Not that it will do them any good. It is more of a favor to ArenaNet than anything else... Taking a bit of stress off their servers for a few hours.
People are still going to buy and play GW2 regardless of the fact that 5.0 hit the same day. Not to mention those that are already playing GW2 by that time because of the prepurchase head start. People are going to buy it and play anytime they want because GW2 is a freemium game. No subscription, just optional cash shop.
When you look at it, what is 5.0? A couple of weeks of the same old end of expansion event that you can do in a few hours, look at your class changes, whine about changes and even worse play some "unbalanced" level 85 PvP due to the class changes which Blizzard will just say "it's balanced at 90" and still do class nerfs and adjustments once they figure out it sucks at 90 too as they always do. Lol. All this takes just a few hours to experience. There is no new raids or dungeons to keep people busy. No leveling content. No access to new places to explore or pet battles if you are into that. Nothing game changing.
I think Blizzard will lose out in MoP because I can see PvPers permanently sticking to GW2 unless Blizzard brings PvP up a notch or two for MoP. Dragonslaying should be fine however.
Where did you pull that from?
There is a lot of prepurchases and preorders for Guild Wars 2, in fact they sold out of online digital prepurchases at a couple of points.
Don't forget that if you preorder/prepurchase in store you get headstart access too.
In 4 hours EB Games here in Australia sold out of regular and collector's editions everywhere with their preorder and prepurchase options. They had to wait for more. Guess no one prepurchase or preorders? As of the past few months they only have the regular version available for prepurchase or preorder.
If no one brought prepurchases, then I guess WoWs prepurchase for the digital edition of MoP is dead.
Also, while you are shaking in your fanboyism boots: Keep in mind Guild Wars 1 was second largest selling mmorpg of all time, only second to World of Warcraft. The Guild Wars 2 franchise has attracted many more new fans to go with their long time fans.

