Guild Wars 2

I haven’t been active for a while, but when a friend of mine asked me to play with him, I decided to log back and give GW2 another go. The only problem was that he was on another server. I didn’t think that would be a problem because I remember when I played that you could transfer for free. Turned out that there was a price this time around, 1800 gems to be exact. I figured it would come out to be about $10 if I paid with real money, which I was willing to do, but when I saw that it was closer to the $20-$25 range, I gave up completely. That’s more than a third of the games original price. A third just so I can play with a friend of mine. I know that there’s a guesting service now, but is a full server transfer really worth the price?

Well at a 1800 gem price tag that answers weather or not your going to a high populated server, cause till the first of the month medium to low servers are free. So I have a few suggestions for you,

• Pay $10 get the 800 gems. Then guest till you have gotten enough gold to transfer into gems for the rest. This should be roughly 15 gold to 20 gold.
• Have your friend chip in $10
• Or have you and your friend transfer to a medium or low population server ( theya re free till the end of the month so hopefully you see this )
• guest till either a free transfer weekend comes up or you can do it all with gold

You have to realize that at the begin they had server transfers open for about a month. This was to account for people finding friends and getting to join their server. Although with no monthly sub fee and the fact you never have to spend real world money on server transfers the fact they charge is not really outlandish. In fact

• Tera
• World of Warcraft
• Rift
• Eve Online
• SWToR

They all charge for server transfers, WoW, SWToR, EvE, all charge a monthly fee now. ( yes SWToR is free till a certain level then you have to pay to unlock higher end content or become a monthly subscriber)

So look at it this way Arena Net could be charging you a Monthly sub and then charging you $25 dollars to transfer, instead they give you the option of never paying a dime of real world money.

^ he’s right(to a degree, server transfers were free past christmas). Server transfers were to “make WvWvW more even” Okay so there is a point to them. BUT if gem prices via in-game gold keeps going up, this game is slowly but surely working more towards rl currncy purchases rather than paying by gold.

Orc Slayer.2780:

^ he’s right. Server transfers were to “make WvWvW more even” Okay so there is a point to them. BUT if gem prices via in-game gold keeps going up, this game is slowly but surely working its way into Pay to Play as paying by gold will not be effective due to its high cost.

The cost of exchange is affected by the amount of gold that is currently in circulation in the economy. The more gold you spend to make into Gems, reflects the abundance of gold in the game that is not being siphoned out. When the exchange rate goes up for gold to gems ( meaning less gold for more gems ) that is an abundance of over flow.

Just last week the exchange was 63 silver better than it was today, a couple a days before that it was 73 silver higher. It is every flowing like a stock market to pre say. It is a self sustaining market.

Orc Slayer.2780:

Kaimick.5109:

Orc Slayer.2780:

^ he’s right. Server transfers were to “make WvWvW more even” Okay so there is a point to them. BUT if gem prices via in-game gold keeps going up, this game is slowly but surely working its way into Pay to Play as paying by gold will not be effective due to its high cost.

The cost of exchange is affected by the amount of gold that is currently in circulation in the economy. The more gold you spend to make into Gems, reflects the abundance of gold in the game that is not being siphoned out. When the exchange rate goes up for gold to gems ( meaning less gold for more gems ) that is an abundance of over flow.

Just last week the exchange was 63 silver better than it was today, a couple a days before that it was 73 silver higher. It is every flowing like a stock market to pre say. It is a self sustaining market.

And if no one buys the gems with real life money and sells them back at the same rate that people are buying gems with gold then we see what we have been seeing since day 1: INCREASE in Gem prices via gold.
Which means?
People start paying out of pocket to get things done that require a lot of gems LIKE SERVER TRANSFERS which makes it similar to PAY TO PLAY (p2p). If the devs wanted it to be a “self sustaining market” then they would make it a 1:1 ratio. Aka if it costs 2 gold for 800 gems, then trading 800 gems would be 2g. It is NOT Like this, if you buy gems with RL money and go to turn them in for gold, you will get significantly less than 2G from the example above. Why did they do this? To discourage players from buying gems for in-gamegold. WHICH ultimately affects how many players buy GEMS with gold( as gold for gems would be too outrageous to even consider buying 1600 k gems or w/e it is). Which only leaves one viable option to get the transfer ( or item) in a timely fashion: Pay money for gems. (Similar to P2P)

Timely fashion is in the mind of the buyer, and person that is trying to make gold.

Secondly it is a self sustaining market, I wont go off topic here, so I will just say it is Economics basic theory, look up Keynesian Economics

Also P 2 P (::EDIT:: apparently P 2 P all together is a bad word ????)is something you need to do in order to play, the OP doesn’t need to transfer, he doesn’t need to buy Gems, he would like to. That is a luxury, ergo it is no Pay to Play, especially when he can guest for free and play with his friend every day all 24 hours of the day if he so choose to.

The original post was about the high cost of wanting to play with a friend on another server. That’s actually free, unless one of you is on an EU server and the other is on a US server.

Guesting: Allows people to play PvE together. Free.
Transferring: Allows you to play WvW together. Cost, depending on destination servers popularity.
Dungeons: Does not require guesting or transferring, as long as you are in same party and in the dungeon’s zone to start with. Free.

As to whether the cost of transfers should be low relative to the cost of the game: maybe. I can see that ANet wants to discourage people from transferring often, since it costs extra money to maintain the infrastructure that makes this easy for us to do. Since we don’t pay maintenance fees, we are going to end up paying for more one-time transactions than we might in other situations.