Under the guise of another popular called, Diablo 3, in which the game focused on the Auction House system to provide you with new gear to complete content with more damage, but at what cost? Diablo 3 became a renown Auction House Simulator, essentially. It’s new system became its downfall, as more people recognized it for the sour taste it will leave you further into the game.
This is what is happening in GW2, where the primary focus on acquisition of any important advancement, be it cosmetically or slight damage increase, the downfall comes to heavy reliance on gold. Given the state of the last two living story, we see massive amounts of people aggressively assaulting the zerg-play in order to gain additional gold fund, not because it was ‘fun’, but effective.
The underhanded mechanism gave rise to more people being able to generate around 10g/hr, in turn providing everyone the opportunity to get what they wanted to obtain while burning out their taste for gameplay. To most people, they were able to gain lots of gold in the last couple weeks, at the cost of inflating the price of gems to 5g/100gem, precursors becoming far and few at a rate of +200g.
Every new weapon skin introduced now is related to the gemstore, understandable when the game relies on a free-to-play model, but that’s not the issue. When the gemstore boxes rely on RNG, you could be spending upwards of $50-$100 a skin. This an ineffective system, that preys on those with gambling addictions and those who are optimistic in rolling against RNG-form.
Nothing in the game produces skill based progression towards new rewards, everything can be bought with either gold or through the use of RNG, which severely limits the gameplay for the majority of people. The only added additions so far is Liadari and the Aether dungeon achievements, that lack additional rewards outside of AP.
TL;DR
Move away from the necessity of gold, its time to focus on challenging content that’s more rewarding than zerging down mobs 24/7. This picture accurately depicts the game in the current state:
