As fair as I know, paid tournaments work with qualifier points which you get from free tournaments. This made me wonder, why there couldnt be tournaments, where you pay gems or gold to play. For example, a player would have to pay 80 gems (1$) each to play in a tournament, that would require 400 gems per team. There would be 8 teams in tournament and they all would play for those gems, winner takes it all or 1st and 2nd gets paid. Obviously numbers are tweakable so we could also have different buy-in amounts and different sized tournaments. Another thing which crossed my mind was to replace gems with karma points, or have both ofc.
I dont see a reason why this wouldnt interest huge amount of players to at least try it out. You can also buy gems with gold, so you dont have to necessarily spend "real money" into this. Buy in amounts would be small, but even small amounts make things a lot more interesting. If more players would play this, you wouldnt even have to be exceptionally good player to win once in a while. There is millions of people playing cards for money and excitment it brings, why there couldnt be few thousands or even tens of thousands of players who would play online game for money(gems) once in a while?
I read somewhere you can rent a server and play for gems or coins or whatever, but I understood it isnt same system what I am talking about here. Basically, you would form a team of 5 players, each of them must have xx balance of gems so they could register to tournament. You could also see how many other teams are already registered in tournament and estimate how long it would take for tournament to fill so it could start.
Anyway, this obviously needs some polishing and even then it might not fit for GW2. But opinions, civilized discussion, could this work etc.
Sorry for butchering this language.