Guild Wars 2

I just came here to post this. I’ve spent about 500 dollars with this game buying gems and I was glad to support it. Now since this change I will NOT spend any more dollars with the game.

Where is the conversion graph? Have you removed it so you could artificially alter the convertion rates?

Why I can’t buy gold by entering the amount of gems I want to spend (event at the “custom exchange” panel)? Since you went the lengths of changing the whole panel and then re-adding a custom exchange, why not restore the previous behaviour?

This is unfair and this why I am stopping. From today’s convertion:
1 gold = 9 gems
10 gold = 77 gems (what!?? 9*10 = 77?)
100 gold = 762 gems (so 9*100 = 762?)

This is wrong, very wrong. So my support to GW2 was good while it lasted.

Even when the conversion graph was visible, the rates for gems > gold and gold > gems were not identical. You’re losing 15% each way. It’s to keep people from manipulating the exchange like a stock market.

Your other complaints are valid, but the conversion rate itself has been like that for as long as the currency exchange has existed. If you never noticed it before, well.. consider yourself lucky that this change has finally brought it to your attention?

For every gem you buy, you will have to pay more for the next one because there are less gems avaibable. It has been like this from the beginning. That you only get that now, is a + point for the new system.

GreenAlien.5623:

For every gem you buy, you will have to pay more for the next one because there are less gems avaibable.

Huh?

They are running out of gems? …I don’t think so, Tim.

The graph was nice. Bring back the graph.

The exchange rate depends on people selling gems, so that others can buy them. It is possible that anet supplies some artifically if there is more demand than supply, but the prices dont change for fun.

GreenAlien.5623:

The exchange rate depends on people selling gems, so that others can buy them. It is possible that anet supplies some artifically if there is more demand than supply, but the prices dont change for fun.

Are you taking into consideration that people buy gems with real money in order to trade for gold as well ?

No, and why do you? If you buy a 100 gems instantly via the exchange for gold, the system doesnt care about people who exchange gems for gold after you. It would only matter if you buy em over a time period. I’m still talking about the starting post, where Rash complains about the price difference between buying gems for one gold, and buying gems for 100 gold.

GreenAlien.5623:

No, and why do you? If you buy a 100 gems instantly, the system doesnt care about people who exchange gems for gold after you. It would only matter if you buy em over a time period. I’m still talking about the starting post., where Rash complains about the price difference between buying gems for one gold, and buying gems for a 100 gold.

Because it seemed you were implying that the supply of gems was static (unless Anet artificially added more).

My trading gold for gems does not necessarily mean that the next time the cost will be higher because there are now fewer gems. It is entirely possible that if I trade gold for gems there will be more gems on the market after that transaction than before.

I simplified for ease of understanding. Seems like that backfired..

The exchange was never linear, small purchases have always been at a worse rate than buying larger amounts.

1 g = 5 gems
2 g = 11 gems
5 g = 29 gems
10 g = 59 gems
20 g = 119 gems
50 g = 297 gems

RE: Purchasing GEMS using “in-game” currency (i.e. GOLD)

To Whom It May Concern:

I have played GW2 for quite awhile and I have just amassed enough GOLD to purchase GEMS and possibly buy a PORTAL STONE which I believe is selling for 900 GEMS.

Now I only have 127 GOLD and it seems the least amount of GOLD that you can use to buy GEMS is 50 GOLD I believe for 400 GEMS.

So here’s my dileema:

After spending 100 of the 127 GOLD coins (aquiring 800 GEMS) it seems that I now have to amass another 23 GOLD to be able to buy more GEMS. Yet I don’t need 400 more GEMS I only need 100. Acquiring another 23 GOLD could take me weeks if not months!

My question is: Why isn’t there a “custom amount” of GEMS buying option for “in-game currency” like there is for “real world” currency?

From what I read/researched: in the past there was such an option and even though it was done away with after/during the September upgrade Anet was going to re-instate it since it was very useful for situations like mine.

I don’t want to gripe or quibble over this especially if this is a way for Anet to make money but unfortunately I’m on Disability and I have a limited amount resources or I’d be buying GEMS like there’s no tomorrow to support you guyz!

Anyway, thanks for your time and a quick reply would be appreciated cause like I said —I’ve been playing GW forever and it’s taken me a long time to aquire this much GOLD.

Thanks again

> Oh, and a quick fyi:

I’m a “game-aholic” and I LOVE playing video games but GUILD WARS is so awesome it’s the only game I play any chance I get so —KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!

You can order an exact amount of Gems. Option is on the bottom right of the Exchange menu which brings up a screen where you can enter the amount of Gems you want to buy. It’s been available just before the end of the Halloween event.

For the graph .. as long as we don’t get it back ingame .. just look here :
https://www.gw2tp.com/gems

Behellagh.1468:

You can order an exact amount of Gems. Option is on the bottom right of the Exchange menu which brings up a screen where you can enter the amount of Gems you want to buy. It’s been available just before the end of the Halloween event.

Thanks BEHELLAGH for that reply but as I stated in my question "the only option to buy an exact amount of Gems is for “real currency” NOT “in game” (i.e. GOLD)"

GeusNeptis.8162:

Behellagh.1468:

You can order an exact amount of Gems. Option is on the bottom right of the Exchange menu which brings up a screen where you can enter the amount of Gems you want to buy. It’s been available just before the end of the Halloween event.

Thanks BEHELLAGH for that reply but as I stated in my question "the only option to buy an exact amount of Gems is for “real currency” NOT “in game” (i.e. GOLD)"

This is actually the opposite of the truth. You can specify how many gems you’d like to buy for gold, not for cash. Behellagh has it right.

And I was replying to this quote. I should have included that in hindsight.

After spending 100 of the 127 GOLD coins (aquiring 800 GEMS) it seems that I now have to amass another 23 GOLD to be able to buy more GEMS. Yet I don’t need 400 more GEMS I only need 100. Acquiring another 23 GOLD could take me weeks if not months!

To me reading this it sounds like he was exchanging gold for gems.

Behellagh.1468:

And I was replying to this quote. I should have included that in hindsight.

After spending 100 of the 127 GOLD coins (aquiring 800 GEMS) it seems that I now have to amass another 23 GOLD to be able to buy more GEMS. Yet I don’t need 400 more GEMS I only need 100. Acquiring another 23 GOLD could take me weeks if not months!

To me reading this it sounds like he was exchanging gold for gems.

The response he left clarifies that he is talking about buying gems with gold and is suggesting that the only way to specify how many gems you want is by using cash, which is the opposite of how it works. It actually does work as you described.

Guhracie.3419:

Behellagh.1468:

And I was replying to this quote. I should have included that in hindsight.

After spending 100 of the 127 GOLD coins (aquiring 800 GEMS) it seems that I now have to amass another 23 GOLD to be able to buy more GEMS. Yet I don’t need 400 more GEMS I only need 100. Acquiring another 23 GOLD could take me weeks if not months!

To me reading this it sounds like he was exchanging gold for gems.

The response he left clarifies that he is talking about buying gems with gold and is suggesting that the only way to specify how many gems you want is by using cash, which is the opposite of how it works. It actually does work as you described.

Okay my apologies.

After hearing your responses I began toying with the GOLD to GEM interface via the EXCHANGE RATE more.

The procedure is not very clear but is “EXTREMELY” easy.

First —press “O” then click on “CURRENCY EXCHANGE” then click on “CUSTOM EXCHANGE” then the trick is to click inside the Exchange Rate box which is set for "400 GEMS for “X” amount of GOLD" (as I guess “400 GEMS” is the DEFAULT) and erase the “400” and enter what ever number/quantity of GEMS that you need.

DO NOT DO WHAT I KEPT DOING and that is: CLICKING on the radio button icons for: “BUY MORE GEMS” or even the “BUY” button as that will pull up the “GET MORE GEMS” screen requiring you to purchase “GEMS” for “real currency”.

I hope this stupid question and easy solution will help another poor soul whose brain has obviously gone to mush due to trying to attain WAY to many Jumping Puzzles in one night.

Thanks again for all your quick and timely responses to my question -especially you Behellagh.1468 and Guhracie.3419 :-)

If the entry fields were highlighted differently or had 0 in them so it’s obvious which field you erase and enter what you want.

And I also glitch on occasion and press the “Get More Gems” button when I want to click “Buy”.

It’s somewhat inelegant and non-obvious but it was a “quick” fix.

It hasn’t been always like this. Let me give you a bit more background on why I am going to stop supporting the game with real money.

Before, we used to buy gold by setting the amount of gems we would like to trade and the game would give us the coins in gold, silver, copper. That is more fair because coins in the game are “float” numbers, like dollars in real life, while gems are integer. That essentially means you can’t trade 80.6 gems, it’s either 80 or 81. But that’s not the same for gold.

Using that conversion I mentioned on the first post, 1 gem = 13s12c

So if I had 10 dollars to spare, I would buy 80 gems and I could convert them all to gold if I wanted to. The game would give me 10g49s60c.
Now I need to buy a “rounded” number of gold. So 10 gold costs me 77 gems, but 11 gold costs me 84 gems, that’s more than I have.

Now I only have the option to spend 77 gems out of the 80 I bought, and I am left with 3 I can’t do anything with. UNLESS... I buy more gems with dollars or gold. My next 10 dollars purchase would put me at 83 gems which, considering the market fluctuation, could help me buy 11 gold.

So I feel like I am being robbed by ANet. I can’t spend all the gems I bought unless I spend more money on the game. I am not doing a formal accusation, of course, but ANet must have some economists in there working for them and balancing the TP. I can’t help but think that someone in ANet knew about this and approved it for evil purposes. So we would unconsciously spend more money on the game this way.

This is wrong, plainly wrong. I understand real money conversion and fees, Xiahou Mao. I work with this. What ANet is doing is just unfair. Rounding the gems on conversion is absolutely unfair. So I am done with supporting the game, unfortunately.

First $10 is 800 gems and 800 gems at the moment is roughly 86.37 gold. Since we can’t sell all 800 gems because we can only ask for even gold amounts, we can only exchange 797 gems. Leaving us with 3 gems. Now it also truncates to gold so we are also short changed by a bit over 5 silver.

Now I have seen players asking to be able to exchange for an exact amount of gems or gold, unlike the old method of inputting what we were willing to spend but the fact they threw one out for the other ticks me off to no end. There was plenty of space if they didn’t list “plans” to include both ways of converting, asking for specific output or inputting the amount willing to spend.

This isn’t rocket surgery. Yet ANet has this modality of A or B and not both. We’ve seen this in NPE, traits, commander badges and the exchange. Maybe they take a simple request, turn it into something complex and then simplify that and what we get is nothing like what was asked for.

Rash.6514:

It hasn’t been always like this. Let me give you a bit more background on why I am going to stop supporting the game with real money.

Before, we used to buy gold by setting the amount of gems we would like to trade and the game would give us the coins in gold, silver, copper. That is more fair because coins in the game are “float” numbers, like dollars in real life, while gems are integer. That essentially means you can’t trade 80.6 gems, it’s either 80 or 81. But that’s not the same for gold.

Using that conversion I mentioned on the first post, 1 gem = 13s12c

So if I had 10 dollars to spare, I would buy 80 gems and I could convert them all to gold if I wanted to. The game would give me 10g49s60c.
Now I need to buy a “rounded” number of gold. So 10 gold costs me 77 gems, but 11 gold costs me 84 gems, that’s more than I have.

Now I only have the option to spend 77 gems out of the 80 I bought, and I am left with 3 I can’t do anything with. UNLESS... I buy more gems with dollars or gold. My next 10 dollars purchase would put me at 83 gems which, considering the market fluctuation, could help me buy 11 gold.

So I feel like I am being robbed by ANet. I can’t spend all the gems I bought unless I spend more money on the game. I am not doing a formal accusation, of course, but ANet must have some economists in there working for them and balancing the TP. I can’t help but think that someone in ANet knew about this and approved it for evil purposes. So we would unconsciously spend more money on the game this way.

This is wrong, plainly wrong. I understand real money conversion and fees, Xiahou Mao. I work with this. What ANet is doing is just unfair. Rounding the gems on conversion is absolutely unfair. So I am done with supporting the game, unfortunately.

This, so many times. After such a huge urge to “fix” the conversion system, the one that exists now is an insult to those who would support the game with real money. It devalues the gems that I purchased, when I would normally be just fine putting the “remainder” gems from a 700/800 purchase back into gem market, keeping prices lower for those who convert gold into gems.

I’m less inclined to do that, now.

GreenAlien.5623:

For every gem you buy, you will have to pay more for the next one because there are less gems avaibable. It has been like this from the beginning. That you only get that now, is a + point for the new system.

while technically true, the actual amount it increases by on a scale you would ever observe is close to 0.
source: I once spent 200g to buy ~3000 gems, 10 times (that was the most you convert at a time). And the last purchase actually gave more gems than the first purchase. What that means is that during those ~10 seconds, more than 30,000 gems were converted into gold to offset my purchase. The supply of gems is huge. The number of players actively trading gems for gold is huge. You selling 9 gems is not going to change the gem price by more than a small fraction of a copper.

I agree the exchange needs to be more accurate. It used to be like that. It used to be, if you wanted to spend 1g to buy 9 gems, it would only charge you 93s42c and give you 9 gems. I really wish that was the case again. The reason for 10g->77gems and 100g->762 gems is rounding errors. Also I think they do rip you off when you are dealing with <20 gems, because rounding would not explain 7.62 -> 9.

unfortunately, I think not enough people are outraged over this for them to change their scamming ways (you may notice all of these are rounding against you; I’m sure that is very intentional). And as long as the amount of business they are losing by us few being annoyed by it is less than they are gaining by everyone else putting up with it… you get the idea.
It’s like buying gas. every gas station charges “$x.xx 9/10”. that 9/10 is 0.9 cents, that they round up to the nearest cent when you go and pay. a scroogey business model that I’m sure some people are upset about, but the 0.9 extra cents they get on the hundreds of millions of gallons they sell adds up to millions of dollars.
edit: 134.51 billion gallons in 2013 just in the US x 0.9 cents = an extra $1.21 billion. $50 less a month from you boycotting them is unfortunately not going to change their minds.

Mystic.5934:

unfortunately, I think not enough people are outraged over this for them to change their scamming ways (you may notice all of these are rounding against you; I’m sure that is very intentional).

Yes, you are right, that is the issue. They know most of their players wouldn’t bother doing the math and realize they are being “scammed”. Actually, this is what happens everywhere with scam. They count on the fact that people wouldn’t bother checking the math.

You are also right that the 1g→9gems and 100g→762gems are rounding errors. But what the hell is that 9 rounding from? Who is doing the math behind the scenes? Certainly not C++ or your CPU. I mean, come on, if ANet’s system knows the “real conversion” value between gems and gold and put that on a real math library it would never round to that. I remember I had also checked 1000g which was something like 7624. So let’s for a moment consider this number.

Python: round(7624/1000) = 8
C: 8
C++: 8
OS X calculator: 8

I would even accept rounding 7.1 to 8. But 9? So that is what kittened me off the most. They ARE hiding it behind the scenes. And this new “all integer” system just helps them get something with every transaction.

By the way, thank you the moderator who changed the topic’s name. I tried to, but I couldn’t.
Second, the only reason I am still posting here is because I CARE. I could just turn by back and take my money some place else. But I really enjoyed this game.

some people never heard of the word “rounding error/calculation”.

Rash.6514:

Mystic.5934:

unfortunately, I think not enough people are outraged over this for them to change their scamming ways (you may notice all of these are rounding against you; I’m sure that is very intentional).

Yes, you are right, that is the issue. They know most of their players wouldn’t bother doing the math and realize they are being “scammed”. Actually, this is what happens everywhere with scam. They count on the fact that people wouldn’t bother checking the math.

You are also right that the 1g->9gems and 100g->762gems are rounding errors. But what the hell is that 9 rounding from? Who is doing the math behind the scenes? Certainly not C++ or your CPU. I mean, come on, if ANet’s system knows the “real conversion” value between gems and gold and put that on a real math library it would never round to that. I remember I had also checked 1000g which was something like 7624. So let’s for a moment consider this number.

Python: round(7624/1000) = 8
C: 8
C++: 8
OS X calculator: 8

I would even accept rounding 7.1 to 8. But 9? So that is what kittened me off the most. They ARE hiding it behind the scenes. And this new “all integer” system just helps them get something with every transaction.

By the way, thank you the moderator who changed the topic’s name. I tried to, but I couldn’t.
Second, the only reason I am still posting here is because I CARE. I could just turn by back and take my money some place else. But I really enjoyed this game.

For the Nth time, the exchange has always been non-linear when buying or selling low quantity of gems. I know because I routinely by 20-30 gems a day for the past 18 months and it’s not a rounding or truncation issue but looks more like a sliding fee if we are buying or selling less than 100 gems at a time.

Rash.6514:

But what the hell is that 9 rounding from?

I suspect the code looks more like this:
$gem_cost_to_buy_gold = ceil( $exchange_rate_per_gem * $amount_of_gold_to_buy + 1 / $amount_of_gold_to_buy)

if: $exchange_rate_per_gem = 7.62 and $amount_of_gold_to_buy = 1, then $gem_cost_to_buy_gold = 8.62 -> 9 gems to buy 1 gold
if: $exchange_rate_per_gem = 7.62 and $amount_of_gold_to_buy = 10, then $gem_cost_to_buy_gold = 76.3 -> 77 gems to buy 10 gold
if: $exchange_rate_per_gem = 7.62 and $amount_of_gold_to_buy = 100, then $gem_cost_to_buy_gold = 762.01 -> 763 gems to buy 100 gold

I was really tempted to put a “+ rand(0,$amount_of_gold_to_buy%3)” in there, but decided to be serious instead of a jab at what we observe.

azizul.8469:

some people never heard of the word “rounding error/calculation”.

Some people never studied math.

Behellagh.1468:

For the Nth time, the exchange has always been non-linear when buying or selling low quantity of gems. I know because I routinely by 20-30 gems a day for the past 18 months and it’s not a rounding or truncation issue but looks more like a sliding fee if we are buying or selling less than 100 gems at a time.

It is not about being linear. It is about being fair. I sincerely don’t understand the defense here. It’s not like I am saying ANet is the worst developer ever. The game is awesome (which is why I am here). I am just saying this isn’t fair. Just do the math.

It’s not defending, it’s stating this isn’t new behavior. It’s just with the denomination list on the default exchange screen it’s now obvious where before you had to experiment entering different denominations, especially small ones, to notice.