They also wanted to sell boosts and convenience items as is done commonly in other F2P MMO's. It seemed they wanted to tax the currency exchange in a fashion similar to how CCP does it with PLEX in their EVE Online game. In looking at the economy and monetization model, it seems clear that felt strongly that by tapping the in-game economy they could do away with the need for a subscription. Doing this mostly without the need for instances makes this truly remarkable. Non-competitive looting and resource gathering, and rewarding players heavily for exploring and reviving their fellows means that you don't have to win at the expense of other players in this world. As many reviewers have pointed out already, this game does so many things right from a game design angle that it will be the foundation for many MMO's in the future. Guild Wars 2 makes a fascinating case study in virtual economics. Complex tools like smart phones are completely impossible to create by one person, and require the collective efforts of millions of people to bring to market. A thousand people can produce one million tools faster than one person can create one tool, so this makes total sense. Even a casual gardener requires tools that are almost certainly not “home made”. Such a person would be the stuff of legends in the modern age, since even the most intrepid adventurer does not go into the wilderness without gear made through the collective efforts of thousands of other people. An individual, acting completely alone, has no need for trade. It is also a given that all economic activity involves more than one person. In a virtual world the economy starts with little (if a seed is provided) or no (more typical) resources and all economic currencies increase rapidly over time, approaching infinity if the world is not properly designed with resource sinks that dynamically remove resources from the environment at roughly the rate they are created.
Virtual economies are upside down from “real” economies, and this causes many conventional economists to come to false conclusions when evaluating these environments. In order to simplify the math, many economists pretend that things like air and water are infinite, but clearly they are not, and clean air and water can quickly become scarce if these resources are abused on an extraordinary scale. In the real world, resources start off in abundance (especially things like air and water) and become more scarce over time. Real world economies involves the careful distribution of finite resources to the population to maximize societal productivity.