Guild Wars 2

Field Marshal.7946:

when you buy gems, and it is converted to gold in game, where does the gold come from?

The gold is created out of thin air whenever someone pushes ‘buy gold’. Kinda like the gold that NPCs drop.

Just like the gems are created out of thin air whenever someone pushes ‘buy gems’.

What I am wondering is if the gem exchange, as a whole, creates gold and if so, how much.

Some people buy gems with gold, so gold get’s ‘destroyed’ = OUT.
Other people buy gold with gems, so gold gets created = IN.

I wonder if OUT > IN (my guess would be that it is).

And by how much (my guess would be by alot).

And, ofcourse, just how much million of gold is involved in each way.

John Smith.4610:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Who-sets-Gem-prices/page/6#post705345

It’s the same debate as always.

Anet decided on the 15% tax.
Anet decided that it is not a bidding market between players.
Anet decides on how the gem/gold ratio is calculated each time (I suspect only taking the last x orders or of the last x days into account).
Anet decides what you can do with gems.
Anet decides how much gold drops.

And still, Anet says they don’t decide the price of gems. It’s an odd point to defend.

John Smith.4610:

I thought of this before release, it won’t work; although I highly encourage you to give it a shot

good to know I don’t know the exact implementation, but now I know it doesn’t need to be tested

To anyone not sure how the gem/gold conversion works, this is how I understand it:
there is an exchange rate for how much gold buys 100 gems (let’s say 1 gold = 100 gems). selling gems to get gold is a reduced amount of this rate (maybe 100 gems = 0.8 gold)
If you buy gems with gold, that means the demand for gems has gone up, and so the exchange rate will also go up, so that further gem purchases will cost more (1.1 gold = 100 gems)
If you sell gems to get gold, that means the demand for gems has gone down, and so the exchange rate will also go down, so further gem sales will give you less (100 gems = 0.7 gold)
the amount the price changes is not this drastic, I just used it to illustrate the principle.

Anet /could/ directly control this, but they don’t need to. it’s inherently set at the optimal rate so that there is equal buying and selling. If it were unequal, like if it suddenly jumped to 2g for 100 gems, then everyone would be more inclined to sell their gems, reducing the exchange rate until it was back at 1g = 100 gems.
Also note worthy: Anet makes money whenever anyone sells /or/ buys gems. if someone sells gems, it’s likely it’s from paying money for them, and the exchange rate goes down, so it’s cheaper to then buy gems. If someone buys gems, it will increase the exchange rate, making it more enticing for someone to then pay money to buy gems and sell them for gold.
Because of this, Anet makes the most money when there is high amounts of buying and selling (causing the price to flucuate between high and low). If it was a constantly high rate, it would just be ‘the rate’, and thus no more enticing than a constantly low rate.

Mystic.5934:

One thing I have wondered:
if someone sells 10,000 gems for gold, then someone else buys 10,000 gems with gold, will the gem->gold price be the same after as before? (is it the same increase as decrease?)

No one knows. They don’t say how their mechanics work.

It depends on what system they use.

They can’t really use a price system based on pure supply, because the supply of gold and gems is infinite (Anet is the seller and they just create gems or gold whenever a player asks).

They can use a partial supply, for example, only count as supply the gems that players have. But the amount of gems that the player actually has, goes up over time.

They can also base their system on the amount of gems that players supplied in the last -say- 10 days and call that ‘supply’.

Bottom line: no one knows.

Mystic.5934:

sell 100,000 gems and get 1,500g, then price of gems goes down to 100 gems for 1g, then you buy 100,000 gems for 1,150g

First of all, you loose 30%, not 15%. It doesn’t show anywhere, but -believe it or not- you pay a 15% fee when you sell gems AND you pay a 15% fee when you sell gold.

Try it. Buy 10 gems. Then sell 10 gems. You just lost around 30% (assuming that the price inbetween those two moments hasn’t changed all that much, ofcourse).

.

Anet doesn’t say how the system works. But… selling gems is one of only two sources of income that Anet has. Despire their official ‘players decide on the gem price’ stance, you can be pretty sure that Anet constructed this whole system with one thing and one thing only in mind: make money.

I can’t blame them for that, I would do the exact same thing.

There is no way that Anet will allow you to get that 30% back in a single transaction. Or in a series of transactions for that matter: there are plenty of systems you can think of, where the price would change more when you sell 4 blocks of 25k gems than when you sell one block of 100k.

.

Although, the marketeer in me, could think of an exception: when Anet makes a distinction between gems that are bought with dollars and gems that are bought with gold.
A marketeer could argue that people that buy gems with dollars should be treated differently than people that buy gems with gold, because people that buy gems with dollars give Anet money.
One could think of a system where some players are ‘flagged’ as dollar-spending-people and are treated differently, in gem/gold exchange for example.

But I have no indication that Anet is doing this, so I doubt it.

The “want” factor is always lurking about. The more people are enticed to buy items with gems, the higher the exchange rate will be. If the market has less need for gems then the price will fall untill players are enticed (i.e. want) to convert gold to gems again.

form 64 gems for 1g to 51 : )
that is rise of the price of gems not drop XD
after the promotion is over the gems will get 64 for 1 g agen

As others have said, it’s more of a 30% difference. It is indeed possible to profit if the market were to flunctuate hard enough – like back in the new years sales caused the value to shoot up about 35%. But that is the ONLY time I ever seen a fluctuation high enough to cause a profit margin. I doubt any one person can self create a fluctuation on that level, especially considering them driving any one price up would cause others to hop on it and drive it back down.

Short answer: Theoritically possible, but the market is not volatile enough to have the margins needed to make it a safe bet.