An option to buy 400 gems
Also, while they’re at it – if all price tiers have gems for a fixed price (i.e. no matter how many you buy, the price is at $0.0125 per gem), they should just give the option to buy a custom amount of gems. I’d even be fine with a minimum, like 400 or something. But it would be nice to specify how many gems I want, rather than having to buy in pre-fixed amounts.
I really think we need an option to buy 400 gems at minimum instead of 800. There are tons of items below 400 gems and if you want them you gotta spend $10 on 800 gems or 7-8 gold, depending on how the exchange rate is going. Saying this especially since I want to change my characters name a bit, and the kit costs 350…and really don’t want to spend 10 dollars on name change so, I think we should get an option to buy 400 gems as well.
Just wanted to mention that you can buy 1 gem with gold if you want. You don’t have to buy 800 gems… if you buy them with gold, in-game.
As for the minimum number of gems you can purchase with real money, I assume the reason for the 800 gem (about $10) minimum is that real world financial transactions usually have fees associated with them and the minimum purchase amount can help ANet reduce the percentage of money that goes toward these fees.
I don’t know that this is the reason but I’d guess that the minimum gem purchase amount is in place due to the financial fees charged by banks.