Guild Wars 2

A while ago I naively bought some gems with gold thinking I could hold on to the gems until the price went up and sell them back at a profit. Then I noticed that the trading post takes a HUGE cut when converting, something like 30% – 40%. This means you’re always losing value when trading one for another, unless the price goes up by over 40%. Is the exchange rate automatically calculated somehow by the amount of trade going on, or does Arenanet just manually set it to what they want? I know you guys have an economist on board, but my armchair economic analysis is that if you maintain a 40% loss on conversions, the volume of trade will go down since no one wants to lose that much, and if it’s automatically calculated then that will only increase the loss if it’s being factored automatically, like a downward spiral.

I think it would be better to allow gold <-> gem conversion to be set by players without a huge 40% cut; something like the normal 10% cut of the trading post might be fine. As an example, Eve allows their RMT currency’s value to be set by player trading and does not take a cut. This benefits Eve in a few ways:

1) It cuts down the amount of gold sellers since their profit margins would be too small to compete with the built in one. Right now, GW2 has a lot of gold sellers because they can make a profit by selling in between that 40% cut that Arena.net takes on RMT to gold purchases. (In other words, buying gems from Arena.net and selling them for gold costs more real world money than buying gold from a gold seller; though on the flip-side, buying gems from Arena.net is cheaper than buying gold from a gold seller and trading it for gems). If the conversion rate wasn’t so terrible, then it would be just as cheap to buy gems from Arena.net and turn it into gold than it would be to buy from a gold seller, and then the gold sellers go out of business. This is generally the number one reason that game companies take over the conversion of RMT for gold; so I feel like Arena.net is shooting itself in the foot by leaving such a wide margin for gold sellers to profit in.

2) Easier conversion would mean more volume of sales, which probably means more money in Arena.net’s pockets. A lot of the ISK trading in Eve is due to market speculators… if there were a chance of “playing the market” by trading gold for gems or vice versa, then more people would trade, and more gems would need to enter the system to supply the gold to gem purchases, which means more people buying gems with cash to trade for gold. This basically gives Arena.net all the current customers of the gold farmers, and probably adds a bunch of new people who might be interested in RMT for gold but avoid gold farmers because it’s a bannable offense. This seems to work really well for CCP in Eve.

Anyway, TLDR: Huge fees on currency conversion are bad for the economy.

Thanks for posting this, I feel its something Anet really need to look into as an issue. The game seems over run at the moment with gold sellers, with account hackers targeting the game, and the conversion rate for gems to gold seems very poor (I hadn’t realised about that 40% cut) making the legitimate trade more attractive to players would be the right way to go.

I’m not really sure if that is intended?

IIRC the only thing you can buy vs real money in Eve is the pilot license, aka monthly sub. So if you have enough in-game currency you are basically playing free.

I don’t really think that is the same deal here. Three scenarios:
People can acquire gems only through playing (converting gold).
Buy gems for upgrades/fluff directly for cash.
Buy gems to convert to gold (don’t want to farm things etc).

What would the benefit for A-net be to have people speculate with gems?

By them controlling the gem price they keep the inflation in check (or at least don’t have it spilling over to “real” cash), so from my point of view the only controlling feature should be the gold in circulation?