Guild Wars 2

If the gem → gold rate is too low when looking at it through the lens of real money to in-game gold purchasing power (and I’m not sure that this is the case), then that is more likely a reflection on the desirability of gem store items compared to in-game items. (i.e. people prefer to spend gold in-game rather than in the gem store).

The exchange rate has been steadily rising since launch, and has at least doubled in the last month. How could this be considered a fixed rate?

What causes you to believe that this market manipulation is happening in the first place? Given the size of the market (global TP), any manipulation will only work in the short term.

As someone who engages in flipping, I have a vested interest in not seeing your suggestions implemented. But my buy orders generally give sellers more money for their goods and my sell orders generally give buyers goods at a slightly cheaper price. If you restrict arbitrage in the market, then it will become harder for sellers and buyers who wish to have gold/goods instantly to get a decent price.

I believe John was responding to the OP not myself. Point 4 of which was:

Forth, crafted items are sold at less than their fair material costs making the sale of crafted items prohibitive. This may be because players are foolish, or because hacked accounts are being liquidated fast. Either way it discourages both crafting and trade.

The “unprofitability” of crafting has nothing to do with the factors cited in the OP, and that’s not even taking into account that some players to make profits with crafting.

Thanks for your comments Anchoku.

1. The price of items in the gem store are set by ANet, but the market will determine the number of sales. Only ANet has that sales data, but I would imagine that they would be willing to change pricing if sales fall below expected levels. Remember also that gems can be bought with gold, so movements in the gold → gem exchange rate would be a general indicator of market demand for goods/services in the gem store.

I do agree that keys are overpriced, but I can’t conclusively state that the game population as a whole agree with us. I have parted with 700 gems for the Mad King’s costume, but I don’t expect everyone to agree that it was worth $8.75 of real money.

2. Okay I’ve just had a quick look at Ecto prices via gw2spidy, and the long term trend is that the price of ectos is decreasing, while the amount of gold gained from converting gems has been increasing. I’m not sure what conclusion I’m supposed to draw from this however. I do note however that 100 gems would have bought me about 1.5 ectos a month ago compared to just over 5 ectos today.

4. I can’t really talk about crafting to any great degree, as I haven’t spent a lot of time using the crafting system past the first few tiers, but gold will always be “funny money”. It’s a fiat currency created out of thin air by anyone playing the game. While karma is also a fiat currency, it’s one that can not be traded to other players and can only be spent on fixed cost items.

5. Simplifying it as a loss in market demand may be a step too far, there may (also) be an issue with the supply side of the market. And again, gold is a currency that is used for trading commodities, if the prices of those commodities are falling it’s hard to say that gold is losing value.

I suspect ArenaNet are waiting for the market to mature before becoming too active in changing the economy. They will have data that we don’t have to inform their decisions, but the introduction of short term mystic forge recipes to reduce stocks of butter, etc. shows that they are willing to act if they deem it necessary.

I’m not sure whether this game needs item sinks, but if it does, I would suggest that armour would be the most unpopular choice. Perhaps player/guild housing could help, or even perhaps utilising crafting to create items consumed in WvW…

1) While the real money price of items in the gem store might not be worth it to you, others may feel differently. There are a few things in there that I’m willing to pay real money for, and many things I won’t. Only ArenaNet has the actual sales data, and we have no idea what the “general population” is buying.

2) Not quite. The supply of gold is increasing, which isn’t unexpected (it happens in all MMOs). In general, once people have more gold, they are more willing to convert some of that to gems to spend in the gem store, which drives the exchange rate up. If gold was “depreciating” across the board, then you would see inflation affecting the cost of almost every item in the TP.

3) Assuming that gold is depreciating, increasing the in-game gold rewards would only increase the speed at which this is happening.

4) From what I understand, there are numerous factors behind this including oversupply due to the ease of learning crafting and a corresponding lack of demand. In addition, some people are willing to make a monetary loss for the XP gain they receive. Regardless of the cause, there are some items that crafters are able to make a profit on, but it’s something they have spent time and effort towards researching.

5) Possibly true, but this is really just a matter of supply and demand. Sure supply may be increased and demand reduced by these factors, but as the market in any game (without an item sink) matures, this is likely to happen anyway.

6) Item speculators may manipulate prices over the short term, but the sheer size of the TP market will cause item prices to move back to equilibrium over time. People flipping items on the TP are in fact improving the liquidity of the market.

You seem to be arguing for more market regulation without explaining what form this regulation would take. Karma is stable only because it cannot be traded for any other currency and because there are fixed prices on all the items you can buy with it. If this were to change, then you would find it would be as “unstable” as you currently claim gold to be.

Tallenn.9218:

They could easily keep the 30% and still have it completely market based. As in- having buy and sell orders just like everything else. Simply up the transaction fee to 30% (no need for a listing fee, gems don’t take bag space, so you couldn’t abuse the TP for free bag space).

The ONLY reason for keeping the details hidden is to allow them to “fiddle” with the exchange rate.

Where do you apply the 30%? The seller of gems or the buyer? If the buyer, do they pay in gems or in gold?

I haven’t done the math, but I suspect there is a single “base rate” with a 15% fee on each side. That is, gem → gold rate = base rate x 85% and gold → gem rate = base rate x 115%.

While I can see the advantages of having the currency exchange operate using buy and sell orders, I think the potential for short term market manipulation of such a system is a risk that ANet didn’t want to take for an item that (initially) cost someone RL money to buy.

I’ve been doing my part to raise the rate of gems -> gold by converting spare gold into gems.

Making money isn’t too difficult in this game. I’m still only level 70 and I’ve got a decent enough gold balance despite buying 700 gems with gold for the Mad King costume.

Back on point though, I don’t think ANet are actively intervening in the currency exchange (although I can’t prove this), but it seems that player demand is raising the gem → gold rates towards being more competitive with the rates available via gold sellers.

Odaman.8359:

I understand why gold isn’t a flat rate. What I don’t understand is why gems traded for gold are worth 50% less than the other way around. Sure there should be a difference, but 50% seems excessive.

The difference in rates is about 30%, and while there hasn’t been an official statement as to why it exists, the general consensus is that it is there to discourage short-term speculation. That is, if you buy gems with gold, then you need to wait for the rate to rise by a larger margin before you could sell the gems for a profit than if the difference was 5 or 10%.

mrsrachelm.7618:

When I first started flipping, I -had- to start small with small turn overs to build up a bank account I could actually work with. I’m no major player by any means but sometimes slow and steady isn’t a bad way to go about it and maybe the ONLY way someone can start out without sinking RL cash into Gems for fake cash in game…which just seems silly to me if one uses a -lot- of RL funds.

I started the same way… I’m still not a major player by any means, but I now feel a lot more comfortable taking a few risks here and there to get increased profits. In general though, I’m still more likely to go for the quick sale and smaller profit just to minimise the risk of making a loss due to unforeseen market movements.

You will also need to “pick up” the refunded money from the nearest TP, it won’t just be added to your funds automatically.

Buying gold from goldsellers is against the ToS.

The goldselling “industry” is purely there to make a profit from the hard work of the developers and is one of the major contributors to the bot problem in this and other games. As well as using compromised accounts to farm and sell gold, they distort the game’s economy to the detriment of regular players.

ANet’s gem → gold exchange allows players with gold to buy gems instead of spending real money and those with gems to spare to convert those into gold. The rates are driven by player demand on both sides of the exchange.

Also, looking at http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem you will note that at 12 September (the earliest data point), the rate of gems to gold was 100 gems → 19 s 49.6c (or 5129 gems for 10g) while the most recent rate is 100 gems → 61s 70c (or 1621 gems for 10g), so the “goldbuying” power of gems has been increasing since the game launched.

Zelot.8276:

I have noticed a trend aswell prices have droped since the first day of the event but have become stable at current rates.

I have given it some thought as to why and my guess is that demand is way down with more and more players busy with the event rather then at the trade post…

Bots are the main supply of items to the market, their supply doesnt drop but player demand drops because of event = falling prices

I’m not sure that is all of the story… I’ve been trading in a particular crafted item for a while now, and since the halloween event started the buy price has crashed, while the sell price has only been slowly declining. This is great for me, as it’s given me larger margins on this item, but I am wondering about the possible cause.

I’m also noticing a pattern of severe downward spikes in sell listings for some items I’m trading. It seems that there are participants putting small numbers of items up for sale that are severely undercutting existing listings. For example, buy orders @ 2s 92c and sell orders @ 4s 62c, then a listing is made a 3s 16c.

While this is to be expected to some degree as the listing will be bought up and the price will return to it’s “normal” level, what I’m seeing is these downward spikes occuring much more frequently than I’ve seen before for these items. I’m wondering whether someone is trying to trigger a “bandwagon” effect to drive the prices down.

Looking at the quantity listed, maybe he’s priced them lower in order to sell them more quickly… He makes a halfway decent profit and frees up capital for further investment.

@alcopaul:
The point Hippocampus made about the gold → gem exchange rate also applies to the gem → gold exchange rate as the two rates are linked.

If, as you suggest, more people are buying gold from the gold sellers, then that would lead to less gems being available for people who wish to buy them for gold. While I can’t state with any certainty what volume of trade is happening via the official exchange, it seems to me that the rising rate of gems → gold indicates that the “market” is moving in the direction you desire.

Also, “the black market usually know the real value of gold based on its in game acquisition. remember these gold sellers are acquiring gold by playing the game” is quite misleading. Gold sellers are likely acquiring gold by using bots and/or compromising accounts, rather than actually just playing the game.

Ephiny.9831:

Lol I only have 7 gold – I just can’t make any money !

I started flipping goods on the TP eight days ago when I only had 1g 58s to my name. I’m sure haven’t made the sort of profits some people are capable of, but I’m up to almost 2g of net profit.

I’ll give you a quick tip about how I determine what to buy. I take the price I’ll be listing at and divide it by the price I’ll be buying at. If the result is more than 1.33, then I’ll start placing orders for that item (e.g. sell @ 1s36c/buy @ 95c = 1.43). This gives me scope to relist later at a lower price if I need to and still make a profit after deducting listing fees.

5 keys are 450 so 90 gems each. Costs 7 gold for 900 gems so it actually costs 7 gold to open 10 chests.

My mistake, I was using the price for a single key. Will edit my original post.

Esrever.8613:

Gems will go up more than 200% by Christmas but I doubt chest will. Costs 5g to open 10 chests now with gems so you are going to be really disappointed if you think people will open more than the chests they have stored up.

You are correct that keys will indeed be the bottleneck in this process, and I’m guessing a few people may buy extra keys with gems or gold (even I’m tempted to do this), but it’s going to be hard to guess the extent that this will happen.

My personal feeling (and I could be wrong), is that price of chests is about to experience a “market correction” once the anticipated demand fails to materialise.

EDIT: Removed incorrect reference to cost of keys

bombastinator.8965:

Nightwind Of Dwayna.3250:

I also do not understand what in the Sam Hail you are talking about. Pretty sure the answer to the thread title is “No,” though.

look up the pump and dump and market manipulation threads. What we’ve got is an 1890s style stock market. and it’s going in the same direction.

Even if your item was subject to “pump and dump”, the only ways you could have received 3s from a 16s listing is if a) there was a bug, b) you listed the item at a lower price than what you thought you did, or c) you responded to the changing prices and relisted the item at a lower price.

If a) then report the bug to ArenaNet. If b) then check your listing prices more carefully in future.

Wreatch.3812:

buy buy buy in mere hours these will go CRAZY, get in while you can, trust me, and yes i have tens of thousands, so what, if u miss out on the money making bonanza of the century dont come cryin to us.

I operate under the assumption that by the time I hear about an “opportunity” like this, it’s already too late and if I join in then I’m just setting myself up to lose money.

I’m not going to impugn your motives, but your words don’t inspire me to believe that you are acting from altruistic motives.

Ayo Blame.7051:

I’m not certain if this is a bug if it is I’ll gladly submit a bug report in game. However, I’ve been having several issues with the cancelling my bids on the TP – I’m able to cancel the bid but then am not returned my Gold.

Is this some new issue or did anet implement some kind of refund delivery time?

Quick question. Did you check the Pick Up tab of the TP? When I cancel bids, the money is held there.

Aura.1645:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/500-000-Locked-Black-Lion-Chests/first#post473338

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/11qepi/you_guys_always_ask_for_guides_to_make_lots_of/

I win. End of discussion.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/events/halloween-2012

Read the part about unique weapon skins dropping from chests… yes, this is speculation to get ahead of anticipated demand, but there will likely be increased demand for chests. Will it be enough to justify current prices? /shrug

raxx.8914:

WTF! black lion chests just went from 3c to 45c and the supply is dropped from 500k to 95k. They going to be used in the upcoming event or something? did the test server come out recently for private beta testers? Some items have shifted really high lately.

From https://www.guildwars2.com/en/events/halloween-2012

Halloween with the Black Lion Trading Company

Available from October 22 to November 5

All kinds of tricks and treats are coming to the Gem Store this Halloween. Costumes that grant spooky skills, tonics that transform you into ghouls and ghosts, creepy crawly minis to follow you around. And don’t forget to pick up your free devil horns before they disappear!

The Black Lion Chest is getting a spooky upgrade for Halloween. Between October 23 and November 5 each Black Lion Chest you open has a chance to give you one of six exclusive Halloween-themed weapon skins!

emphasis mine

lackofcheese.5617:

As far as I know, what GW2Spidy tracks is in fact the highest buy / lowest sell prices – the averaging is done over time.

I believe they use a “rolling” daily average system. I wouldn’t mind this so much if I could also see the current prices & volumes, so I could more easily determine if some of my items have sold while I’m at work.

If you also look at the volume sell listings, you’ll note that at some points of the graph, there are very few listings (sometimes just the one listing), so it’s not just an effect of averaging.

Spidey is useful in providing trend information not available in the TP interface, but you do need to consider that information carefully before drawing conclusions.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Gems seem to be an exception. But I’m expecting that when ANET introduces another use for lots of gold, people will cash out on their gems to buy it, temporally crashing the gem price. Followed by others panicking and pulling out, crashing the price even more. Once all that panic dies down, you’ll find out how much of the demand for gems is from people wanting to use them, and how much is from people investing in them.

This is why I qualified my statement about my funds held in gems as being somewhat inflation proofed (and I was tempted to go into more detail).

ArenaNet can introduce factors into the system that could increase the desirability of gold leading to the situation you describe. They could also make changes in the gem store that lead to greater demand for gems. Either way, these external factors beyond inflation can be hard to predict.

Having said that, it is already known that ANet are planning on introducing new items to the gem store with the upcoming Halloween update. While the exact nature of these new items aren’t known, it is likely that acquiring gems will become more desirable after the update. (Although, there also seems to be some movement in the gem market in anticipation of this, so if the new items don’t spark sufficient player interest, there gem price could shift downwards.)

/flips coin…

CrazyGoNuts.9536:

Gems have a fixed value, and gold is valued relative to that. Ergo, if the economy is working (meaning if people value things properly, which they do) investing in gems in order to get more gold later is not worthwhile. You will be getting the same purchasing power back except you are paying a 30% tax. This is only a good investment if there is nothing else to invest in and you expect rampant inflation to devalue your money (which is happening now, sadly).

This. Buying gems can be useful as a hedge against gold inflation, but not really a useful form of making profit. I’ve bought a small number of gems as I’ve been levelling, and while I could now sell them back for a “profit”, I’m not likely to do so unless I actually have a use for the gold I would get. Until that time, the gold I have tied up in gems is somewhat “inflation proofed”.

I guess it would depend on how many Badges you can earn via the jumping puzzle compared to spending the same amount of time engaging in actual PvP.

Thinking it through a little more, I think that if you want to allow player speculation on the currency exchange, then you would need to allow buy/sell offer listing rather than just reducing the “transaction cost” differential between the two rates.

With the current exchange it seems that if you make a purchase, it happens at the current rate regardless of the quantity involved. If this is the case, then depending on when the rate is recalculated, it could be possible (with a small transaction fee and large enough transactions) to shift this rate into a position where you could quickly sell again with an immediate profit.

It seems to me that the current system has been set up to provide instant transactions (liquidity) while disallowing (short term) speculation. If you want to allow speculation in the exchange, it would be better for the liquidity to be provided via buy/sell offers (and the actions of speculators/flippers) than use the existing mechanism.

Venge.6893:

If it is indeed 15% then that is Far too high. Currencies exchanges are different than products. IRL a good currency exchange fee is around 2%, and those places don’t profit from the currency itself (Gem selling).

I suspect that the large gap between the two rates is intended to discourage currency speculation. This would also explain why there isn’t the ability to place buy/sell offers on the exchange.

So I guess the question would be, should players be allowed to speculate on the currency exchange? Additionally, what would be the benefits/drawbacks of letting them do so?

Then the price will drop until it is one copper above the highest buy order. Then everything stabilizes.

While this does mean that there there is likely to be an increased supply of the item in the TP (as opposed to a system where the aforementioned player has to choose to trash the item, to hold on to it long enough to vendor it/place it on the nearest TP), I still don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing in and of itself.

Are you arguing that this needs to change so that supply of items on the TP is reduced? If so, explain how this would be better for the economy as a whole.

And why is this bad? Individuals will always place different values on an item, changing the ease of access to sellers will not change this significantly.

Grimwolf.7163:

As far as I can tell, a great simplification of how the system currently works is that the Gem>Gold and Gold>Gem conversion rates are completely separate and based upon how frequently people use either over a period of time.

The graph of gem exchange rates at http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem demonstrates that these 2 rates are indeed linked.

Trading Gems for Gold should decrease the Gold price of Gems for both ways, and vice versa. Currently instead of doing this, people are turning to gold sellers which means that less and less people are trading real-money bought Gems for Gold. This means the supply of Gems is MUCH smaller than what it could be and thus Gems are MUCH more pricey than they should be.

In a FREE Market, these people playing the market to make a profit, and those who now buy gems for real money from A-Net instead of the gold sellers, both drive the price of Gems down. The people making the profit wouldn’t even be able to do that until the prices settle anyway.

This would be fine if the primary concern was to maximise the number of gems that can be bought with in-game gold. What about those people who would like to maximise the amount of gold they can receive for the gems they bought with RL money? I will agree that ideally, the price should stabilize to some kind of equilibrium point, but given an ever-increasing gold supply, that is unlikely to happen (IMO).

NinjaKnight.1340:

I can think of one, the guild bank.

But my point is to show th OP that shutting down mail transfers simply moves the trades elsewhere while punishing the legit players.

You would have to literally shut down ALL methods of inter account trading to completely stop illegalgold transfers.

That is the method I was thinking of too… and I agree, all methods of inter-account trading would need to be shut down or severely limited to completely stop transfers of illegal gold.

My contention was with an earlier statement that gold sellers were already using the TP to transfer gold. I am highly doubtful that this is occurring due to the inefficiencies of doing so when more efficient methods exist.

NinjaKnight.1340:

no just find a thinly traded item, then buy out all the exisiting low listings that prevent the Gold trade. That isn’t a hard thing to find and do.

While that covers one side of the problem, there are still the inefficiencies of paying an up-front listing fee and sales tax to consider. Not insurmountable, but I can easily think of a more efficient way to transfer gold without incurring these costs that does not use the mail system.

Venge.6893:

John Smith.4610:

There has been no price manipulation, there is a transaction fee, I don’t feel these are the same thing.

Then could we get transparency about how the gem prices fluctuate and why the big difference in the two different trades. With Gems>Gold and Gold>Gems usually about a 10~ silver difference last time I looked?

I think this is the big issue for a lot of people. While some are prepared to have faith that there has been no manipulation of the gem/gold and gold/gem exchange rates by ArenaNet, the lack of transparency about how these rates are set leads others to doubt the extent to which the rates are “player driven”.

In my previous post, I referenced the material traders in the original GW. Having seen these in operation, I believe that the currency exchange portion has been set up in a similar fashion with respect to how the rates are determined. I don’t recall people in GW doubting that the buy/sell rates these traders were being manipulated by ANet, but it may be that the real money element to the currency exchange requires more transparency about the rate setting algorithm.

While I personally think that the negatives of this idea outweight the positives, I’m sceptical about the claims of gold selling happening via the TP. If I was to list an item for 100g for a gold seller to buy, I would first need to have 5g in order to list it, and then only receive 90g (and I would also need to find an item that had no other sell orders listed).

While it could be used as workaround if mailing gold to other players was disabled, it seems to me that it would be too inefficient for it to be the current primary method of transferring gold.

Out of curiosity, how many feel that a 100% free market would be a good idea?

I’m relatively happy with the current gem/gold exchange system as it stands, although it would be nice to have some transparency about how the exchange rate algorithm works. Not necessarily the exact formula/values used, but some kind of detail about it would be nice.

While the ability to place buy or sell orders might give players greater confidence in the “honesty” of the market (specifically ANet), it does have its downsides as well. As others have pointed out, it does make it easier for people to manipulate (over the short term), but I think a bigger issue would be the “lag” between purchase and receipt of gold/gems.

That is, unless you accept the current price (for gems or gold), you would have to wait for someone to accept your offer before you were able to use the gems or gold to purchase something. While this is how the rest of the TP operates, I’m not sure many people would accept this with real money. (e.g. “I spent $10 to buy gems to convert to gold, but now I have to wait for someone to buy my gems before I get any gold”).

Yes, with the existing exchange, the buyer of gold or gems is forced to take the current price (or exchange rate if you prefer), but the price is not being directly manipulated by players with large funds, and in addition the “goods” are instantly available for their use.

In some ways, I think of the gem exchange as operating in a similar fashion to the material traders in the original GW. The prices they might bought/sold fluctuated based on supply/demand, but they always had materials available if you wanted them. The analogy fails a little because of the existence of player-to-player trading that (mostly) operated between the margins of the buy/sell prices.

Melk.6958:

The prices won’t equalize until the gold for gem trading equalizes with ArenaNet’s selling price which is way higher than farmers. Prices will only equalize when gem conversion increases by around 75%, meaning…

82.25 silver for 100 gems.

The conversion rate of gems to gold is influenced by player trading, not set by ArenaNet. As the in-game gold supply increases, converting gems will give more gold (assuming there isn’t a matching increase in the supply of gems). This is already happening.

Having said that, even in ArenaNet “intervened” and set a new rate that is competitive to the gold sellers, they would just turn around and cut the price again.

Looking at the market data via http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24350 it does seem like there was some rapid movement in large claw trading at that time, whether it was manipulation is harder to tell.

However, with a market the size of this one, it is hard to control the market for any length of time, and the linked page seems to indicate that prices and volumes for large claws are trending back to where they were before.

Before the game launched, I was trying to find out where the Oceanic population would be based (according to several threads on other forums), but I ended up coming to the conclusion that, for WvW reasons, having the Oceanic population dispersed across many servers would be better than a small number of (un)official Oceanic servers.

With the population for our timezone being concentrated, WvW queues become longer and there really wouldn’t be any challenge due to a lack of opposing force.

Hi, this post is just to mention something I noticed last night as I was browsing through the TP looking for a few upgrades and to see whether anybody has any insights they could add as to why this may be the case.

Firstly, some context. I was planning on taking my level 41 Guardian through AC story mode with a few friends and decided to see if I could pick up some upgrades to a) replace some low level items I still had, and b) pick up some extra toughness and vitality to improve my survivability in the dungeon I was about to attempt.

I first looked at some of my armor slots needing upgrading (shoulders, leggings, boots) and used the filters to look in the level 35 to level 40 range, and entered “Hearty” into the text box. Given I didn’t have a lot of money (having spent 1g at level 40 on the master trait book), the results were discouraging as the cheapest (usable) items for sale were slightly over 15 silver.

I then did a quick check for some weapons using the same filter & search criteria, and found both a sword and scepter upgrade for less than 40 copper each.

Now I have a basic understanding of supply and demand, but I’m trying to understand what is driving this discrepancy in pricing between armor and weapons. They were all of fine (blue) quality, and I realise the hearty affix would be in demand to some extent, but why would armor pieces command approximately 40 times the price of a weapon?

For the armor pieces, the quantity available for sale was in the 15+ range, but I was in a bit of a hurry at the time and didn’t notice how the quantity of weapons listed for sale.

I did place a buy order for some shoulders and noticed that the majority of the existing buy orders were in the 3-4 silver range. For this level of item, 3-4 silver would be a healthy profit above vendor price, 15+ silver is (IMO) overpriced for that level of item even taking the desirability of the stat affix into account.

So I guess I have 2 questions, is this part of a wider phenomenom, in that generally armor is priced more expensively than weapons on the TP (for desirable affixes at least)? Or is it possible that someone has found a small niche in the market where they can try to make some speculative gains? Sadly, it will be a few days before I have time to log in and get some more data to see if this was an isolated case or not.