the fact of the matter is; if anything anet should MASSIVLY decrease gold item droprates. i G U E R E N T E E you GW players would play the game longer and be more likely to get later GW games.
why?
because GW is not one of those games where you NEED an 8 15.50 crystalline or dwarven or +30 -2 magmas. you can easily get items with the exact same (usually better) mods from the weapons crafters for 3-15k (some have more expensive materials), which, you can EASILY get by playing the game from begining to end. noone in gw can claim they need high value vanity skins in order to operate. the sole reason for the existence of these items is to provide some level of meta-game incitation to continue. after you beat the game you move to pvp, building multiple chars, collecting precious items, whatever the case may be. its a form of non-essential post-plot game enhancement that is 100% optional and 100% seperate of the game itself.
look what happened to ch2; what is an 8 15>50 golden phoenix blade worth in comparison to an 8 15>50 crystalline? A: virtually nothing. why? because so many of them have flooded the market you cant take a leak without pissing on one lying on the ground; there are however (to this old-world high-end traders knowledge) less than a dozen 8 15.50 crystallines (i can substantiate no more than 8; out of tens of millions of items farmed). and do crystallines look good? almost unanimously people will agree: no. oni blades, sunqua blades, gothic swords, brute swords, longswords, etc, all have interesting, unique and eye-candy-like skins, while crystallines are farily bland and quite frankly ugly. would that stop rich players form paying tens of millions for a perfect one? no. why? rareity.
and this is an extreme example of the bottom line fact that the sole reason these items are worth a lot is because they are rare, and because they are rare few people can afford them, and because few people can afford them they become status symbols, and because of that, other people desire them. but imagine if everyone got a free 8 15.50 crystalline with the inception of their account, do you think they would be worth more than 50k inside of a month? probably not. and what would happen to the people who spent millions on their 8 15.50, 15 while enchanted, 15% while in a stance, etc crystallines? many would quit.
now some of you are thinking "good, they are stuck up richie rich ebayers anyway and the game is better that they are gone," perhaps, but imagine they did this with every item skin, or at least every one of value. all of a sudden you would wreck the time and effort put in by rich players, middle-class, lower middle class; and all of them would probably quit as well, and all that would be left are people with the same equipment all around, and very very quickly the pve content would get booring, as there would be nothing to strive for after beating the game content, and then these people would quit. and before you know it, gws population dwindles to a few thousand people with the exact same crap.
even if this didnt happen; if the rich players quit, who will the middle-class sell their fancy wares too? other middle-class players who ahve the same things? no, they would lose their item market, go broke, and quit, and once again we end up with the same enevitable scenario.
dont believe me that its possible? the same people who made diablo2 made gw, and look what happened with diablo2, after the rarest items in the game became commonplace the rich players quit, then the middle-class, then many of the poorer players with a penchant for pvp quit, and whats left of the game now? an empty shell of its former glory. and in d2, high end items were actually different in stats; in GW, they arent. the only thing that keeps thousands and thousands of people playing is the rarity of skins; sure you might not like the idea of people like me buying/selling things worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, but if item drops increased enough and traders like me quit, then to what purpose is there farming? none. so when the traders quit, so do the farmers, and when the farmers quit, all of a sudden the supply for items becomes nil since the farmers arent going to spend 15 hours a day farming items only worth 10k, and sooner or later GW ends up as a barren wasteland of people with the same crap; in your quest to make the items you cant afford more common, you'd just make them worthless, and at the same time, even harder to come accross.
already hundreds if not thousands of people have quit or refuse to touch factions items due to their over-saturation fo the market and highly depreciated value; hundreds of people took massive losses by purchasing them in the opening days of factions, only to have them be worthless but a month later; and the economy is in the worst state of existence it has ever been in, its nearly impossible to sell anything since everyone already has 15 of them, and its impossible to buy rares (for most people) because the small amount of money they make off their factions items disallows them from trading for more rare equipment. anyone can become self-sufficient these days, but it is far more difficult now than it has ever been to bridge the gap of "average wealth" to "wealthy," simply because the few people who have rare items in general wont give them up for the ability to buy crap they can get from anyone at any time, for a next to nothing price.
/end rant.
-Akh
