Guild Wars 2

Is the collection expander in the gem store for Guild Wars 2 worth the money?

Some say yes, some say no.

If you find yourself with stacks of extra materials in your normal bank / inventory and need bank space, then yes – grab the first expander (500).

If you aren’t a hoarder and sell everything, then it’s probably not worth it.

Depends how many mats you like to hoard. I’m up to 1000 per now, buying them only when they are on sale. When every I make a character with Chef as the craft I’m going to be set. It’s worked well for my jeweler so far.

If you’re a hoarder, it’s worth it. If you tend to not hoard stacks and stacks of mats, then no, it’s not too worth it.

@ a 1000 here too. The only items that hit that tho are my t7 mats. Everything thing else once I hit the 500 mark gets 250 sold on the TP

It has been worth it for me, because I had tons of stacks of items. Roughly, I figure it’s worth it to me to upgrade if I have 15+ stacks of a mat beyond than the current storage max Your mileage will vary. Here’s how I decided on “15” as the magic number:

There are two things you get for your 800 gems:

• Extra storage for any stack that routinely runs about 250 (or really, above ~225).
• The convenience and reduced aggravation of not having to manage that bit of extra. I happen to value this a lot; I like to play the game, so I want to minimize the time I spend managing my inventory.

One way you can evaluate the actual cost is to compare how much it costs you to store extra stacks right now:

1. The bank tab expansion gets you 30 slots for 600 gems => if you have over a stack each of 40 different mats, the storage expander is break-even on cost (and a big winner on convenience).
2. ~800 gems could also add 30 slots on a mule for close to the same costs (each extra bag slot costs 400 gems and 15-slot bags cost less than 2g, which barely rates in gems). => Break even on costs if you have a stack plus of 30 or more mats.
3. 800 gems costs ~122g at recent exchange rates, for which you could get twenty 20-slot Halloween pails. That could add a lot of slots or just a few, depending on what you already have.

All three of those alternatives mean you will save money (if you have fewer stacks of “excess” mats). However, you’ll pay more in terms of time and aggravation, since you’ll have to keep moving mats around.

• I maxed bank tabs, so that isn’t an option for me — if it was, they are more valuable to me, because they can store anything and all the vendors can “see” what’s there.
• I don’t want to put extra slots on mules because (a) that means more moving stuff around (not less) and (b) I want to feel free to re-roll such characters (and investing 400 gems per bag slot makes that cost inefficient).
• I already routinely max out existing bag slots, whenever I can afford it — more slots means less time visiting vendors and therefore more play time.

tl;dr the cost evaluation is straightforward, while the convenience (how much time you have to spend managing inventory) depends a lot on the player. For me, the cutoff is 15 slots. Among my friends, it ranges from 5 slots to 60 slots (as some people prefer to sell or delete rather than store).

edit: rephrasing convoluted sentence structure

I think it would be worth it for me if it increased the stack capacity for everything not just collections because I have a few thousand of Crafting Mats so getting an expander wouldn’t really help (it would let me wait longer to pull things out of the collection, but it wouldn’t let me hold things there, really).

The way I store things is to wait until I can’t deposit, then retrieve the full stack (250) and place it in the bank. I store that in a dedicated tab and when it or my bank gets full, I put it into a designated bank character. Of course this kind of… “system” requires a lot of investment but it’s arguably more cost-effective than getting a collection expander (since most of what I get is the same items over and over again) although if I were to get a collection expander I could save maybe 3-5 slots (not a lot compared to how many slots I have of stacks) by placing items I don’t get a lot of but have a stack or two of.

For example, I’m at 650ish Ectos, so I’d have to get at least 2 Expanders to fit them all into my bank. That’s the same for Wintersday Crafting Materials (although some of them I’m at 4+ stacks). Then there are low rare crafting mats and also combined crafting mats (I have a lot of planks, ingots, and bolts… like, a lot). And then we can get to Quartz and Dragonite where I have too many stacks (and I don’t want to do the karka hunt. I’M LAZY… fine I’ll do it later…)