I understand that A.net needs to make its money and i get that but the prices of gems are just borderline ridiculous. right now its going to cost me 10+ gold or so to get another bank tab. I am really glad i purchased one early on but now I find myself almost handicapped in game because I cannot spare the money to purchase gems and I shouldn’t have to purchase gems things like this. this is extremely intimidating for new players aswell. They are going to start off by making only copper and silver and by the time they hit 1 gold its going to be worth like 10 gems. Something has to be done about the price of gold to gems.
I suggest making gems to gold and gold to gems even. It harms absolutely no one except for the person who chooses to buy their way through this game
Yea i understand that but its too much. If they keep raising the prices it is just going to turn off alot of players off and refuse to purchase anything. At this rate i might aswell spend all my gold on gems. Wait like 3 months and make double the cash and repeat…
the exchange rate is manipulated by “the company”.
The exchange rate is determined by supply/demand. In this case, many people are still using gold to buy gems, but much less people are converting gems into gold, which is why the rates are creeping up.
When prices increase so that eventually, about the same number of people convert gold → gems and gems → gold, prices will stabilize.
Ok- initially it was much more favorable to exchange gold for gems as you could get much more vs gems for gold.
Now it s very hard to earn gold in game by just playing so the gem price is very expensive- I paid 6,5 gold for a make over.
To me that meant I had to prioritize vs other things I needed.
Not even to mention my alts.
The gem shop would be much more successful if it supplied what people want to buy outright and the game would be much more enjoyable if you could actually work towards your goals. Atm I have maybe 2 gold spread around 5 alts. yeah I suck at the TP and I like crafting and skins and alts…
the exchange rate is manipulated by “the company”.
they dont want you to use ingame currency to purchase gemshop items,
they want you to purchase gems.
they made this game to make money, not to go bankrupt.
Pretty much this. I remember after the halloweeen event the gem price started to drop dramatically, but when I actually went to try and purchase some with gold it changed to a value that was.. far from the listed value.
Value to items is arbitrary, depends entirely on the person, however I doubt the majority of the people would pay the current price for anything available at the store.
don’t forget wintersday starts real soon…. gem prices tend to go up quite a bit as these events get closer. Inflation is probably also causing gems to be pricey.
Yea i understand that but its too much. If they keep raising the prices it is just going to turn off alot of players off and refuse to purchase anything. At this rate i might aswell spend all my gold on gems. Wait like 3 months and make double the cash and repeat…
they made this game to make money, not to go bankrupt.
That’s the worst argument for what they are doing I’ve ever heard. It’s one thing to want to make money for the game beyond launch, it’s another thing entirely to employ blizzard-like and EA-like tactics to prevent people from progressing unless they spend $50 in the gem shop every single character.
Greed is never a good business plan because it ALWAYS come back and bites you in the butt or have we already forgotten what happened to SWTOR and D3?
right now trading 20 gold will give me 950 gems… i traded probably 3 gold for 600 gems near the beginning of the game. That just makes me not want to play or ever pay for gems that i was considering to do just to get that extra bag space. But not i am totally handicapped because i don’t play 24/7
don’t forget wintersday starts real soon…. gem prices tend to go up quite a bit as these events get closer. Inflation is probably also causing gems to be pricey.
yes, as soon as the new costumes and items/skins are in the store,
i and many others will be buying gems with £/$ and buying them all.
save your gold for conversion to gems at the market peak.
i would guess the market will peak around xmas eve,
as everyone will want to buy themselves a present (if they haven’t already done so).
right now trading 20 gold will give me 950 gems… i traded probably 3 gold for 600 gems near the beginning of the game. That just makes me not want to play or ever pay for gems that i was considering to do just to get that extra bag space. But not i am totally handicapped because i don’t play 24/7
Then spend 10 dollar/euros and sell the leftover gems, problem solved.
right now trading 20 gold will give me 950 gems… i traded probably 3 gold for 600 gems near the beginning of the game. That just makes me not want to play or ever pay for gems that i was considering to do just to get that extra bag space. But not i am totally handicapped because i don’t play 24/7
Then spend 10 dollar/euros and sell the leftover gems, problem solved.
Then i m buying into their whole bussiness plan that is totally unacceptable
People today love conspiracys. There none of this company killing currency to buy gems. It´s about players with LOT of gold and cand do nothing with this because everything is too expensive or don´t have enough (players fault too). So when there are some events people spend lots of ingame money and influence the price of the gem in general. And people don´t buying gems to sell just make the price skyrocket (stock laws).
In a nutshell:
If there are more gems/gold than gold/gems prices go down.
If there are more gold/gems than gems/gold prices go up.
Simple as this.
@Warchiefomega
And it´s this business plan that gives you a MMO game to play. Try to make a profitable MMO server (there are some “server emulators” out there) and you will understand what I´m talking about.
I don’t think its a supply and demand thing, as alot of posters have already suggested, there is an infinite amount of gems available (and subsequently, near-infinite amount of gold as gold can always be attained from thin air). But rather, the rate of conversion from one to the other. Regardless of the quantity of gems/gold in the market, the amout/frequency of gold→gems and vice versa will affect the exchange rate. So it doesn’t really matter if a total of 1million gems were bought (with cash) over a certain period of time, what matters is how much of those gems were converted to gold and vice versa. The more gold converted to gems, the higher the gold→gem ratio is. and vice versa.
The problem is, the trade-off or the choice whether to farm gold and convert or just buy gems exist only for people in, say, NA or people with credit card or those who can afford. For the vast majority of us, we have no option to buy gems for cash, and thus, will be forced to convert using the current ratio to get gems (for whatever reason), and thus will constantly drive the exchange rate up. I believe it will not stop increasing, just will affect the rate of increase. I wouldn’t be surprised if it reached 10g/100gems (but this may occur probably in a year’s time).
Don’t disturb me, I have a cat in me at the moment.
The ability to exchange gold for gems is an optional feature. That makes it a privilege, not a right. The exchange rates are based on supply versus demand, as others have already said. If the supply of gems for sale is lower than the demand, the exchange rate goes up in favor of gem sellers.
The problem, if their is one, is that players who want gems but aren’t making gold are competing with players who want gems and who are making gold. The solution is not to have ANet artificially manipulate the gem exchange rates, which is what the OP is asking them to do. The solution is for the player who wants something from the gem store without buying gems to figure out how to make gold.
For the vast majority of us, we have no option to buy gems for cash, and thus, will be forced to convert using the current ratio to get gems (for whatever reason), and thus will constantly drive the exchange rate up.
i totally agree,
and conversely,
i have no problem spending my £ on gems so i can buy something in the gemshop,
but i will not convert any gems into gold at the current exchange rate because it’s so bad.
i can make easier gold by playing.
so if the same is also true of many other gem purchasers,
the the gold>gem exchange rate will only escalate over time.
I’m tempted to sell all I got, buy all the gems I can, and sit on that till I make a profit. But the discrepancy is quite big for buy and sell. I’ll probably have to wait for a few months to get some profit >.>
Don’t disturb me, I have a cat in me at the moment.
while the conversion rate keeps going up and up, you have to consider how they made it work.
If people by gold with gems, the rate comes down.
If people by gems with gold the rate goes up.
So instead of blaiming ANet, blaim those who convert gold to gems.
I will be “buying” gems for wintersday, I was hoping to buy with gold but loot drop bug means I dont have the gold I had hoped for to buy gems with . I havent bought gems for gold since it hit 88s/100gems because it made mystic forge salvage kits cost more than master salvage kits.
People complain about how much Gems cost when buying with Gold. Though, you don’t consider that the people selling Gems bought it with their own MONEY and are trying to make a profit.
I wouldn’t even consider buying Gems and supplying them to the market if I was going to get less than one gold per 100 of them.
right now trading 20 gold will give me 950 gems… i traded probably 3 gold for 600 gems near the beginning of the game. That just makes me not want to play or ever pay for gems that i was considering to do just to get that extra bag space. But not i am totally handicapped because i don’t play 24/7
Then spend 10 dollar/euros and sell the leftover gems, problem solved.
Then i m buying into their whole bussiness plan that is totally unacceptable
For you to trade gold for gems someone else has to buy into their “totally unacceptable” business plan, part of the problem is this sentiment in which players think that paying “real” money for gems isn’t that great so they buy gems with gold and then complain because the price has gone up.
At the start of the game people were willing to spend money on gems and the realized that they can get some gold for those gems, and 2-3g at the very beginning of the game was VERY significant, so the market was flooded with a surplus of gems and they were reasonably priced… until you consider the fact that the average player has something along the lines of 4-5x as much gold now as back when the game was “new” and incidentally the cost of gems has risen to meet the inflated economy, the economy inflated because bots were farming materials and keeping the prices cheap which means that more people has a surplus of gold they could spend on gems, thus the gem price has risen more than is “reasonable” for some.
But here’s why the price is continuing to rise even after many of the bots were taken care of, fewer people are willing to spend their “real” money on gems because they hold your mentality that it isn’t worth it, which means the gem supply is decreasing while the demand is increasing due to many recent (and future) events, the end result? Until the demand meets the supply then the market won’t stabilize, and untill supply is greater than demand the prices won’t reduce so it’s in your best interest to spend real money on the game because the players that do control the gem<>gold economy.
Fornicate like you’ve never fornicated before.
I am anti-censorship, for it doesn’t make sense to pander to a minority.
@ Coffeebot: Someone passed economics. I wish more would and stop with threads like this. Great post Coffee.
@ Mimizu: Epic, since people seem to think they can toss out any price and expect people to accept it in exchange for goods worth -more-.
