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Where as the message in Free to Play is clear: Oh? Don't want to be patient? Pay us more money. Want that shiny chest that you took and hour exploring to find? Pay us more money.
To be blunt, this statement seems fully indicative of the problem I have with about half of the anti-F2P reasoning in this thread. I have yet to play a F2P game, except LOTRO, where there's anything like this. It's, at best, gross exaggeration and, at worst, just downright misleading.
The RMT chests in GW2? Very common drop. As someone noted, you MIGHT farm for them, but only because you were also farming for the funds to unlock them. You'll get them during normal farming activities. And you can either decide to pay gold for a chance to get something that will sell well, or you can just pocket the gold and walk away. Most players have a big stack of the normal items those chests contain - there's no particular reason your average player would even want to open all of them. They won't have room for all the crap in their bank.
But IF you want to open them, you can purchase a key using in-game money.
Something I'm going to note was standard practice back in vanilla/BC WoW days (locked boxes dropped, you'd pay a Rogue or a Blacksmith to get it open. It was a gamble that sometimes paid off well, sometimes cost you money).
From a player experience perspective, nothing has changed. Decide if you want to gamble, and then do or do not. There's nothing unique to F2P about that.
Furthermore, the chests themselves aren't the objective. At all. They aren't going to contain weapons or armor, they aren't going to make your character stronger. They aren't the chest that appears after a boss battle, or the reward from an epic quest line.
Meaning, they aren't being presented as something amazing, something you'd spend an hour of work fighting your way through a dungeon, to find.
The other issue I have is the content update argument. As someone noted (Filth), current F2P mmos are coming out with content that realistically matches subscription MMOs.
GW2 had small updates every week. But if you're comparing that to a 3-4 month update schedule for other games, that's still 15-18 weeks of content updates compared to that one content patch.
It also HAS to be noted that GW2 is a fundamentally different beast from something like, say, FFXIV. Content updates there are small and serial because the game is balanced around a PVP landscape. They aren't going to be building in massive raids, because that's just not how the game works. More specifically,
it wouldn't work. They can make huge events work as part of their FATE-esque system, or by implementing battles that use additional mechanics (like adding cannons), but otherwise the control/support nature of how abilities are developed just barely works for PVE content at a smaller level. It won't work when you blow that up.
If you take an issue with that, you just don't like GW2. It's nothing about the F2P model. If it was a subscription game, you'd be getting the exact same style of content.
That's also why GW2 is a really bad comparison here, because they're delivering fundamentally different content. I don't think you can easily put them next to each other and evaluate it like that, because what you want - what you value about the content - is different.
But compare something like RIFT and FFXIV? Or TOR and FFXIV? That seems much fairer, because they'll deliver primarly-PVE, group-oriented content, plus some casual/aesthetic content, plus some side-PVP content. They're actually similar games, and the comparison is easier.
So far, unless FFXIV is ramping up its update schedule, the total content being delivered over time seems roughly equal to me.
And if you're going to make an argument about the quality of that content, you have to actually be prepared to take on the burden of proof there.
