Guild Wars 2

Ok in the first weeks of the game One can buy 387 gem for 1 gold. And it started to drop day by day
Now One can buy 256 gem for 1gold which is huge difference and i do not want to buy almost half amount. So there will be any intervention to the prices?

There’s no reason for intervention (and I’d hope they never do it).
The market is entirely self sustaining, and run by the playerbase. The price will vary based on what people are willing to pay, and has to balance out somewhere.

If the price goes up, so too will the amount of gold players can get for gems, which will entice some players to go buy gems to feed into the market (to earn gold for themselves).
This feeding will increase the supply of gems on the market, moving the prices down again.
This will go back and forward.

The prices the gems were initially was never going to be the balance point however. Noone was level 80 yet, people hadn’t worked out how to make gold yet. Noone HAD gold yet. No one having gold, combined with some initial gem purchases new players almost certainly did (I would think a reasonable number of people bought the game, then like, threw $20 at the store for some initial gems) will have left surplus gems on the market, and little gold to pay for them.

Higher level players have more gold now. I don’t imagine they will ever drop down to ~400 gems for 1 gold again (maybe around expansions? hard to say)

Well the only “intervention” I can see is a gem “sale” where Anet would offer discounts on Gem purchases for real money for a limited time. That would increase the amount of Gems on the market and thus reduce the price of them for a bit.

Take in account that all gems that were purchased during the beta events were moved over to the retail version, thus resulting in an ecomony where there was an insane amount of gems and little or no gold in the market. You can be 100% certain the price of gems will never fall to the level it was close to launch. I would expect the price of gems to at least double within the next few months.

This is a big issue that’s transcended by an even larger issue which is driving (for better or worse) the economy, so much so that it’s not a free market as they’re are trying to imply – which should be obvious since nothing is material anyways.

Without getting too specific on theory(which we’re full of already..), let’s look at some numbers and see why this all falls down.

We’re going to use United Kingdom sterling/British pound as our currency as most ‘exchange’ and exchange rate conversations circumvent it, with Euro being a close second.

After speaking with numerous English, we found that you can currently purchase 10 gold for roughly 10 GBP (it’s actually 11.3 from what I can see, we’re going to round down to keep it simple. The fact it’s 1:1 ratio is irrelevant).

We’re also going to use the in-game Gold to Gem conversion price of 30s per 100gems(this was where it was stable for several days before it got inflated in the past two).

At this rate, you could get 3000 gems for that 10 gold.

Arena net offers 800 gems for 8.50 GBP. If we round this up for simplicity let’s say you can get 1000 gems for 10 GBP.

Which would you prefer, 3000 gems or 1000?

The rise in the recent gem price is simply because the obvious : more gold is circulating and thus more people can buy gems.
However like most things in a vacuumed and false economy(as we have here with virtual ‘products’), the concept that demand drives price isn’t always true – especially when there assumption is that more gem sales should therefore equal higher gem cost.

The recent spike in gem cost is artificial. It’s far too convenient that now gold selling prices have settled – and Arena net is aware – that the spikes have began appearing.

I wouldn’t put it past them for not inflating it themselves.

And why would they do this?
Because the higher the gem value, the less ‘worth’ the gold has, which nullifies whatever advantage their gold seller competition has.

Remember Arena net’s free to play style in-game store is a means to make money (or money they do not obtain from subscriptions). Currently gold sellers are stomping them. They are losing money left and right.

As per my example above, the simple solution is to better the price per gems – yet they don’t want to do that.

The average sales price of the game itself in England was 40 – 45 GBP. Divide that by five and you have roughly eight. We start with five characters in the game. Five times eight is…forty.
If you consider that 800 gems equals one character slot …see the pattern?
It’s not a secret..it’s obvious and it’s fine.

However now combine that with the fact that 800 gems in the store costs..yes you guessed it 8.50 GBP.

Rather than compete with the gold sellers by lowering the in-game store cost of gems, they want to to see the gem price rise and the gold value drop. Then they don’t have to lift a finger to compete.

Strategic? maybe. Savy? sure. Shady? definitely.

For companies who try to act like they care about avoiding gold selling, they don’t start out so well by making games that have items and incentives in them to be taken advantage of. Some games have been smart and gotten around it. But cash cows like Guild Wars couldn’t resist the temptation.

As long as the gem price spikes continue, you can bet Arena net is artificially inflating it on purpose.

And the argument that gems are finite is a joke just as much as gold being finite is.
These are virtual items in a virtual world that can change at any moment they please.
If every player in the game spent one hundred gold on gems, then the system should pump out ever last gem without fail.

And thus the whole thing is a moot point.

This is not a free market, there is no real supply and demand and the dealers are players who are abusing a bad percentile rate that the owners refuse to adjust so they can win the long game.

For a virtual world, this aspect of it smacks a bit too much like the the bad side of real life government and fiscal travesties.

MMO economies are usually anything but – they’re often subject to so many unscrutinized conditions that there’s no trust and no proof. Often an afterthought, Arena net should have realized that they weren’t making another EVE, they were making yet another fantasy progression grind adventure MMO and they should stick to that reality.

Either adjust the gem prices to compete with gold sellers for gold on the gem rate, or drop the entire gem/gold buying in-game.

If Arena net let’s this go unchecked indefinitely, gem prices will soar, gold value will decrease, gold sellers will be thinned out and for a time, the general populace will be happy. Yet like any artificial market, it will crash and frankly that’s even worse.

Maybe we’ll then get a bail out from the president of Arena net and limp along like the American economy for a while.