Guild Wars 2

bag slot 200 gems currently… except 100 gems is 30 g atm
before sales started 100gems would go for 16g
bag slot cost 400gems = 62 gold

so actually, at least on bag slots you save 2g if you actually convert gold into gems atm D8

They are sales if you buy gems with cash. If more people doing so are using the gems to buy items rather than gold, those gems remain scarce for people buying them with gold and the gold price goes up.

Before sale started, 100 gems was 1.25€ and right now 100 gems cost you:

1.25€

They are sales if you use real world money or if you converted gold to gems when the conversion rate was better beforehand.

They go by the gem prices: before the sale a bag slot was 400 gems, now it’s 200. And the gem prices are based on real money prices.

They never go by the gold to gem exchange. For one thing it fluctuates too much to act as a baseline, especially for sales – the price has gone up because of the sales, so if they adjusted the sale price to allow for that they’d have to keep bringing it down and then more people would exchange gold for gems and they’d have to bring it down again…

But also whilst they made the decision to include the gold to gems exchange I think it’s not a huge jump in logic to say Anet would prefer players to buy gems with real money because then they get the money. It’s great that they included the ability to get gems with gold (even if it was just so they could offer the ability to get gold with gems as another incentive for people to spend money) but it’s not surprising they don’t worry when it’s inconvenient.

For future reference they always have a big sale around the end of August for the anniversary and another one around the end of November (black Friday in America) or in January (January sales). So if you want to buy gem store items with gold it’s a good idea to start saving up gems before then when the exchange rate is better.

There was no reason for Arenanet to provide a bi-directional exchange other than to allow non-paying customers the opportunity to get what paying customers, who they really like, purchase with real money.

The gold to gems direction of the exchange also sinks a lot of gold to help keep BLTC prices down but there was no real reason Arenanet had to allow gold exchangers access to gems. The upcoming expansion is the first time since release that I had seen them say “No” to exchangers and exclude game money as a payment option.

It’s a sale if you converted your gold early in anticipation of the annual sale rather than once it started.