Guild Wars 2

Preface 1: I have worked in IT in various aspect (including Tiers 1, 2 and 3 technical support) professionally since 1995.

Preface 2: Having submitted a support ticket to GW2 support due to the fact that after logging into a US server so I can play with my American friend (I currently live in the middle east), I experienced lag upwards of 3 minutes. The game would not allow me to switch to an EU server. The end result amounted to "sorry, Charlie, but you’re going to have to wait 7 days before you can switch to an EU server).

First of all, “No” is NEVER an acceptable response to a client.
The technical support person (who was very polite and as helpful as his position allowed him to be, no doubt) said there is no way that the counter could be reset.

First of all, I don’t believe that for a second. It should be well within Tier 3’s ability to reset a counter on an account.
But lacking that there are ALWAYS alternatives.

1.: Offer to delete and recreate the account (you would lose all your characters, but for a new player this isn’t an issue as, as I understand it, you need to delete your characters before switching servers anyway.
2.: Offer to create a short term “temporary account” so that the client can at least play with the game for the week until he can get back to the original account and switch servers.
3: Escalate this issue to Tier 3. It’s Tier 3’s JOB to create solutions to issues that Tier’s 1 and 2 cannot resolve.

“I can’t help you” is never under ANY circumstances an acceptable answer to come out of the mouth of anyone in Technical support. If you don’t have a solution ready then tell them that you will need to research the issue or escalate it to a higher Tier of support.

That aside, I don’t understand why GW2 makes you wait 7 days (or any amount of time) before switching servers. The duration should be ZERO, or, at worst, 24 hours before being allowed to switch servers.