As for GW2 coming up with something in the cash shop to attract paying customers, they just added as drops to their equivalent to our Super Packs, a series of weapon skins that had people pour a whole lot of money since Tuesday into their item store in hopes to get one. And just like our Super Packs with numerous threads have blown up complaining about the RNG and how some have spent supposedly thousands upon thousands of gems (their Paragon Points) to in an attempt to get those skins. 100 Gems = $1.25 or 2.29 gold. A week ago 100 Gems would have cost only 2.02 gold. The gold to gem exchange rate goes up as more players convert gold to gems and down when they convert gems to gold (their legal RMT method).
Then like back on our boards when SP came out, a debate ignited about if this is considered gambling and whether it's legal, since you are paying for a "roll of the dice" hoping to "win" the prize you want. Before this they spent the whole month putting different items up for sale every day, 20% off. I believe it was moderately successful, at the very least they should be able to tell the kind of products players are interested in.
Note: Unlike the devs in CoH, ArenaNet is a flashback to Jack's days where they hold the actual percentage chances and drop table weights to themselves. One dev recently posted "we don't want to show you how the sausage is made". Lack of transparency has also brought out a number of the tin foil hat crowd.
On the up side the changes that went into Tuesday's large patch for WvW, server vs server vs server PvP via capture the flag across 4 similar maps have queued up entry to WvW on all the maps for the first time in recent memory.