When I’m on the Trading Post gem trade, I want to obtain a certain number of gems, in order to buy something. Let’s say I want 800 to get another character slot. I can’t just put 800 into a box and have the game tell me how much it will cost. No, I have to put in some amount of money, see how much it is, change that amount, see how much it is, ad nauseum until I eventually land on the amount of gems I want for the cheapest price.
It seems surprising that the interface would be arranged in this way, because I assume most people are using the gem trade in the same way I am. I’m not desperate to get rid of a certain amount of gold in order to get however many gems I get for it, I am aiming to get a certain amount of gems to buy something I want, and I want to know how much they’ll cost. I assume it is the other way around for many players on the other side — they want a certain amount of gold, and want to know how many gems they’ll have to give up to get that money.
The current system cheats the player out of a little bit of money with every transaction. If, say, I want to convert all of my current amount of silver into gems, I put that number into the gem conversion. It tells me how many gems I’ll get for that. But what are the chances of that number of gems dividing perfectly into the amount of silver I have? Say I put in 4 silver. It tells me I can get 14 gems. I reduce that number to 3.90. Still 14. 3.80, still 14. I just saved 20 copper by fiddling with the numbers, and my more naive lower-level self didn’t even realize my money was being taken in this way.
None of the rest of the trading post works this way. I don’t go searching for onions, and have the trading post ask me how much money I’m willing to pay, and then tell me how many onions I can buy with that money. It asks me how many onions I want to buy, then tells me how much it will cost. Why is it so difficult to trade for the number of gems that I need to buy what I want? I needed just three more gems to hit 800 the other day, and it took forever to narrow down the correct number I had to type into that little box to get what I wanted.
As an aside, while I appreciate the little graph with the highs and the lows and the week-long average, it doesn’t answer the main question that I was looking for the answers to from the first moment I tried using this interface: how much do they cost RIGHT NOW? There isn’t even a vague estimate, due to the rapidly fluctuating prices.
The interface has a long way to go in explaining how this system works or what determines the prices of gems.
After fiddling with the prices for a bit on the conversion interface, it seems to me that the price of gems varies greatly on how many you’re buying. I can currently buy one gem for 49 copper, or I can buy ten for 2.89. Eleven for 3.13, which makes that eleventh gem only cost 24 copper. But then the twelfth gem costs another 48 copper, up to 3.61. I know these are really low numbers, but I’m rather broke at the moment, so bear with me.
Anybody able to shed some light on this?