For the person asking how WvW costs gold:
Food and oil is 9-10 silver each. That is 40 silver per hour. The blue and green drops don’t make enough money in an hour to cover that cost.
Siege costs money. Upgrading various things can cost cash if you are into that.
Gear repairs/respeccing out of a pve build costs money in WvW.
If WvW wasn’t meant to be a reason to farm gold, then why did they allow consumables as well as asc gear in? Siege you can buy? Traps you can buy? They have to make their money somehow. If they were not making money off of it you would find everyone being able to enter at lvl 80 as they are in spvp. That would take out a bit of the imbalance seen with various buffs and asc gear for some classes.
sPvP was for pvpers who did not like grinding but spvp was too boring/imbalanced to keep their interest and they left. WvW milks the casuals and PvErs. Instead of addressing the broken stealth..they decided to profit off of it? Hmm.
I think they are going the wrong way with WvW which is going nowhere and not changing anything.
Take out the AOE limit. Certain AOEs can be worked around and addressed such as wells. Would it hurt WvW more if a group wiped when trying to enter a tower blindly or if huge zergs crush smaller ones on every map on every server resulting in a game of numbers with people quitting. Other games did not have the AOE limit and it worked.
Wide area proteciton or heals or Aegis can be allowed to break through the traps if they were an issue.
Allow certain classes to scale walls and kill AOE/Siege Pvers on the walls. Throw in grappling hooks but limit the number of people or classes able to use them.
Don’t allow any AOE or finishing downed players to go through tower gates. That is just silly.