Interesting post by Valatar on the Guild Wars 2 Beta Forums. He breaks down some of the hidden costs of GW2.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gem/The-Gem-Store-s-Grim-Math-or-Why-GW2-may-cost-220/page/1#post115334

Valatar

Welcome to Guild Wars 2, new player! We’re the fun new game where you don’t pay a monthly fee to play! But you do realize of course that we need money to keep up our servers and update the game, so there are a few modest cash store items to help cover our costs. But it’s probably nothing that you actually need, so don’t pay any attention to it!

How do you like the classes? They’re all great fun, aren’t they? We bet you’d like to play them all! But not so fast, you only have five character slots. If you want the other three, you’ll just need to make a one-time payment in the cash shop to unlock them. It’s only 800 gems per slot, so for only 2400 gems you’ll be on your way!

What’s that, adventurer? Your bags are full? Why shucks, have we got a deal for you! You have seven bag slots, but we locked three of them so you’d have room to grow! For an insignificant 400 gems, you can unlock one bag slot on one character. Of course, if you have eight characters, that’s twenty-four slots, but hey, what’s a little 9600 gems between friends for the luxury of being able to carry things?

Oh, you wanted to actually be able to store things? Like, in a bank? Well other MMOGs make you spend nasty gold to have more than 30 bank slots, but not us! You can just buy them with gems! We’ve helped you out by making the sky the limit and locked a whopping seven bank expansions at 600 gems each, so you can feel extra accomplished when you pull out your credit card to pay for the 4200 gems for that.

tl;dr:
At the current listed rates, you have to pay 16,200 gems to have eight characters with unlocked inventory and bank slots in GW2. With the assumption that the conversion rate is $1=100 gems, that’s $162 dollars above and beyond the box cost of the game. Edit: The actual gem price is believed to be $5=400 gems, which makes the cost $202.50 for those 16200 gems. A year’s subscription to WoW is $156 if purchased in six-month blocks, making it ironically cheaper to play a year of WoW than a year of GW2.

Bear in mind that I’m ignoring vanity items, convenience items, and keys in this tally. Those are all entirely optional, and a player can take or leave those without any particular penalty. I’m focusing entirely on the one universal constant of any MMOG: storage. It’s the thing that is indisputably vital for every player, that nobody can afford to be without, and everybody absolutely requires. Anyone who doesn’t purchase bag and bank space is going to be regretting it, deeply and often. I don’t consider it optional, and doubt that anyone with any length of experience in online games would disagree with me on that.

There needs to be an alternative option to gems for purchasing in-game storage. There’s no telling what the gold value of gems will be after the game’s release, but if the beta weekend’s average around 20 silver per gem holds true, it will cost 120 gold per bank expansion and 80 gold per bag slot, which are fairly ridiculous amounts. Edit: My numbers for the silver price for gems was incorrect, see below.

Alternatively, making the bag slots an account-wide purchase rather than a per-character purchase would save the eight-character player 8400 gems, making the grand total a much more reasonable sum.

Disclaimer:
All of this hinges on beta test gem prices for cash shop items, and involves an assumption on the cash price for gems. Either of those two things may change before release. My goal in bringing this to peoples’ attention is not to incite panicked nerd rage, but to make people aware of the potential cash cost in GW2’s gem store model of business, and the fact that it may be no less expensive than other games with monthly fees.

If it costs $10 for extra character slots, the most I will ever pay for this game after the initial box price is $30.

Extra bag space? Who cares. Just means you need to instantly teleport back to town 30% quicker than someone who buys the slots. Must be such a pain to instantly teleport back to town and then instantly teleport back to where you were adventuring.

Well yeah of course they need to keep the cash coming in to be able to run the servers and make exp packs and so on..

It was pretty obvious there was gonna be things in the cash shop that people would need to buy, sure its not pay to win but you will still probally end up paying out for these things..

Its just a different way of maknig money out of an MMORPG , but i guess at the end of the day you can choose not to buy the items and play for free..

Fair enough on the character sots. In regard to bag slots and bank slots, really? Must have? Maybe in your opinion but not in mine. I played WoW for a long time before finally giving it up for good and I still had characters with 10 slot bags equipped. L85 characters. And no more bank slots opened up then you get at char creation. And no "bank char" either.

This idea that you "need" all this inventory space is BS. It's each person's preferrence. I've never found the need for large inventory space. Perhaps I'm just more organised than most?

And until the prices have been confirmed (seeing as GW2 is still in beta) I think you need to relax a little.

Can't I buy gems with in-game gold? 

That'd make this whole discussion at this point in time trivial.

Also you state "you’ll just need to make a one-time payment in the cash shop to unlock them."

So it will be cheaper in the long run. 

Originally posted by NBlitz

Can't I buy gems with in-game gold? 

That'd make this whole discussion at this point in time trivial.

Ya, you can. Atleast you could in the beta weekend, so I assume its there to stay.

Originally posted by NBlitz

Can't I buy gems with in-game gold? 

That'd make this whole discussion at this point in time trivial.

You can but that will lead to them saying that by selling Gems you will earn enough gold, to pimp your fortress in world vs world - bringing us back on the p2w track.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/videos/gameID/473/videoId/2415

Bill Murphy's preview of the cash shop. In this he clearly says that 125 gems is  equal to "50c or a dollar, I'm not quite sure of the conversion rates". So where does $5=400 gems come from? There's obviously been no announcement about the costs of gems yet or I think we'd have been told.

[mod edit]

Originally posted by Master10K
From my experience the only ones I even see needing extra inventory & bank space are cooks and gear collectors. Especially cooks. Everyone else can make do with what's given and even if you're a cook, you'd only need one of your alts to actually be a cook and mail all the food to other chars. So yeah... just more arguements against the cash shop based on assumptions.

Apparently from what I've read bank space is shared across your accounts.

So rolling an alt would not work.

For bank space anyways. You would have extra inventory space I suppose.

Let me play your game

So I bought everything for 200$

Ok, WoW is cheaper when playing for a year

Ok so I play for three more months...suddenly GW2 is cheaper, and for every other month, the game is cheaper and cheaper

Ofcourse I dont have to buy any of this stuff with real money, I can spend ingame money...Can YOU spend gold in wow for monthly sub? No you cant, what shame

You lost your own game -- > fail

I'd pay em thousands of Euros to play the best game since chess.

Freeloaders are annoying btw.

OP, I know that you're on a personal crusade against the game and the cash shop but there comes a time when a man needs to call it quits. You've been at it for days and you're not convincing anyone. Most people who are going to play GW2 know about the cash shop and know what it entails. And you know what? We are OK with it for the simple fact that there is no monthly fee and the stuff that is in the cash shop really is mostly for conveniece.

May I direct your attention to almost every single other AAA MMO (except SWTOR) which has a cash shop on top of a subscription fee? Your energies would be better spent crusading against one of them. For example, TSW is about to launch with a cash shop and a subscription, and it only has *gasp* 3 character slots with the rest being $9.99.

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Originally posted by BizkitNL

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Originally posted by NBlitz
Can't I buy gems with in-game gold? 
That'd make this whole discussion at this point in time trivial.

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Ya, you can. Atleast you could in the beta weekend, so I assume its there to stay.

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Indeed. There was even a whole article about conversion on this very site. This guy's whole (very cynical) argument is rendered moot by the fact that the only people who will buy gold are those who wish to trade it via the in-game conversion economy, or use it for themselves. You don't need to spend a cent more than the game and its' expansions if you don't want to: you'll just have to fork over some in-game currency. Really, this guy should have done a bit more research.