Guild Wars 2

But you haven’t explained how market speculation affects price!

But that kind of activity isn’t market speculation. Market speculation doesn’t affect price unless huge amounts of supply is removed in anticipation like the mats you can trade for event boxes removes all the lower cost supply.

There’s been interviews and statements from Colin, I think, that stated that.

There was a saying that was popular back then was the suggestion board was where threads went to die. Active threads discussing a suggestion not starting on that board would come to a virtual halt after it was moved.

Saylu.8271:

No. Market speculation can happen on all type of goods. Monetary devaluation can cause inflation but not necessarily.

Describe an example of what describe as market speculation. To me market speculation is buying up a supply of an item I expect to shoot up in price due to some future event. Like players buying unidentified dyes because of rumors of dye changes in the Chinese version of the game and cashing in when word came about dye changes in our version.

What’s been going on with some precursors isn’t speculation. It’s buying all supply and setting a new higher price. That’s straight forward manipulation. Unless they have an unlimited amount of gold they can’t control supply for long and prices will drop until rate of supply is balanced with those who can afford that price.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

1,000 gems is the price for an unlimited gathering tool; it replaces consumable multi-use items that might need to be repurchased for a few silver perhaps 3x/day (representing mining 100 nodes every day), i.e. 1000 gems to replace something that is worth 15s/day (I ignore the convenience aspects). That’s less than 2 gems per day.

But that replaces an item that cost coin, not gems. The suggestion was to make an unlimited item that cost gems that replaces a consumable item that cost gems.

Don’t try to equate cost of unlimited gathering tool in gold that it would cost to convert to gems. ANet doesn’t price items in relation to the exchange, only cash value.

Inflation is ONLY when currency loses it’s value. Everything becomes more expensive, not just luxury items and especially basic items.

I would rather have more armor of all types, skimpy and non-skimpy, as attainable for free. I would also like more pants and skirts without the trench coats.

Skugga.5298:

Lishtenbird.2814:

Skugga.5298:

There is only 1 big economy problem in this game and that is the gem store !

As long as they have their gem store , they will nerf every farming spot, you’ll keep getting meaningless loot, and every new update will be behind the gem store.

Might aswell login open the gem store and just play that game instead because that’s what they want. “We made a game for the players!”, Lol ! During that manifesto they should have phrased it "We made a store for the stupid :`) ! ".

FYI: if they remove gemstore, they’ll have to shut down this game after the Festival and fire all the staff.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

They can keep the game running with X-packs. It’s that simple.
No need to apologize, you can break my bubble :`)

Which doesn’t jive with their LS plans.

Pop.

They ban them as they are reported. Just keep reporting and blocking them.

Transmutation charges are currently 24-30 gems a piece. You need 6 to do a full set of armor. What you are suggesting at 2000 gems that most players would only ever buy 66-83 charges in their lifetime in the game or 11 to 12 full armor remaps or roughly two per original costume slot.

But the Gem Shop’s clientele for charges are those who love skinning. To me this means 2000 gems is too low and in the long run ANet would lose money offering such an item.

City of Heroes’ Consignment House style market did show the time and price of the last five transactions. It gave you the information to judge what a fair price was and how frequently sales occurred. It still didn’t tell you the amount sold at each transaction so you don’t quite have a handle on volume but include a 24hr total volume and running average transaction price on our TP would be very informative.

1) Rewards. Devs can measure the total amount of player hours doing activity X and set the rewards to what they deem to be at an appropriate level. When players start getting more rewards per hour at activity X than the devs thought was appropriate, such as speedrunning dungeon paths, knobs get turned down or limitations imposed.

2) Having 7 accounts is more about overcoming storage limitations than doing anything diabolical. If you are buying lots of goods to sell later, you will need a place to warehouse them.

TP doesn’t cause inflation since, as pointed out by others, it removes 15% of the payment from the economy. What the TP can do is shift wealth from those who foolishly use the TP like an NPC vendor to those who understand you can make a little money working the gap between high bid and low sell. And yes this can increase the price of ultra low supplied, highly desired items since the price will rise to where there are just enough buyers for the supply. But that’s supply and demand for you.

3) It’s a service. Not everybody knows an elite team of crack players to show them the ropes. As long as the seller fulfills their commitment letting the payer got the exclusive rewards doing that path whatever they may be, I don’t have a problem.

We don’t see completed transactions or the price they were executed at. Perhaps if we did there wouldn’t be so much angst over precursor prices if we can see most are going off at prices closer to high bid than low sell.

The ratio between the two rates is the Gem to Gold rate is 72.25% of the Gold to Gem rate. This is 0.85 × 0.85.

In reality there is only one exchange rate. When you buy Gems, the Gold you are paying is first taxed at 15% and then this singular exchange rate is used to determine the number of Gems you get with the remaining 85%. When you buy Gold from the exchange, the singular exchange rate is used to determine the amount of Gold you will get from Gems and then 15% is deducted, leaving you with remaining 85%.

Rather have basic “swimwear” underclothes than Blade & Soul’s lingerie and loin cloths.

And like a number of other precursors, supply dropped to zero which allows the first seller to set the new price. Other sellers come along and undercut that price either be a little or a lot. Buys may increase their bids establishing a new lower range that was as high or higher than the low sell before the supply dropped to zero. As more and more are posted for sale, price should drop to near the old price, but likely still higher than where it was.

It has already dropped 400g from it’s 700g spike in a few days. Still a 300g (38%) spike isn’t nothing to sneeze at.

Now just under 1300g with one appearing to sell for 1111.1111g today.

Redenaz.8631:

Currently, a Character Slot costs about 56.8 gold, or $10. (USD) You can convert gold to gems via the Black Lion Trading Post window. (Press [O] in game to open it.)

Actually it’s $10 per slot or as I write this 78.5g if you are converting from gold to gems. I think you Redenaz was looking at the gem to gold rate which is much lower. That much gold for 3 slots is like 3 months at my casual pace of roughly 2.5g per 2 hours a night. But I don’t play to maximize my gold collecting.

The core development started in 2007 during Vista’s reign and if you remember a lot of gamers weren’t all that impressed by the promise of Dx10. Also quad cores were the top end but not prevalent in gaming yet. So the game was designed around XP, Dx9 and minimum dual core but quads were supported. 64-bit XP wasn’t widely adopted either so 32-bit. 64-bit would allow more assets to remain in memory rather than discarded and streamed of disk but with the OS caching the drive those discarded assets may still be in memory so not as slow as if it only fetched them directly from the drive so more memory could still be helpful.

But since adventuring along in the wilderness does generate good enough framerates with enough CPU and GPU, the drop in frame rate suggests the problem may not be the setup for rendering, which Mantle would help, but overhead tracking other players in visual/audible range during each rendering pass.

The Gem Shop aka cash shop is what pays the bills post launch. Without a steady stream of income from the Gem Shop through gem purchases, the game folds. They may alter that approach at some point, one stock analyst reports an expansion in 2015, but as of now and since the game launched, selling gems for cash rather than annual paid expansions or a subscription is the income model they chose.

Love it or hate it, that’s the way it is. Complaining that they promote it, whether buying gems for items or for gold, is a waste of time. They simply cannot alter their income model quickly, not so soon after a launch in a major market.

frans.8092:

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

They don’t care if you use the cash shop, or somebody else, because every gem you exchange for gold was once bought with cash.

Except that isn’t the truth. The Exchange was founded with an enormous amount of gems at launch, according to John Smith. While the majority of the gold that gets paid for gems is likely from players, most of the gems you get from paying gold are likely still the original ones the exchange had at launch.

That works for messaging but not those who will follow you about and interfere with your game play. “But I’m not doing anything wrong, it’s an open world, so it’s just coincidence that I’m killing all those critters you seem to be heading toward first.”

Pics from back then don’t reflect the game as it is today in China. There was a lot of experimentation during the closed betas.

I wouldn’t mind a pair of pants but all we get are skirts and trench coats. Then again it’s not like that isn’t a fantasy trope.

frans.8092:

Nothing ANet can do will help against phishing.

Thought this was fitting when I saw it last Monday.

Personally I haven’t seen any message from ANet in game promoting the Gem Shop or the Gem to Gold. Not at login, not during zoning and not during general play. Maybe I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time or I don’t have that chat channel mapped to my main.

But players have complained on the forums that they hadn’t seen the limited time return of certain popular items to the Gem Shop thus missing them, regardless of news posts or info on the launcher about them. Maybe this is a way ANet is trying to make sure players are notified.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Besides, even though ANet claims that the conversion rate is set by the market, we don’t know that. There is no transparency.

So you believe they manually set it minute to minute?

Aidan Savage.2078:

Behellagh.1468:

ANet doesn’t set gem to gold ratio, not directly. They set up a system to handle setting the rates based on selling gold for gems and vice versa.

They set the initial rate, but after that point, the gem -> gold and gold -> gem rates are 100% managed by players.

And that’s what I said.

Silvia.9130:

Playing the game normal way I don’t manage to make more than 100gxmonth at the moment (I don’t flip LT, I run dungeons.) and the feeling that unless some luck (that won’t happen) will give me my precursor, I will never manage to have enough money to buy Dusk (because its price keeps going up and by the time I’ll have 1500 g (over 1 year) the price might be double) is pretty much killing my will to do much in this game.

That’s about as much as I make, and if I didn’t spend most of it on Gems, I would easily have enough for a precursor now. Of course since I don’t do dungeons I still won’t have what I need to craft Twilight.

The problem with prices of extremely limited items is because the ratio of people who don’t understand how to use the TP, they are using it like an NPC vendor, to people who do understand, acting as a player vendor, is to high. I know they are a source of much hatred but if the majority of players didn’t give them the opportunity to skim a little money by acting as the middleman, the wealth distribution wouldn’t be so skewed so 1000g precursors or 3000g legendaries wouldn’t be a viable price point.

Then we have speculators. How many people bought Thick Leather Sections at 9-10c during the week we knew the Bazaar was returning and doubled their money? You didn’t need a crystal ball for that. While it’s not the same as flipping it was shifting mats from those who didn’t know better to those that did only to sell them back to those who didn’t know better.

Between the champ bag change last September and the Scarlet invasions, a huge amount of coin was dumped into the economy until they started to nerf champ bags. This led to the development and overuse of the Champ Trains which in low level zones, weren’t necessarily a “good thing”.

The Champ loot boost is a prime example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

To keep the game’s economy healthy you need to balance coin added to the game among active players to coin removed by the various sinks. Same is true with items dropped but between salvage and forging a lot of excess can be removed.

So any activity that enough people participate in that spikes the amount of coin injected into the game will get nerfed. So speedrunning a particular Dungeon Path over all others, problem. Champ Train, problem. Farming boss chests, problem.

And this is all done because of the persistent belief that everything in the Gem Shop should be “free” if only you had enough gold. But it’s the persistent use of the Gold to Gem conversion that has raised the exchange rate so it’s increasingly difficult to gather enough gold to do so. Which generate threads about how grindy the game is.

If players surrender the belief that “everything” in the Gem Shop should be free and accept the notion that you could supplement or avoid buying Gems for the occasional item then players may not feel the need to “grind” anything, ANet wouldn’t need to nerf the grind activities and the exchange rate wouldn’t be so high.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Because they want you to use the cash shop. I’ve been saying this for months.

NA/EU are in the final phases of a money grab. They don’t need those regions now that they have China.

ANet doesn’t set gem to gold ratio, not directly. They set up a system to handle setting the rates based on selling gold for gems and vice versa.

I personally think that the restriction on Ascended was a compromise between vertical progression and making sure you couldn’t simply buy one. If you want it, vertical progression, so badly then grind it out.

Legendary on the other hand was the penultimate “rare” weapon at game launch and since precursors are randomly dropped, you may get one you can’t use but have the ability to craft it into a Legendary, that you also can’t use, so making it salable was a way to balance the RNG aspect of precursor drops.

Looks good from my vantage point. Only downside is the i5-4690 is not a K part so it is not overclockable. But if you don’t plan on overclocking, who cares.

Well there are 8 available

2000g
1999.9999g
1999.9998g
1999.9997g
1549g
1500g
1450.0397g
1300g

While it’s true there is no cost to keep that 2000g one on the market, the list does show another reason why prices spike when supply gets low. Over priced items get exposed.

Major Rune of the Scholar is currently around 20s. There are 5 at 4.9957g and 20 others 1g and over and another 21 over 99s. If the current supply drops in half, the price will be over 60s. All of that is already set up in the sell orders. Drop supply by 116, price triples. It’s not inflation. Maybe speculation. Maybe storage. Maybe price guesses in the early days of the TP since there was no info about what a good price would be. Who knows. But it’s there, just waiting for a run on supply.

Nope. The player base is somewhat divided whether it should be added or dueling parties should just go and do 1 on 1 PvP in the mists. At least there it would be a matter of skill and not equipment or level differences.

phys.7689:

tolunart.2095:

Behellagh.1468:

And now it’s back down to 1295g, was 1200g before the spike and one was sole for 1150g a couple of hours ago.

Obviously, the cartel wants to distract players before making the minimum price 2500g next week.

100 gold increase in one week is pretty big dif. About 8-9%
That’s actually really sizable

And my point was Dusk was 1200g, shot to 2000g and the price has decayed back down to 1295g (now 1290g) in only 3 days. What will it be in a week? Back down to 1200g or below?

The thread was started because someone was outraged that there was a 67% price spike and how this was the end times. That it was a sign of out of control inflation (inflation doesn’t happen overnight) with precursors. Has there been inflation? Yes, a year ago Dusk was 625g range with a supply of 22. The 1290g is with a supply of 11 now. But as more go on sale, sellers will match or undercut the low sell price and the sell price will fall. High bids will fall to allow a flip margin which increases the amount available to undercut.

But if supply and price stabilizes, that means that’s the price the market can now bear.

It unbalances the economy as speed runners became too good in finding the fastest path to repeatedly run.

Primary reason for multiple currencies is to tie specific rewards to specific activities. You can’t buy that dungeon armor if you don’t run that dungeon. If you don’t do events or renowned hearts, you don’t get Karma to spend at Karma vendors who unlock from completing events. Just two examples.

Well you included a quote from me so … you can understand why you seemed to imply me.

And now it’s back down to 1295g, was 1200g before the spike and one was sole for 1150g a couple of hours ago.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Behellagh.1468:

….. If you ask why they grind they will say to earn gold to buy enough gems to buy that thing at the Gem Shop….

And these guys are probably also the ones who complain that gem prices are too high and rising. Guess what, because people are discouraging others from buying gems with real money to bring down the price. Without them, the gem price would keep on rising with no limits.

Other than supporting ArenaNet, players who bought gems with real money are also keeping gold sellers out of business. Remember? The ones who keep messaging and annoying you in the game?

Fine if you don’t praise them for supporting your game, but you should at least stop persecuting them.

Dark, I’m all for encouraging players to buy gems with cash. I thought that was clear in my first post.

Just started to get this.

“There was an error.”

Anyone else seeing this? I’m using chrome in windows.

It’s just the OP has noticed, and I assume others like myself have noticed, screen shots of that notice being posted in all the treads dealing with perceived poor loot or the removal of train champs in starting zones. And yes it’s being used as ammunition.

But a lot of that animosity is the side effect of the false belief that a player can easily get everything from the gem store for free. Key word, easily.

It’s in pursuit of this false belief that leads to grinding which in turn launches rants against grinding. If you ask why they grind they will say to earn gold to buy enough gems to buy that thing at the Gem Shop or to buy that high demand item on the TP whose drop rate is truly rare so naturally it’s priced as high as the market can bear.

Now maybe other MMOs (WoW) everyone can eventually get access to all the “good” stuff if they run raids enough times but this game hearkens back to the days of loot tables in the back of the DMG coupled with a TP that allows players to sell what they don’t want to players who do. Everyone who wants a +5 Holy Avenger aren’t going to get one dropped on them if only they play long enough.

The exchange isn’t bringing in a lot of gold from nothing. The vast majority of it is gold players used to by gems. On top of it the gold is sunk twice, once going into the exchange and once coming out which is how we get the difference between the two exchange rates.

“New” gold only comes from drops, vendors when you sell to them, achievement chests and the occasional bag of coins from BL Chests. It doesn’t come from selling gems.

Yes well GW2 is still number 2 in income at NCSOFT for the games they list, excluding income from royalties which should popup next quarter under royalties. Just don’t expect GW2’s direct income to go up from China as listed in the quarterly report.

But I imagine that NCSOFT does have a preferred income per employee that they would like their games to hit. And if it wasn’t for China their first quarter would have been horrible. Worse in nearly 3 years.

But the thread is about advertising the Gem to Gold service. When I started at the beginning of December 2013, a $25 gem card got you about 25 gold.

Chase.8415:

For the millionth time, buying gems with gold still generates revune for ArenaNet, as all gems bought with gold were originally sold from player who bought gems with cash.

Except that’s not the case. The Exchange was stocked with a massive supply of gems and a little amount of gold at launch. While it’s true that most of the gold you get from selling gems was originally from players, the percentage of gems that a player gets that were added to the exchange by another player has been increasing as time goes on, it’s likely not even at 50% yet.

It most certainly isn’t “all”.

Except that was the whole purpose of having the exchange in the first place. The rate is high enough now that a $25 gem card is worth around 150 gold. Evon’s weekly post is all about what to buy with gems, preferably gems bought with cash, and gold is one of those things. Gold is the gift card of Tyria.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell. The Gold to Gems side of the exchange was set up to finance the Gem to Gold side. It’s designed so that as long as players convert gold rather than convert gems, the rate will rise, faster and faster, thus requiring more gold for similarly priced items from 6 months ago. This is an attempt to ween players from gold to gem and encourage them to crack open their wallets and pay some cash. But instead players are desperately looking for a way to get more in game gold to buy gems the buy the nifty doohickey just introduced at the Gem Shop. But the devs are NEVER going to increase the drop rate of coin into the game and nerf any activity that perverts gameplay for the almighty loot.

So we have this disconnect. ANet needs players to buy gems with cash. Doesn’t have to be a lot of players, but I assume they do have goals they are trying to meet in terms of quarterly income. And we have players who only want everything in the Gem Shop for “free” by earning in game gold. Except all the use of in game gold to buy items from the Gem Shop has now made it increasingly difficult to buy items from the Gem Shop using only gold.

Irresistible Force … Immovable Object

Your choices are spend a little money, complain about it or leave. Of course the 3rd choice leaves you only F2P MMOs with paywalls that deny you actual content, dress you in drab rags and give you a lunch sack size inventory or a P2P MMO with a monthly fee in the $140-180 a year range that will still charge you for exclusive DLC.

Going from 1000 to 30 does that to the price. They were only 40c at the start of the year.