Guild Wars 2

in view of the lost shores update, and of the promised one-time only gem store items, i decided to make an experiment.

based on the assumption that converting X gold into Y gems is equivalent to converting Y gems into X gold, i spent 10g on gems a few days back. that got me little more than 1100 gems.

now, out of curiosity (and interest in seeing the price fluctuation), i went to the gem->gold conversion screen, and to my surprise, those same 1100 gems i had just bought only accounted for little more than 7g. the prices couldn’t have plummeted so fast, a suspicion i confirmed by placing another 10g on the gold-> gem converter to see what was the estimated outcome (still 1100 gems).

is this intentional? has it always been like this? is it to discourage “pay to win” ideas and devalue gems, or to discourage market investments/gambles like the one i did?

There is a 30% (i think) difference to discourage people from buying gems only to resell them later for profit.

fair enough, though i think it’s a shame, if you look at gems the same way as you look at, say, ectos, playing the market with them would prove rather interesting.

oh well, prices are raising, i might be able to break even, maybe even profit if i don’t buy anything during the event.

Buy prices are always different from sell prices – just look at any foreign exchange retailer.

The only difference here is that ANet is a monopoly, so they can set the difference to whatever they want. (in real life, foreign exchange retailers make their profit from these differences, so they compete against each other to attract customers etc.)

But the basic concept is just a simulation of real life.

On the other hand once these items comes out tomorrow it is likely that the price for buying and selling gems will go higher. you might get lucky and lose little no nothing if people really want the new gem items.

Black Wolf.7348:

On the other hand once these items comes out tomorrow it is likely that the price for buying and selling gems will go higher. you might get lucky and lose little no nothing if people really want the new gem items.

yeah. it was just an experiment after all. i was just curious if it was working as intended, because i could swear the exchange rates were interchangeable in the past.

BrunoBRS.5178:

yeah. it was just an experiment after all. i was just curious if it was working as intended, because i could swear the exchange rates were interchangeable in the past.

The margin may have been closer in real terms, but as a percentage it’s always been about 30%. (e.g. taking the earliest data point from http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem the buy rate was 28s 9c for 100 gems, and the sell rate was 20s 33c for 100 gems, so the difference was less than 8 silver per 100 gems compared to the current difference of about 27 silver per 100 gems).