Is the Guild wars 2 gold to gems exchange fair?

Is the Guild wars 2 gold to gems exchange fair?

Given that the rate is set by supply & demand, I really can't see how it could be much fairer...

is the exchange bettwen canadian dollars and american dollars fair?Yes to both questions since they are diffrent currencies

gems = no sub, playing for free if you wish is fair imo. The exchange rate is balanced to ensure neither market collapses.

I've got no problem with it. Do I wish the gold to gem exchange was more favorable, of course, but it's fair.

No... reasoning, inconsistent exchange.

400 gems can currently be exchanged for 72 gold, but requires 106 gold to buy.

Fair would be the same exchange rate both directions.

Do you mean is the exchange rate fair, or is it fair to be able to buy gold with gems and gems with gold at all? IMO they're two very different questions.

@Danikat.8537 said:Do you mean is the exchange rate fair, or is it fair to be able to buy gold with gems and gems with gold at all? IMO they're two very different questions.

Good question, but I think it was just a complain about how works supply and demand.

@Panda.1967 said:No... reasoning, inconsistent exchange.

400 gems can currently be exchanged for 72 gold, but requires 106 gold to buy.

Fair would be the same exchange rate both directions.

Not really. Unless you think the TP tax is also unfair. Obviously we would all love for it not to be there, but it's a reality. Gems are a commodity, just like anything on the TP, it just has it's own separate marketplace.

@Panda.1967 said:No... reasoning, inconsistent exchange.

400 gems can currently be exchanged for 72 gold, but requires 106 gold to buy.

Fair would be the same exchange rate both directions.

Tell you what: go to a bank with 100 Dollars (or whatever your local currency is) and exchange it for another currency, say Euro. Then exchange the currency you bought back. Not a buyback, a straight up new transaction. Let me know if they gave you 100 bucks back.

(Spoiler: they won't. All small-scale currency exchange take a slice, so the effective rate between selling and buying are different.)

@Panda.1967 said:No... reasoning, inconsistent exchange.

400 gems can currently be exchanged for 72 gold, but requires 106 gold to buy.

Fair would be the same exchange rate both directions.

The price difference is there for two reasons. One is a gold sink. The other is to discourage people from making gold by flipping gems for a profit.

.

Be careful what you ask for. ANet might give it to you.

@Panda.1967 said:No... reasoning, inconsistent exchange.

400 gems can currently be exchanged for 72 gold, but requires 106 gold to buy.

Fair would be the same exchange rate both directions.

I'm not sure what their reasoning on the difference is, but it does make it less attractive to buy out gems to sell at a higher price. Without the difference the cost of gems would definitely be higher. "Taxes" aren't inherently bad.

@Panda.1967 said:No... reasoning, inconsistent exchange.

400 gems can currently be exchanged for 72 gold, but requires 106 gold to buy.

Fair would be the same exchange rate both directions.

ROFL you obviously have never been to a real life currency exchange.As thats how it works in real life too, you buy a different currency at a higher rate than when you sell it back.This is due to inflation, if you had same rate both ways it would crash the market.Like in GW2 we would all exchange gold into gems, but because of that the price of gems would grow much higher, so then due to the higher price in gold we could sell all the gems back and instantly have more gold than before due to the higher price of gems. But now due to selling all the gems their price drops back so now we can buy even more gems than before because we have more gold than at the start and we could go on this way forever.Thats why there have to be such differences when buying and selling a currency, if not each change in the ratio could be easily taken advantage of.However this way only a really huge jump in the ratios makes it worthwhile to exchange back and forth to make a profit.

@Rikimaru.7890 said:

@Panda.1967 said:No... reasoning, inconsistent exchange.

400 gems can currently be exchanged for 72 gold, but requires 106 gold to buy.

Fair would be the same exchange rate both directions.

In real life some of the money 'lost' during the transaction also goes to pay costs - the salary of the person who sold it to you, the rent, lighting, electrics etc. for the shop, internet connection to monitor exchange rates, salary of the people who transport the physical currency between locations and so on.

GW2 simulates that by just deleting it from the game - which (along with similar systems like TP and waypoint fees) balances out all those times gold just appears from nowhere when you kill an enemy or complete an event or whatever. Otherwise we'd have hyperinflation due to all the gold constantly appearing in the system and never being removed.

@Linken.6345 said:is the exchange bettwen canadian dollars and american dollars fair?Yes to both questions since they are diffrent currencies

As a Canadian I say watvfhvcgbnjfffggghhh!Remember that ONE time the CAD was over the USD. I was there for that!

Was pretty cool.

I would say it's fair. In fact that we even the option of changing gold, a thing we get for free, into gems, something we would otherwise need to buy with irl cash, makes it very fair.

Sure the rates go up and down, one hour 800 gems might cost ~230g, then next it might be ~210g, but it's supply and demand. Plus you can always just monitor it to keep an eye on the rates and just buy when the rate is favourable. Sure we'd all love it if we could get 800 gems for 50g, but an in game economy is just like a real life one, it will collapse if things aren't balanced and get out of hand.

Plus gold is easier to get now than it's ever been (AB:ML nerf aside), so of course buying gems now will cost more than it used to years ago.

And what really makes it fair imo, is that in the few games out there which allow you to exchange an in game currency for items that would otherwise cost real money, they would normally use an in game currency that takes 100+ of hours to accumulate enough to get an item that would be £5-10 on it's store. In GW2 at the moment it's ~215g for 800 gems (£8.50ish). If someone really wanted to then 20-30g per hour is very achievable, which would mean enough for 800 gems (£8.50) in around 10 hours or less, which sounds very fair to me.

Heck just with the 2g you get for doing dailies each day would mean 730g in a year which is almost 2800 gems which is about £30, I don't know any other games that would give you £30 of free store currency each year for playing 15 mins a day. Throw in the daily login rewards, mystic coins, laurels etc to convert into gold, and you end up with almost double that!

I don't know if it's fair or not. The prices are not controlled by the players directly. It's automatically adjusted based on supply and demand. The only option we have is to by/sell instantly, which ends up eliminating competition completely because players aren't able to actually set their prices like we can do in the trading post.

But, on the other hand, it might be to prevent the currency exchange from being manipulated.

It's fair that you can exchange gold for gems at all, something we can all the thankful for. And fortunately the exchange rate has more or less stabilised, for a while it seemed as though it would continue to rise indefinitely, but the current 210 - 250g per 800 gems (on average) is reasonable.

It is very fair.

The exchange rate is entirely fair, or at least, it's precisely as fair as any RL currency exchange. It varies with supply & demand and the 'handler' charges a fee, paid for (in this case) by sellers.

The "rate" is the same in both directions. The reason you can't exchange 106 gold for 400 gems and then turn those gems around to get 106 gold back is that ANet charges a fee to each the transaction, just like we see in RL and similar to what we pay when selling on the TP. In other words, you pay about 17-18% when you 'sell' your gold for gems and also 17-18% when you sell gems to buy gold.

These fees prevent people from speculating in gems & discourages hoarding for the sake of profit. And, like TP fees, they also sink enormous amounts of gold from the economy, which helps manage market inflation. (The fees used to be exactly 15%, but that was changed sometime around one of the TP overhauls. I'm not sure why it was changed. I asked John Smith about it, but he wasn't able to tell me -- I'm not sure he was aware of the change though.)

The specific rate varies with supply & demand, as we would expect. It's easy enough to see: whenever BL keys are discounted, the rate spikes about 10-30%, whereas near Christmas (when lots of folks get Gift Cards as a present), the rate usually dips (although ANet has been clever in recent years in maintaining a more interesting set of items in the gem shop during the same period, so the drop isn't as steep as it used to be).

In short, it's 100% "fair" in any meaningful way we could measure fairness objectively. At worst, it's a little surprising to people unfamiliar with RL currency exchange practices or to folks who haven't done the math.

@Panda.1967 said:No... reasoning, inconsistent exchange.

400 gems can currently be exchanged for 72 gold, but requires 106 gold to buy.

Fair would be the same exchange rate both directions.

It's not symmetrical to act as a gold sink and to discourage market manipulators from "playing" with the exchange rate.

No idea. It is claimed that supply and demand dictates these prices and they seem to change very often, i've seen values change on a minute by minute basis.Now whether this is actually done the way they claim or if extra, hidden, factors kick in that artificially pushes prices one way or another, we simply do not know. Kind of have to take anet on their word for it, but i don't recall anything reall scummy having happend over the last 5 years. If there was something funky with this system it may have been found out a lot sooner already.

Gems to gold will always yield a better return rate than gold to gems, because gems to gold is the premium option, simple as that.

If you want to get gems without paying for them with real money, I think the premium exchange rate you have to pay is perfectly reasonable.

As far as the actual exchange rate, it's all down to how many gems have been exchanged. This is why you see massive spikes in the gold to gem rate when new gem store items are released (because so many people convert gold to gems, increasing demand thus increasing the gold price per gem)

@Panda.1967 said:No... reasoning, inconsistent exchange.

400 gems can currently be exchanged for 72 gold, but requires 106 gold to buy.

Fair would be the same exchange rate both directions.

Well to be fair gems cost real cash , b> @Behellagh.1468 said:

@Panda.1967 said:No... reasoning, inconsistent exchange.

400 gems can currently be exchanged for 72 gold, but requires 106 gold to buy.

Fair would be the same exchange rate both directions.

This, buy 600gems for 1000g and Next week , sell 600gems for 1500g :p

The exchange gems to gold is way always more to avoid manipulation and reward gem sellers

gold to gems exchange rates are very fair . as they are set by the players and not anet . this is something you just need to always keep eyes on . so you can buy low gems and when they go up in gems prices . just hold out and wait for them to drop . or if it is something you really want that is on sale or something could always do some node farming and get the gold and put them to gems that way . I do that a lot