For anyone who has been in this thread and its predecessors since the beginning, it's not unreasonable to suspect you might slowly lose interest in Guild Wars 2 over the next year no matter what they do, nor would it be unreasonable for you to do so. In any other genre (excluding highly competitive multiplayer "scenes"), it would be a downright aberration for you to play a game religiously for two years and then have just as much interest and motivation at the start of year three as you did at the start of year one. That such a scenario is considered not only something within the realm of possibility, but an actual expectation of the devs held by consumers of the product, speaks to the kind of game we expect an MMO to be- but that game isn't necessarily one ArenaNet is aiming to make. Nor does NCSoft have any pressing desire to encourage them to start making that game instead.
The overarching brilliance of this "B2P with robust-but-not-gamebreaking cash shop" model is that there's no dependence on the guaranteed recurring revenue provided by keeping long-term monthly subscribers.* A particularly well-received release might make them more money than a poorly-received one due to higher concurrency and more attractive cash shop items leading to boosted gem sales, but a poorly-received release will crucially never lose them money in terms of hard cost. In terms of opportunity cost, they still have substantial motivation to make good releases instead of bad ones, but the types of players targeted by new releases can and will be completely out of sync with traditional subscription-based MMO content additions.
To use an analogy: imagine two versions of a Fruit of the Month club. In the first, you pay a monthly subscription and are sent a few pieces of fruit every month. In the second, you pay a one time fee and are sent a piece of fruit every month with the option to shell out a little cash for extra bits of fruit whenever you feel like it.
The first scenario is quite successful and results in lots of people happily paying every month for their fruit. However, over time it becomes clear that the people who have been paying every month for the longest period of time really prefer apples over all other kinds of fruit. In fact, one month they deliver oranges and a huge swath of paying customers dislike them so much that they cancel their subscriptions. The service immediately returns to delivering apples, and eventually, every month simply offers a new variety of apple. Some of these apples are particularly bitter and have rather challenging textures that other potential subscribers don't like at all; still, the threat of hard cost dollars lost in recurring revenue from loyal subscribers is significant enough that it's all apples, all the time.
The other service- at least in pure fiscal terms- doesn't have to preoccupy itself at all with what kind of fruit the customers who have already paid like most. Certainly plenty of them love apples, but instead of being beholden to that group the service is free to seek out people who prefer other fruits, and even make inroads with customers that don't like apples at all! The eventuality here is that even if they try oranges and they're poorly received, the instinct isn't to immediately return to apples: maybe the next month they'll try dragonfruit, then mamey, then apples- then maybe even try oranges again a few months later.
To bring this back into our terms: in NCSoft's eyes, a brand new player who buys the game on sale tomorrow and spends $30 on gems before reaching level 80 is literally more valuable than someone who paid full price and has been playing since headstart with 12,000 achievement points but hasn't bought any gems. It's to ArenaNet's enormous credit that they designed their game to avoid the "greed + efficiency" approach that caters primarily to the former player over the latter- which is to say, they do not rely on "pay to win" contrivances in any viable way. Thus the 12,000 achievement point player is more than welcome to go on playing at her leisure without ever feeling the need to pay a cent- the "downside" being the likelihood that the game's content releases won't exclusively cater to her, either. Lapsing back into the analogy for a second, it's the difference between knowing that apples are coming if you just keep paying and wait long enough, versus being served a variety of fruit including some you're almost guaranteed to hate.
This analogy of course ignores the phenomenon of paid, boxed expansions specifically designed to switch things up and cater to new, incoming players ("no really, oranges!!!") and attract a new and different customer base. But the point is that the non-subscription service avoids the need to attempt this altogether. All the orange-lovers need to do is wait until they hear there are oranges and take the plunge then. This is bad news for people who exclusively love apples, but good news for those who like just about anything else, better news for those who love a variety of fruit, and the best news of all for the service itself, which has absolutely no motivation to directly compete with their apple-dispensing subscription-based peers.
What NCSoft is rubbing its hands together over right now is the prospect of tapping into an completely untouched Asian market and making huge stacks of cash. But doing so successfully means a few important things for ArenaNet: a) tightening and reworking the in-game reward systems one by one, b) developing a larger portfolio of flashy content to draw from than was available for the Western launch (due to competing in a different market space there vs. here) and c) strengthening and developing a stronger tutorial/new player orientation system for more process-oriented eastern MMO gamers. The totality of these things might not actually be even remotely interesting to you or me, but they eat dev cycles and they are "strengthening the core world" in the most basic terms. They mean a refinement of the most basic aspects of the game that affect all players, and they are not simple to implement.
All of that was an extremely long-winded way of getting at the following:
Eventually, you're going to stop wanting to log into Guild Wars 2 on a daily or near-daily basis. Then you're going to stop wanting to log in every week. Then you won't have the desire to play at all for longer periods of time- months or years. It's going to happen to me, too. This is going to be the case regardless of what ArenaNet does with their time, just like it would happen with any other game that isn't designed to financially incentivize the opposite.
But there's nothing wrong with that. Because the model is so generous you could sit out for all of 2015 and come back in 2016 without being penalized in any practical sense. And because of the release design methodology you can pop in game, after all that time, and ask two things:
1) What's new to see since I left?
2) What's going on right now?
And both will have answers that will be revelant things you can do at that moment if you so choose. That's where a statement like "temporary content adds temporary value" falls apart. Because the game requires no continuous investment, its value both increases enormous over time and remains at at constant (though variable, depending on what kinds of fruit you like) high at any given moment.
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*Just to tie up the loose ends in this rant, I thought of the counter-argument that might be made here...
Q: But what about GW1, the company's only other game? That didn't rely on a cash shop significantly at all, just independent boxed campaigns, and it was a big success.
A: While a magnificent product with enormous value, GW1 was rather simply not an MMO at all. It was an instance-based multiplayer RPG with very beautiful and complex user lobbies masquerading as physical locations in an overworld. Much like the more recent Path of Exile, it cleverly obfuscated its limitations to the point where you did, if you didn't think about it too much, feel part of a connected online world. But neither is, in any real sense, "massively multiplayer." The two games have entirely different economies of scale and GW2 flat out costs enormously more to develop for and maintain.
