I believe I understand the devs desire to try and ease people into their system to make it more ~user friendly~, and I agree, there was a possible bit of confusion as to what you were clicking on when you desired to exchange gold for gems/gems for gold.
The problem is that they went with the “microsoft points” direction, which limited the usability, and over simplified. A better approach would have been managing the UI flow to allow people to understand what options they were selecting.
Any one veteran could tell you what you were clicking on when you said “buy gems with gold” .. it’s simple. But I guess some people made poor decisions in what they clicked and ended up expending gold for gems instead, which is their fault.
If you had to improve the UI for gold/gem exchange, creating set, non-customizable “tiers” of payment feels like an over simplification in response to a problem that needed a better solution.
I don’t -HATE- ANet for this. But I am irritated that this feels like a restriction rather than a improvement. I don’t know what the meeting was like when they discussed this measure, but I would hope that some of the voices in it were asking if the UI flow was so damaged that ~new players~ were becoming confused, and that they might look at different interface designs to better understand this.
Of course, this might have also been a discussion about in-game economy, which in that case, I have no answer for, either.
