Guild Wars 2

One of the things I really thought was going to be interesting about gw2 was the ability to play in the market and potentially make investment to benefit yourself if you payed attention to market trends. To an extent you can do this with items you sell in the tp something comes along drastically increasing the demand for an item due to a new recipe or a nerf to the drop rate of something. The thing I don’t get is why we can’t play the gold to gem conversion in the same way. Initial conversation about the game and even several guides even states that we would be able to play the market on conversion and buy low/sell high ect. But if we look at gold to gems right now you can see thakittens about 3g50s to buy 100 gems, yet to sell back the same 100 gems only gets you about 2g60s . Now gems haven’t been available for that price in well over 4 months… I know there is some top secret supply and demand formula that they use but to me this does not make sense that there is such a large disparity between the two. It took a very interesting aspect of the game and completely negated it.

kailin.4905:

One of the things I really thought was going to be interesting about gw2 was the ability to play in the market and potentially make investment to benefit yourself if you payed attention to market trends. To an extent you can do this with items you sell in the tp something comes along drastically increasing the demand for an item due to a new recipe or a nerf to the drop rate of something. The thing I don’t get is why we can’t play the gold to gem conversion in the same way. Initial conversation about the game and even several guides even states that we would be able to play the market on conversion and buy low/sell high ect. But if we look at gold to gems right now you can see thakittens about 3g50s to buy 100 gems, yet to sell back the same 100 gems only gets you about 2g60s . Now gems haven’t been available for that price in well over 4 months… I know there is some top secret supply and demand formula that they use but to me this does not make sense that there is such a large disparity between the two. It took a very interesting aspect of the game and completely negated it.

It’s a tax. A fee.

It’s meant to discourage people from quickly flipping and buying and selling gems.

Just imagine if the TP had no tax on buying/selling gems. The profits on just playing off the fluctuations of the gem trade awould be immense considering the speed that prices fluctuate.

And just consider the destruction it would cause for the economy, as well as Anet’s own profits? I don’t wanna go there.

The gap in buying/selling is basically the same 15% tax as you get on the TP, just being applied in both directions.

From GW2spidy, 100 gems now cost 3.1436 gold. 3.1436*.85 = 2.6206 gold which is the midpoint value of those 100 gems after the 15% tax. 2.6206*.85 = 2.271251 gold which is the gold value you can get back from the second conversion, again after the 15% tax. GW2spidy has 100 gems now netting you 2.2712 gold so this seems to be the right amount.

Makes sense, still I wonder if things are different than they expected given some of the initial plans they had for the system.

If I could flip Gems and Gold, there’d be a few of us who’d completely own the TP. THEN you’d see a horrible in game market.

The fees help to balance the flipping. So instead of flipping every hour, I need to wait a few months to get to a point that I’m comfortable with reselling my Gems.