What do you mean by “why does the buyer of gem in the currency exchange get the better deal and not the seller of gems”?
Are you saying “why does it cost so little gold to buy gems / why do you get so little gold when you sell gems”?
Allegedly it’s based on supply and demand. It’s not a straight trade, though, when you buy or sell gems you’re not trading with another player. You’re trading with the game at a price set by ArenaNet, which I believe fluctuates based on how many people are buying and selling.
I do agree that it is strangely cheap. I’m not even level cap yet and I’ve already bought 2000 gems for gold, that’s enough to buy everything I have any interest in buying, thus guaranteeing that ArenaNet won’t get any money from me in the cash shop. Conversely, if you were buying gems to sell for gold, it’s insanely expensive. e.g. if you look at an expensive purchase, like the 100g Commander tome, it would currently cost you almost $500!!
Their “kway” pronunciation cracked me up, too.
Glad to know it wasn’t just me.
Is there any part of the world where “quay” is actually pronounced “kway” rather than “key”?
They really should indicate somewhere on their prices that it is for 100 gems.
Indeed. I avoided buying gems for gold for a while because I thought it was insanely expensive. Then I discovered the price was per 100, realized it was actually insanely cheap, and went crazy spending all my spare coin on gems.
If you purchased gems for real money thinking that you’d be able to sell them for 20-something silver each, you’d be rather peeved, I would think.
You sure about that?
If you look at the historical prices on http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem they certainly seem to be in perfect lockstep to each other? I was under the impression that there was a single true price, and that the difference between the two exchange rates was the commission on the trades?
From my observation yes. The graph does look like to be similar but the actual value isn’t.
For example, during my play time, the value usually plays around like this:
- Silver to Gem is 24s to 100 Gems; and
- Gem to Silver is 100 Gems to 21s
If they are tied together, converting Silver to Gem and Gem to Silver should net the same value. So if I convert 24s to 100 Gems, then right then and there convert that 100 Gems back to silver, I should get 24s – but I only get 21s.
There’s a commission. Selling gems nets you about 72% of what you would have paid to buy those gems, which would be consistent with a 15% commission on both transactions (0.85 × 0.85 = 0.7225)
Also, you have to remember that the exchange rate for “silver to gem” and “gem to silver” are separate. They don’t affect each other, not like in the real-world wherein two-way exchanging affects the value because they share the same computation.
You sure about that?
If you look at the historical prices on http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem they certainly seem to be in perfect lockstep to each other? I was under the impression that there was a single true price, and that the difference between the two exchange rates was the commission on the trades?
actually you’ll only get 1.44 Gold
Correct.
So please be aware, that at current prices, you would have to be absolutely blithering pants-on-head insane to buy gems for real money, and sell them for gold.
One can get most vistas without doing a jumping puzzle.
You know what has repeatedly annoyed me, though? Vistas that look like jumping puzzles.. but aren’t. The vistas where you can painstakingly jump halfway up to where you want to be, and then you fall off, and try again, and again, and get stuck, and scratch your head, and poke around for ten minutes.. and then discover that if you approach from the other direction, it’s a leisurely stroll up a gentle hill to the vista.
Swear they put those fake jumping puzzles in just to annoy us.