I just wanted to thank those of you who put in a legitimate thought process into your responses.
Also to agree with @Daddy.8125 on their post about the cash shop. I just checked my bank out of curiosity, and I had spent $500-ish USD, last year alone (2020), on keys, mounts, glittery thingies that look amazing, and shiny stuff, for both my partner and I. TL;DR - Cash shops are great, they make money. GW2 wont ever have a P2P, it just doesn't make any sense for this type of system. It might gain them some consistent cash flow, but most of the players I know play this game because it's not P2P, and so they risk losing a lot of their player base, and potential cash shop bling.
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More words below if you're bored.
I'm gonna go on a ramble because it's covid and I'm feeling verbose. Just to give an example that cash shops rake in money. And if I'm doing crude math here, and assume there is just 10k players out there spending the same as I am, that's $5.4 mil.
Now, for some pseudo research - 10 bored minutes of digging around.
The average estimated number of GW2 players per month is about 542k - sourced from: https://mmo-population.com/r/guildwars2#:~:text=Guild Wars 2 is estimated to have 14%2C265%2C884 total players or subscribers. (They say it's an estimate too, not sure where they scape that from). I didn't dig into this number much at all, or checked other sources, as I'm mostly attempting a very poor thought experiment.
So let's assume this: 5% of the population is: 0.05 x 542k is: 27,100 people. Take 27,100 x $500 (average assumed spending per year) gives you: $13,550,000.00. So even if those numbers are WAY off, like 50-70% skewed (which they probably are) - you're STILL looking at: $4-6 mil per year. That's not laughing matter cash. It'll keep some lights on and pay some salaries.
Cash shops work, GW2 P2P is a terrible idea and wouldn't deliver what people expect anyway, as it was told.
I miss Rurik though...he was a good dude. Cared about his people wanted nothing in return except their safety. I reflect on that sometimes. Having leaders that go above and beyond. I'm disappointed I didn't see him in the mists yet. Brother is probably just chilling.
Well...see ya later.