Guild Wars 2

Since I bought the game a week after launched, I’ve watched the amount of gems I can buy for 1g steadily drop from around 400 to almost half that.

The earlier price I would have considered steep but reasonable, as the price is now I would not consider it feasible to buy gems with gold. The concern I have is that it looks like the pricing of the gems players want to sell cannot be manually set, you just punch in how much you want to give and the game tells you how much you’re going to get whether you’re buying or selling gems, so how are the prices determined? Are anet just inflating the value of gems over time purposefully to try and force people to buy them with real money, as well as inciting people who want more gold to get it by buying gems with cash and selling them in game?

I’m actually in two minds about buying a bunch of gems right now because the prices show no signs of going back up, but if it does I’ll have wasted a lot of money. Before someone comments on it, don’t kid yourself, a couple gold coins IS a lot of money.

Well truthfully…a couple of gold coins will probably only get your around $10 of gems, more or less. But that isn’t really the point here.

The game is still relatively new, the economy hasn’t stabilized just yet. It may go back up again…eventually (I’ve been waiting on that too). I think the price is basically related to supply and demand. The more people who demand gems for gold, the more the value of gems goes up, the more people get gold for gems, the more the value of gems drops. If its anything related to the system of Guild Wars, its probably just based on how many people are trading gold for gems compared to trading gems for gold. Its just a matter of which is more prominent that determines the value.

Edit: There is also the possibility that gold traders are inflating the value of gems, oddly enough. People can buy gold, and then trade it for more gems than they could simply buy through the store for the same amount of cash. Such a large amount of gold turning into gems could easily make gems worth more.

Indeed, its only been 3 weeks since release, as more people pick up and play and start buying gems with money/gold and selling gems we could see a fair balance, I just hope that people don’t have set in stone the idea that 1g=$5 or something, things are gonna fluctuate, you’ll just have to wait till conversion rates are at prices that are acceptable, even if you don’t like them.

I’m not sure how the exchange rate is determined since players aren’t setting the prices as such but agreeing to them.

If no one buys gems for in-game gold, does the price start trending upwards automatically?

If people are buying up gems for in-game gold all the time does that force the price downwards?

I’m guessing the layer of abstraction was introduced as an attempt to prevent market manipulation but I’m still curious as to the mechanics of it.

Is ArenaNet setting prices manually? I’m guessing that’s a no but how do we know? And, does it matter?

The other way around actually.
If a lot of people buy it it gets more expensive, if no one buys it and a lot of people sell it it gets cheaper.

At one point it was 1g for 400g now it’s 1g for 300, and the curve is constantly rising. At this rate in a week it will be 1g for 200g.. is it related to the number of lev 80’s? The more lev 80’s the more gold there is in the system, the less value gold has, the more expensive the gems get? Is that it? Because then we can expect a huge rise in gem price as more and more people hit 80 and start getting rich by farming Orr etc. It’s like inflation, 80’s producing gold just like banks can print money?

What happened was a lot of people spent a ton of real money to get gems and then simply traded them off for in game gold. Mostly to buy high end items and commander books and what not. I saw as high as 410 per 1G, I stocked up then, that was on 9-8-12. Since then it has been a steady decrease.

It is now in a ‘perfect’ storm situation. The initial people willing to spend boatloads (rumors are some people spent upwards of a thousand dollars) of real money to get gems to trade are not spending anymore money. You have gold sellers selling in game gold for cheaper than what it would cost to trade gems, which compounds the aforementioned issues. Then you have people simply having more in game gold. The initial “OMG I need gold and can’t make it” fears are over and people have figured out how to make money so they dont need to ‘buy’ it. Finally, there just arent many things worth it in the gem store. Beyond an extra character slot, maybe a bank slot or two and on the outside an upgrade, the stuff in the store is overprice fluff. So its demand isnt really that big.

Gold can buy stuff off the TP, gain influence with a guild, buy cosmetic armors and weapons, and just about everything. Gems really aren’t ‘worth’ that much now that the economy has more in game gold in it. I figured prices would be around 300-320 gems per gold, but they might plummet to even less than that. That is the tricky thing about having in game currency traded for ‘real world’ money and/or products. Especially when the exchange rate is so out of whack gold sellers can easily beat prices without even trying.