Guild Wars 2

I think it goes without saying that it harms the game as a whole for a limited number of players to make gold through speculative trading on the currency exchange. In the last couple of days I have seen several very steep spikes in Gem price fluctuation.

I propose a simple mechanism that prohibits large amounts of gems to be exchanged at one price, especially if it’s by one user. So a group of users cannot pool their resources and buy a couple hundred thousand Gems (or however many is needed to significantly raise Gem price) at, say 35 silvers/100 Gems, boost the price to 50 silvers (which leads to sell price of about 40 silvers), then sell all of it at 40 silvers, leading to a crash. Then repeat the cycle.

I lack the resources to test whether preventive mechanisms are already in place, but at the very least, I think it’s reasonable for very large quantity transactions to be divided into smaller segments with each segment trading at progressive prices based on market direction.

If someone can buy cheap gem to boost the price up…that means each consecutive purchase made will be more expansive…pushing the price up. When the buying is done, the average price of their gem stock will be higher than the 35s/100 gem. Given the wide spread, when they try to sell it at 40s, the price will depreciate for each consecutive sales..making their average selling price lower than 40s.

Now I haven’t play the gem market yet…but I think if there was an exploit on making speculative gains, it could be due to being able to make a bulk purchase/sale that’s being locked into 1 price. Fixing that would do (if that’s the problem to begin with), you don’t need to limit the number of gem purchases. Still…I don’t see much harm on the restrictions you propose to the average gem purchaser that buy it for their own use.

The trade back and forth from gems to gold cost money, if people want to waste money doing that, then its their problem.

They will have to spike the price a very large percent and then somehow counteract all the people selling the gems because the price is high.

In my opinion the gem market doesn’t move enough as it is. There hardly any fun in it if its just a straight line kind of thing.

I checked earlier today and the 5 day average prices were 36s to buy 100 gems and 26s for selling 100 gems. This means that the gems I bought a few weeks ago for between 25s and 26s I could sell for a profit. But based on the long term time frame the rate of increase is 1s every 2 days. We can only assume there are 10s or even 100s of millons of gems in the system. After all if only 25% of the 2 million players each bought 100 gems with gold to date that would be 50 million gems. And I’m sure it is actually a lot more people buying and many more than 100 in a single day. After all I bought a lot more than 100 in one day.

But if we assume that 50 million gems have been bought with gold each day for that 1s every 2 days increase in price. Then it would take twice that to bump the price up 1s in one day. Which means with the 10s gap that a more than 10 times the daily rate of gems has to be bought by a group of people in order to manipulate the price up high enough in one day to turn around and sell them for profit that same day. That means they would need over 1.3 million gold to pull it off. That would need a very large group of people pooling gold to make it happen. But lets assume 26,000 people contribute 50 gold each to an effort to do this each of them would make less than 2 gold profit.

The vast amount of gold needed by a small enough group to pull something like that off is probably impossible especially at this point in the game and the seer number of people needed to pull it off with a small enough amount of gold each is just as impossible if not more so. Not to mention the fact that the amount of profit for the effort wouldn’t be worth the effort. If anyone feels the numbers are off and can provide more accurate numbers to the available amount of gems in the system any given day and the average amount purchased each day that would be great to know for sure.