.
How can this be fixed?
1. Eliminate the Trading Post.
2. Allow trades via mail and in person.
3. Allow players to setup shops when they are off-line.
4. Make drops guaranteed for items that come from creatures.
5. Reduce the items required to level.
6. Transform high level crafting into a more interesting crafting system.
I am sure many people have other wonderful ideas, but this is what I can see to fix the situation currently.
Eliminating the trading post would encourage us go find our own crafting materials more or get them through our guilds and friends. Thus encouraging more group effort. By having players set up shops, you could still go places to find and buy items in some quantities, but it would prevent a player from buying 2,000 of the same items. It would also eliminate finding the BEST equipment drops, which would send players to crafters more often as the selection would be more limited. Guaranteed drops would make it just like mining or cutting down trees. Making crafting easier would make the craft items more useable to a player as he levels through the game.
Finally reaching the highest level should expand the crafting into unique items that are the best in the game. Where the crafting is blended with the questing.
Quest & Crafting
1. Special recipes drop while adventuring
3. Research via story lines to discover the items for the recipes
2. Finally these items demand questing with a group and doing dungeons
Alas I doubt such changes will come to GW2. What is more likely, is that they will start selling large quantities of crafting supplies on the gem market. Thus being able to make money for themselves and players getting crafting supplies cheaper than buying gold via a gold seller.