As of now we have two main pvp tournaments. Mistpedia and ESL. These tournaments provide prestige, gold and real money and require players to perform at their best as well as practice as a team. Also with recent prize pool of WTS, GW2 started to take its babystep towards becoming Esports.
However PvP community is very small and also divided by regions and to be honest due to high skill gap and attitudes that come in play of any competition, pvp does not attract “casuals” who are the largest base of this game. And with further division of gamemodes such as pve/pvp/wvw, we see many players in the same pool but playing different modes of game.
And if pvp community grows, there will be more problems such as class balancing, change in quality of matchmaking, egos and etc. While the best thing for GW2 pvp is to grow and attract more people, this game offers so much other things and also restrict certain contents to certain gamemode that one balance patch could literally make or remove certain classes from certain game modes.
With that the solution is keep the competitiveness of top tier tournaments going for those who are willing to compete while creating smaller, much smaller tournaments on weekly basis, hosted by Anet themselves. Academy Gaming’s tournaments are fantastic examples of how users can also host tournaments, but it is still restricted to top quality players.
What I’m proposing is this; Take a look at Fifa 15’s tournament hosting, and base GW2 weekly tournaments like that. On special days/weeks, players can enter a pvp tournament with Anet/GW2 logo in pvp tab, along with practice, unranked and ranked. If they do so, their pvp match will be put on a bracket and it will be listed in GW2 page (which doesn’t exist yet). The final prize should be less than 10g and it should not be broadcast so that people will not be exposed to criticism of public. With not much prize money and without public shaming, casual people will then enter the tournament and at least get a feel of competitive gaming.
The point is to lure more people into pvp, whether those people are pve or wvw hardcores. Also WTS advertisement should also be in game, not some tiny description on the right corner of the screen, but advertisement video playing in GW2 browser (TP) so that people will know there is a big tournament being broadcasted via twitch.
There would and should be a lot of fixes/adjustments/removals even if anet decided to employ weekly tournament basis for casual players such as Fifa. But as people are leaving GW2 due to whatever reasons, and we see the same top tier teams over and over because people do not know or cannot enter touranments because whatever reason, at least give people incentives to play pvp other than for reward tracks/finishers.