Guild Wars 2

OK, so I’ve been wanting to buy some gems for a while now, but I’ve noticed the price of them keeps going up. Earlier on, I bought a few gems for 20S and have 78 gems. As of this writing, if I spent 20S, I get 51 gems. OK, that sucks. I’ll have to think about that Well, maybe I could make some money on the gems I do have. But, right now, if I sold my gems, I’d only make 21S 52C. That seems off. Back on the gem purchase tab, I’d have to spend 30S 20C to get 78 gems. Wait, what? Well, shouldn’t I be able to sell my gems for that much?

I just don’t get it. Can someone explain what’s going on here?

I looked through 5 pages on the forum and did a couple searches. Don’t want to waste any more time on this.

Have you never exchanged currency in real life? Cause it works pretty much the same. There is an average at which currency is exchanged. From that average, a slightly increased price is used for selling (to you), and slightly decreased price is used for buying (from you). The difference is the profit for the person/company performing the exchange, and in game-terms is a gold-sink.

Nope. I don’ t buy that explanation. I’ve exchanged currency lots of times when travelling. There might be a small service fee. If I was trading currency on the markets (which I don’t), the service fees are miniscule. Also, currency exchange on markets are fairly direct, so if the prices go up or down a small amount, I can re trade my currency for a profit.

Here, it seems like one can’t do that. In my OP, theres a greater than 50% descrepency between the exchange rates. So, while I can sell my original gems and make a profit of 1S 52C, I seems that even if the prices of gems do drop in order for me to repurchase gems, they won’t drop by more than 50% for me to get back into the game. If I were to re-purchase gems, even if they do fall somewhat, I’d be in the hole.

Maybe I just don’t understand commodity exchanges, And I’ve come to expect that I’m gonna have to spend more on gems now, I just don’t understand the vast difference between the two numbers that I described in my OP.

I’m pretty sure its based on how many Gems are out there vs how much gold is . Given this is in a constant state of flux the prices will be as well .

Well i dont know this is how it is supposed to be but if you buy gems worth 1gold, then you sell the gems like 75s. Which makes making profit from flactuating economy imposible.

The exchange rates are out-of-wack cos the game economy is still very young. It will need a few more months yet before things settle down and more gold enters the economy.

If you need gems, best to use ‘real’ cash to purchase for now …

The two exchange rates differ on purpose. They want to strongly discourage speculation in the gem market because it would ruin their free to play model. The two rates are still correlated – when there’s a lot of people buying gems with gold, then the people doing the opposite (converting gems to gold) will benefit from a better conversion rate.

Phrased differently, they really do not want you to buy a bunch of gems with in-game gold, hold them for a week or a month, and then sell them for gold for a profit. That’s why there’s a large difference in the two conversion rates, and there always will be. If they didn’t maintain this difference between the two rates, then those gold sells you see in map chat could game the system to make the official rate of cash to gold terrible, so that more people would come to them to buy gold instead of to Anet. Similarly, malicious or bored players (or groups of players) would be able to game the system.

Sparkie.3465:

Similarly, malicious or bored players (or groups of players) would be able to game the system.

There are guilds dedicated to manipulation of the TP and currency exchange. I’ve seen them advertising on the forums and their intended activities are not bannable. Be happy these protections exist.