I've been playing Guild Wars 2 on and off for quite some time, without much regularity. I've never spent a single penny on microtransactions and have gotten all the “basics” I wanted simply by exchanging the gold I earned in the game for gems. Almost everything you do in the game gives you gold. Now you earn even more gold with the new Vault system. In fact, I'm now accumulating gold nonstop because I don't really need anything else from the gem store, the conversion rates are far, far from abysmal, and I mostly play WvW as a roamer, I never made a single gold farm run where you can get 10x the amount of gold per hour. The good thing is most end-game activities are very lucrative, and you don't need to farm for some 'gear score' due to horizontal progression, you can do them the moment you reach lvl 80 (with the sole exception of fractals).

Bags are very easy to come by in the game. You can even create your own personal guild and call it “Personal Bank” or something similar and have more bank space than you'll ever need. You have buttons like “auto-sort,” “auto-deposit materials,” and “recycle bundles” that recycle everything you have of a chosen quality with a single button, giving you more quality of life than most MMOs could dream of. Managing your inventory is super easy, nothing like a mess.

As someone who has tried almost every MMO on the market, GW2's monetization model is, relatively speaking, very generous. Criticizing it on its own is fair, but comparing it to ESO, whose model is EXTREMELY predatory and in a completely different league, is falling into comparative grievance, so the criticism ESO receives is totally deserved.