Please don’t move this to the Living World forum, because this doesn’t have to do directly with it. This has to do with Arena Net´s/NCsoft’s overall business decisions and why in cases such as this you are only hurting your own brand names.
Taking something that you are using apparently all your resources on and make it cost a LOT of gems for players who would like to play GW2 1 year or 2 years from now to unlock is a terrible idea, because it will only prevent us from bringing new players to the game.
These players would like to experience the living world to understand the story, and nobody will do that when it costs ridiculous amounts of real money just to get started for more story (which is not THAT exciting to most players), and in the other hand not being able to experience it would be a reason not to play this game.
And worse of it all, you are charging money like it was an expansion to something that ISN’T an expansion. You only add story and some challenges, but not new character progression, no new races, no new nothing. This is overcharging for a product that isn’t that great, yet people are expected to play it to enjoy the future Living World stories.
You are shooting yourselves in the foot with this decision, in the long term it is making players lose hope on anet business decisions.
What happened to gems being for cosmetic things only?
