Guild Wars 2

Will Gems to Gold rate come back down?

I want to buy gems to gold, but not at this ridiculous price, 996 gems for 250g was a good price when I did it last time, now its nearly 1500 gems for the same amount of gold.

Better yet: Can Anet give a fixed price on Gold if we were to spend money on Gems?

I think you mean Gold to Gems rate. It has come down from recent times. I just traded in for Gems because the rate is better…like around 26. It had been 33 or more.

And no, ArenaNet won’t ‘fix’ the price, as the price is only set by the players exchanging either Gold for Gems or Gems for Gold. If you want the price to lower even more, encourage all your friends/guildies/fellow players to exchange Gems for Gold.

Good luck.

The prices are set by how many players buy gems with real money and sell those gems for gold and how many players are buying gems with gold. More players selling gems means gem prices go down. More players buying gems with gold means gem prices go up. It’s a player driven supply and demand, not an ANet price controlled feature.

Your best bet is to wait for the next infusion of desirable gem store items. Generally when that happens more people want to exchange gold for gems, which in turn increases the gold gained by converting gems.

My bad. Guess I got it backwards.

Same as above, but encourage all your friends, etc. to exchange Gold for Gems for a better exchange rate on Gems for Gold.

Again, good luck.

Thanks for the responses, looks like I’ll have to wait before buying Gems. Not keen on paying anything higher than 1100 gems for 250 gold.

There are a number of websites where you can track the exchange rate. GW2spidy is the one I use.

It does vary quite a bit even within one day, and even more over longer periods of time.

As a general rule more people use gold to buy gems than the other way around, so the cost of doing that will go up at peak times, and especially weekends when lots of people are online. (Remember the exchange is universal – both EU and NA servers use the same one so peak time is more spread out than for other things.)

When that happens the price of buying gold with gems goes down.

So right now it’s likely to be higher because it’s Thursday morning, meaning most people in Europe are at work/school and most people in America are asleep. I think Australia would be asleep too by now. So it’s been a while since many people were buying gems with gold and the rate will have dropped back down a bit.

Wait until late afternoon/early evening Saturday and it will likely be higher. Or if you can wait longer have a look at websites that track the price and try to estimate when would be the best time.

Short story: no, gold:gem rates aren’t likely to drop significantly — you should plan accordingly (see below as to alternatives).

Gold:Gem Historical Rates

It’s currently running at about 26g/100 gems, which is low for the last few months. Historically, we were lucky that the price hasn’t been higher: for a long time the price was stable at ~16-18g (no sales) to 20-21g (during sales), dropping lower still (Wintersday, when people got gift cards for RL xmas).

The only time the price drops substantially from an existing equilibrium is when people are spending RL money on the game and that only happens during certain holidays (e.g. gift cards for xmas) or when ANet offers a special incentive to do so (Mini Sparkles — they’ve only done it once) or the price is so high it’s attractive to people to buy gems to convert to gold.

None of those things are likely to lower the current rate much: GW2 is old enough that it’s no longer a popular gift card choice for RL holidays, ANet hasn’t offered incentives to buy gems since the one time, and if the rate goes higher, that doesn’t do bargain hunters any good.

Alternatives

Technically, there aren’t any (aside from opening your own RL wallet to buy gems), so these are just ways to make the experience sting less.

• Fixed Cost Investing: convert the same coin to gems every day/week/month, regardless of rate. For example, convert 14g/week or 60g one day a month — that’s the amount you get from logging on, so it doesn’t “cost” you anything
• Proportional Investing: 1x/week (or per month), look at your wallet and take x% out to convert to gems (again, regardless of rate). For example, 10%: invest 10g if you have 100 or 30g if you have 300.
• Bargain Hunting: look at the graph of the ratio on a favorite website and identify the lowest point in the last 2-4 weeks. Check periodically and invest as much as you can afford when the rate drops below that.

Incidentally, exchanging gold for gems is one of the better methods that exist for keeping inflation low, since the Black Lion Company takes 15% of the profits.

Wait for Halloween, it will go back to about 250g for 1k gems then, wintersday at the very latest.

Ballistic.2570:

Wait for Halloween, it will go back to about 250g for 1k gems then, wintersday at the very latest.

Yea I think this is my best bet, got the credit card ready so to speak for when it happens.