I vote no. Would feel too much like a subscription, despite me knowing better. If I'm paying for gems, I want to actually take a minute and think about it.
Do I really want this? Don't I have enough gold to just convert to gems? Why am I saving up gold, anyways?
"Buy once, subscribe never" should also apply to recurring payments. It's supposed to be one of their strengths. One scenario I can think of is, what if you took a 5 month hiatus from the game and came back to see thousands of gems to your account but $50 poorer and nothing interesting in the gem store at the moment? I'll make an independent transaction each time I want to thank Anet for their content.
That's a perfectly fair and reasonable opinion on the matter. I won't try to make a strong case for an automated gem transaction because I don't feel that strongly about it. I tend to spend what would amount to $5-10 worth of gems a month, on average, so it more or less amounts to sheer laziness, not wanting to watch the market or pick up a gem card or
whathaveyou.
And you're absolutely right about the gem store being optional, and that being one of their strengths. Every time an MMO thread pops up on GAF, somebody immediately thinks they're being clever by pretending Guild Wars 2 has the same old Pay-2-Win scam as the rest of the F2P market, and they're almost immediately corrected (and no, not by me).
This will probably double or triple ArenaNet's revenue and
at least double the game's population (not that we'll ever interact with that market, but it's nice to know there's tons of people playing). Gonna be fucking crazy to see how well GW2 does in that market.
I also expect us to get some Nice Things too when this happens, as there's supposed to be a new tutorial and such shipping with the China launch.