Guild Wars 2

Now let me preface, I have absolutely no problem with paying for a server transfer. I understand it’s a drain on resources, and also discourages cheating in WvW, or something to that effect. What I do have a problem with is the price point being 1800 gems, but I can only buy 1600 for $20, unless I want to go one tier up and get 2800 for $35, or do two transactions of 800 for $10 and 1600 for $20. I’d gladly pay $20, or even a hair more to get the transfer done, but it’s incredibly frustrating to be essentially forced into getting a larger package than what I want for what should be a fairly simple process. It really feels like I’m being taken advantage of. Yeah I can pay with gold, but that’s assuming I can get that amount of gold and that could take days just to work up 200 gems, which is far more than I’ve ever had in the past. The most gold I’ve ever had at one time is what I have right now, and that’s 10. This is genuinely upsetting that I have to pay so much more than what it actually costs.

Yep, welcome to micro-transaction pricing schemes.

They’ll always try and force you to buy more of the currency than you need so that you’re inclined to buy even more things from the gem store. Just one of the things they have in place to ensure every little nickle and dime is scraped off the floor for their coffers.

Although you can always liquidate any excess into in-game gold if you’d prefer to do that. At least they let you exchange a custom amount now, so you can actually sell off any excess gems.

Is this the only thing you’re ever going to buy with gems, ever?

If so then I agree you have a problem, but if not just buy the larger package and save the extra gems for something else in future.

I’ve always got a few extra gems on my account, sometimes only 50 or so, once about 900. Sometimes I only have them for a few days, sometimes for several weeks but sooner or later I find a use for them. (And that’s without resorting to buying something I didn’t want just to use them up, it’s always something I would have bought anyway.)

The only thing I’ve ever spent gems on is extra character slots (again, a thing I don’t mind spending money on, makes sense.) I don’t really need to ease of life items, and I’m not much into cosmetics. So yeah, it’s a bit of a problem for me unfortunately.

use some ingame gold for the last 200 gems…. 20 – 25 gold shoud be enough.

Usually, when an account has such little Gold resources, it isn’t that old. You can always delete your characters, and transfer at no cost, whatsoever. Just put everything non-soul-bound in the bank, and it, and your wallet will transfer with you.

Good luck.

I want to, but I feel like raising that kind of money is gonna be difficult. I checked the exchange rate and it’s about 32 gold right now.

Best way is to farm dungeons. Even if you only do like AC And CoF every day, you should be able to score around 4-5 gold easily per day, and it would likely take less than two hours of gameplay so long as the people in your party have a semblance of how to run the dungeon efficiently.

Be glad that you don’t play WoW where transferring a single character costs 20 bucks.

Just run SW or dungeons for a few hours and you’ll have more than enough gold.

Overlooked the button named “individual amount” at the bottom right of the gold-gem exchange dialog?

And why do you want to transfer for real money? If you wanna spend real money better buy a new account for 10$ at the next occasion, instead of transferring for 20+$.
For half the price you not only get wvw/EotM for both worlds, you also get 5 char slots, a bank slot, double login rewards, …

Yamsandjams.3267:

Yep, welcome to micro-transaction pricing schemes.

They’ll always try and force you to buy more of the currency than you need so that you’re inclined to buy even more things from the gem store. Just one of the things they have in place to ensure every little nickle and dime is scraped off the floor for their coffers.

Although you can always liquidate any excess into in-game gold if you’d prefer to do that. At least they let you exchange a custom amount now, so you can actually sell off any excess gems.

Well they can always shut the game down for not being profitable if you’d rather like that

I pay around 4k gems every month, cause the magnitude of this game and that it costed me around 20-30$ to buy and play forever, is to me awsome. I don’t know any game THIS BIG for 20-30$ that you don’t have to pay for each month.

Go ahead, gief them your money, these guys actually deserve it.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Yep, welcome to micro-transaction pricing schemes.

Well, this is more an account service, something that has been in mmo’s for 20yrs, long before the micro-transaction junk.

Can’t say I have sympathy in this, it’s really only something for wvw. We had a good population in wvw for our server, but after they unleashed transfers, all the cool kids moved in and imo the quality of play dropped, and we stopped climbing in the rankings pretty much locked at T2 from then on.

I ran Vinewrath six times the other day, salvaged everything and sold the mats. If you’re worried about 10 gold, better not tell you I made 50 in one day. And I only spent 3-4 hours on it, much more is possible with better dedication.

All it takes is some effort to get what you want.

the price is just so high to make sure hackers and such do not switch easy. also it is a thing they added ad a later point in the game: a) the later implementation was done so at start of game people could switch to make sure they found the right server/area to play on and find their guild and/or friends to play with. b) WvWvW: they do not want people to easy transfer over to “cheat” during WvWvW matches. E.G.: quick moving over to another server to give and/or get rewards from another server.

OP are you annoyed at the cost of transfers or that you can only buy gems with cash in certain size packages or both?

If it’s the first, remember WoW charges $25 per CHARACTER, here it’s your entire account for $22.50, if you are transferring to a high population world. It’s cheaper, 1000 gems ($12.50) or 500 gems ($6.25) for medium and low population worlds. The price differential is encourage players to spread out across the worlds so WvW success isn’t determined by the world who has the largest pool of players to draw from.

If it’s the Proxy Currency amounts when buying with cash is the problem, yeah buying the just the amount you want isn’t possible.

The two alternatives you have, besides not transferring, are buying 1600 gems with cash and then buy the remaining 200 gems for roughly 37 gold or buy 2800 gems and either save the extra 1000 gems for a rainy day, a watchwork pick or selling them for roughly 130 gold and probably have a few gems left due to the stupidity of the “new” exchange system.

Depends on how patient you are.

Honestly, its a blessing that we can actually convert in-game currency to a means to server transfer! Even if the exchange rate right now is rather high, it is still something that could be worked towards like everything else in this game.

It’s to discourage abuse in WVW. At one point near release they were free (I forget why); all hell broke loose as people just swapped to the winning server for that week.

Woo! Thanks for all the civil replies. Good points on both ends. Since there seemed to be some confusion about my initial grievance, let me reiterate. I’m not annoyed at the price point, or that there IS a price point. I think something like this should cost money, and I’m happy to pay it. I’m annoyed that my 2 options are

A) Buy a surplus of Gems for more money than what the transfer costs, or
B) Use my in game gold, which takes time to raise.

To me it’s quite unfair that a service like this doesn’t have a straight, simple exchange and instead requires quite a bit more money, or requires me to farm for a time to make up the difference when I could be doing other things like leveling my characters (so hype about the specializations!) or getting bandit crests for those minis I want.

Use option A. Buy gems, buy the transfer, convert extra gems to other items in the store or into gold.

Or hold onto the gems just in case you want something in the store later on, that way you don’t have to buy any gems or not as many.

I agreed with you back in the day when servers segregated everyone in PvE as well as WvW, but now that really the only reason to change is for one of the competitive aspects I’m okay with it. You shouldn’t be able to switch teams easily.

why does server transfer cost more than buying an entire new account?

Ark the Pie King.2064:

Now let me preface, I have absolutely no problem with paying for a server transfer. I understand it’s a drain on resources, and also discourages cheating in WvW, or something to that effect. What I do have a problem with is the price point being 1800 gems, but I can only buy 1600 for $20, unless I want to go one tier up and get 2800 for $35, or do two transactions of 800 for $10 and 1600 for $20. I’d gladly pay $20, or even a hair more to get the transfer done, but it’s incredibly frustrating to be essentially forced into getting a larger package than what I want for what should be a fairly simple process. It really feels like I’m being taken advantage of. Yeah I can pay with gold, but that’s assuming I can get that amount of gold and that could take days just to work up 200 gems, which is far more than I’ve ever had in the past. The most gold I’ve ever had at one time is what I have right now, and that’s 10. This is genuinely upsetting that I have to pay so much more than what it actually costs.

Just curious, why do you have only 10 gold ? I understand buying stuff on TP then being broke for a while until you get back up, but 10 ? Do you intentionally keep that low ? Why ?

I also greatly disagree with you, the super cheap gold to gem coversion rates and transfer costs is what has led to the downward spiral of all except the top 2 tiers of WvW.

I’d make the transfer costs literally about 5-10 times what they are now to the top 6 servers, not less.

raptor.1064:

why does server transfer cost more than buying an entire new account?

Hmmm.. perhaps A-net started to lose many players, even with the expansion announced they’re just not getting it right, so they made a super cheap account sale and havent adjusted the transfer costs.

Thing is, if they go even lower on transfer costs they will lose even more players due to WvW geting even more screwed up, thus defeating the purpose of this sale event, so unfortunately these prices may have to stay.

My question is: why is every server in NA either Very High or Full? Why does a transfer to Eredon Terrace cost as much as Blackgate? Why aren’t server transfer costs now tied to WvW rank, since that is the only part of the game affected by server home?

raptor.1064:

why does server transfer cost more than buying an entire new account?

Selling basic accounts at a low price is done to increase player numbers, and — lately — to potentially increase sales of the imminent expansion. The more players who have accounts, the more players who are potential purchasers of the expansion — which will be full price.

rhapsody.3615:

My question is: why is every server in NA either Very High or Full? Why does a transfer to Eredon Terrace cost as much as Blackgate? Why aren’t server transfer costs now tied to WvW rank, since that is the only part of the game affected by server home?

Because Very High and Full correspond to the number of players who have chosen that world as their home world. Including players who are banned, do not play Guild Wars 2 at the moment, and players who do not WvW.

There have a number of suggestions that now due to megaservers, it would make perfect sense to make server transfer cost correspond to tier level. Going to higher tier servers would cost more than bottom tier servers.

Before megaservers it did make sense to base cost to transfer on total population size. Because server choice mattered for WvW and PvE.

raptor.1064:

why does server transfer cost more than buying an entire new account?

Cause the game is old. A year ago the sales were $20. And since you can’t move characters between accounts it’s not a cheaper short cut. And when the game isn’t on sale, like now, it’s still $40.