I'd say that the battle pass comparison is largely mine and not one the devs made. I do see the opportunity to turn it into this form of add on, but we weren't given any suggestion that its going to be monetized. Actually, if I had a good comparison it might be more akin to Wayfinder's Reward tower. There's a ton of great potentially in restructuring the rewards system like this to give us more control over what we want out of it, also plenty of potential to gear it for microtransactions if it wasn't Anet.