Gem prices are going out of control

[Zera.9435]

3 hours ago, Solvar.7953 said:

I do think WV has added more gold to the game - you still get ~2 gold/day if you do the dailies (1 from daily chest, and another for 30 AA, and you get more than 30 AA if you do the dailies).  And then they added weeklies which add another 750 AA (or 25 gold).  And this does not even include the discounted gold that costs less than 30 AA.

One pretty quickly buys all the non gold items from the WV, so is left making ~50 gold/week doing dailies/weeklies.  If Anet wants to reduce gold coming into the game, they should add more repeatable non gold options to the WV that are actually worthwhile.

 

Everyone please calm down. If you have an abundance of gold, give it to me. I will actually put it to use instead of hoarding it like the TP barons.

[illuminati.8453]

All that matters is where the gold is coming from.  The reasons for conversion can vary, but the means to convert should be very much under control in a healthy economy.   There is no doubt ANet has pumped more gold into the system and what the outcome is of that injection remains to be seen.  This could very well be a result of that stimulus.  

This doesn't mean there is a problem.  ANet could have seen they needed to push a certain wealth level of player into a possible gem purchaser and to do that they needed to give them enough gold for that player to see value in the transaction (and hopefully turn them into a regular gem holder, both via gold and cash).  

Edited November 30, 2023 by illuminati.8453

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

there's a few misconceptions here , but i'll try to unravel a few of them.

 

first of all, while the wizard's vault has increased the liquid gold supply in the game (that is, gold that isn't traded with a fee), i think it hasn't increased the overall gold in the game. most of the gold in the game came from players buying gold with gems/real money to begin with, since some players have really good jobs and i've seen someone blow $100/a week on this game before, which isn't that much when you make $10k/mo and that's like, starter pay for some high-end jobs.

 

however, keep in mind most veteran players did this a long time ago, and don't do it anymore for various reasons. for example, they might already have their stockpile built up, or maybe they're fully maxed out and just have alot of spare gold sitting around because of that, or maybe they have some issues with how the game is being managed, or the quality of the content being introduced, and so on, as well as the state of the world since covid hit.

 

the gold produced from liquid sources like fractals and the wizard's vault, seems like alot but is very small in comparison to the stockpiles of hundreds of millions of gold that players have. i've seen players who just have 80k-100k gold sitting around in their wallet, not even counting their bank or materials.

 

secondly, the bulk of gold in the econemy is traded between players, by far. especially by those who stockpiled rare items like mystic coins and even leather back when they were just sold to npcs when they were mere silvers. i've seen players who have 20+ mules full of items such as mystic coins, created back near the start of the game when the cost of character slots was very cheap, so storing excess items in this way was very efficient. there's players who make a habit of never npc'ing anything, "just in case".

 

that's to say nothing about flipping on the trading post, which has been known for making small fortunes in the past.

 

it may seem like traded gold doesn't matter, compared to liquid gold, but remember this still ends up in the gold to gems conversion. its just someone else putting it in there instead of you, and thus the prices go up and you have to pay an increased cost when converting your gold to gems. players can currently make enough gold to buy a legendary every few weeks, so its really not that hard for them to turn it around into gemstore items instead, especially if they're already maxed out on equipment.

 

there is definitely "gold creep" that has become a real problem; the econemy has been unmanaged for so long that its essentially gone out of control, and some items cost a thousand times more from the trading post than they sell to a vendor for, which is a really bad sign, but liquid gold isn't the cause.

 

the core issue is that most gem sales for real money come from new players, and new player uptake has some serious ongoing issues that keep getting ignored. (the main reason cited to me by people i invited to the game was the complexity of the living world model.)

Edited November 30, 2023 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[Linken.6345]

4 minutes ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

there's a few misconceptions here , but i'll try to unravel a few of them.

 

first of all, while the wizard's vault has increased the liquid gold supply in the game (that is, gold that isn't traded with a fee), i think it hasn't increased the overall gold in the game. most of the gold in the game came from players buying gold with gems/real money to begin with, since some players have really good jobs and i've seen someone blow $100/a week on this game before, which isn't that much when you make $10k/mo and that's like, starter pay for some high-end jobs.

Snip

That is not how it works all the gold that get bought for real life cash was created by players playing the game then sold to the exchange for gems.

The first gems in the pool was introduced by Anet then filled by players that bought with real cash and traded for gold.

4 minutes ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

the gold produced from liquid sources like fractals and the wizard's vault, seems like alot but is very small in comparison to the stockpiles of hundreds of millions of gold that players have. i've seen players who just have 80k-100k gold sitting around in their wallet, not even counting their bank or materials.

Sure given alot of people dont play fractas the majority of the gold are made from open world and daily completions spread over all of the player base as a whole I would guess

Edited November 30, 2023 by Linken.6345

[Zok.4956]

4 minutes ago, Holmindeboks.3490 said:

I wish i had 100k gold and a bank full of worth 1 million gold and everything maxed out and infinite gems. Then i can try what i really liked in game. For now its just ???

When I was a new and poor player in GW2, I could play anything I wanted in the game. So I did it and had fun from the start.

You don't have to wait until you're rich to play the content you enjoy in the game. Just try it out.

[Marshall Sed.8643]

38 minutes ago, Holmindeboks.3490 said:

Rich ppl are the most greedy ones.  I wish i had 100k gold and a bank full of worth 1 million gold and everything maxed out and infinite gems. Then i can try what i really liked in game.

Play the game, completely learn your profession, gear up as you go along and then do all of the high-end endgame content.  You'll get everything you need or want.

As to the last sentence....how do you know you "really like" if you aren't up to the standard to try it?  You only NEED ascended/legendary armour for fractals because of AR in the higher levels. 

 

 

[Danikat.8537]

1 hour ago, Linken.6345 said:

That is not how it works all the gold that get bought for real life cash was created by players playing the game then sold to the exchange for gems.

The first gems in the pool was introduced by Anet then filled by players that bought with real cash and traded for gold.

That's how I've always been told it works as well. I've not seen it myself but apparently it is possible for the exchange to run out of either gold or gems, but it's unlikely because the exchange rate shifting based on demand discourages more people converting the same way and encourages converting the other way (for example recently when gems have gotten very expensive gold has been much cheaper, at the peak 250g was about £7.50, normally it's closer to £15-20 so it was a very good time to convert gems into gold). Someone in my guild says they remember it running out of gold during the first Halloween in 2012.
 

1 hour ago, Holmindeboks.3490 said:

This makes me somewhat mad/disappointed. And it will take years to get rich. I just tried the game again and try to be positive overall. But these rich players have so much gold. Probably only for show-off. Rich ppl are the most greedy ones.  I wish i had 100k gold and a bank full of worth 1 million gold and everything maxed out and infinite gems. Then i can try what i really liked in game. For now its just ???  And for open world legendary armor i need soto. I hope legendary armor will be trade able through the trading post. 

Having a lot of gold will definitely be just to show off, because there's nothing else to do with it. You can get a full set of exotics relatively cheaply (or free from some places) and even ascended equipment, which is the best you can get, can be obtained without using gold (for example getting it from the wizards vault or from achievements). There's no area of the game which requires a lot of gold to play, the more expensive equipment is just for skins.

[Sovarica.4368]

Gold to gem probably won't readjust itself until January if we're lucky. But yea.. I miss the early years of gw2 the gold to gem was crazy good and was the perfect moment in time to build up your account with upgrades like character slots and bank slots

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

3 hours ago, Sovarica.4368 said:

Gold to gem probably won't readjust itself until January if we're lucky. But yea.. I miss the early years of gw2 the gold to gem was crazy good and was the perfect moment in time to build up your account with upgrades like character slots and bank slots

Right now the conversion rate is ~25% above the average from before the price spike(~45g for 100gem compared to ~35g for 100gem), so now with the end of the sales it is falling down rather quickly.

[Linken.6345]

3 hours ago, Sovarica.4368 said:

Gold to gem probably won't readjust itself until January if we're lucky. But yea.. I miss the early years of gw2 the gold to gem was crazy good and was the perfect moment in time to build up your account with upgrades like character slots and bank slots

Gold was also alot harder to come by at the begining of the game so hence why the gem then costed so little aswell.

[Trejgon.9367]

On 11/27/2023 at 4:25 PM, Farohna.6247 said:

Same reason they up fuel prices at holiday times 😑... because they know people will want to buy more at that time.  They definitely up the exchange rate at festival/holiday times and during sales.  One could say that's consumer demand,  but it's really to get you to swipe the card and not use in game gold.   Real money vs in-game.  

Are you really trying to imply in here, that AN has an employee manually adjusting these prices? common xD

Common AN has already explained how currency exchange works, it's on the wiki, with links to sources, it's baffling how despite that people make crap up about it.

[Danikat.8537]

10 minutes ago, Linken.6345 said:

Gold was also alot harder to come by at the begining of the game so hence why the gem then costed so little aswell.

I remember a few weeks after launch working out that it would be cheaper to convert gold to gems and buy a 3-pack of minis (most likely giving me 2 blues and a green) than to buy the minis from the Trading Post, but I wasn't able to get enough gold to do that before the price of gems started going up. The first 'spike' I remember was around Halloween 2012, which I think was the first time new stuff got added to the gem store after launch, and possibly the first big farming opportunity, although the Labyrinth wasn't as profitable then as it is now. I still kind of wish I'd converted as much gold to gems as I could and then converted it back during Halloween because I could have made a lot of gold (even with the taxes on both transactions), but I didn't know that until later.

[Manasa Devi.7958]

9 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

I still kind of wish I'd converted as much gold to gems as I could and then converted it back during Halloween because I could have made a lot of gold (even with the taxes on both transactions), but I didn't know that until later.

That's what I did, I converted all the early gold I made into gems at ridiculously cheap rates. I'm talking about the really early days, when the TP was still having a lot of issues and most players couldn't use it at all. I didn't spend any gold at all except on gathering tools and salvage kits, crafting all my own gear all the way to 80 using found materials, and then buying karma armor in Orr.

Edited November 30, 2023 by Manasa Devi.7958

[Holmindeboks.3490]

4 hours ago, Danikat.8537 said:

That's how I've always been told it works as well. I've not seen it myself but apparently it is possible for the exchange to run out of either gold or gems, but it's unlikely because the exchange rate shifting based on demand discourages more people converting the same way and encourages converting the other way (for example recently when gems have gotten very expensive gold has been much cheaper, at the peak 250g was about £7.50, normally it's closer to £15-20 so it was a very good time to convert gems into gold). Someone in my guild says they remember it running out of gold during the first Halloween in 2012.
 

Having a lot of gold will definitely be just to show off, because there's nothing else to do with it. You can get a full set of exotics relatively cheaply (or free from some places) and even ascended equipment, which is the best you can get, can be obtained without using gold (for example getting it from the wizards vault or from achievements). There's no area of the game which requires a lot of gold to play, the more expensive equipment is just for skins.

The only thing i would like is swapping stats for free and try some builds. Now i can only make my own builds. But the gear stays the same. Further i like to play with dyes. And 

 

to be continued

[Doggie.3184]

Lack of $$$ whales. 🥺

Everyone sinking all their gold into rerolling. Probably to Necro.

Edited November 30, 2023 by Doggie.3184

[Solvar.7953]

It is also worth considering that compared to when the game first came out, getting gold through playing the game (not dailies) has become easier.  New rewards/meta has increased gold supply, but players also better understand how to get gold (fast farming guides, etc).  However, most worth is not direct gold drops, but rather items/materials one might sell on the TP, in which the transaction fees suck some gold out of the economy and other players need to have gotten actual gold through some means to buy those items.

It would be interesting to know how much actual gold is added by various sources.  I have a feeling the dailies/weeklies may be a big portion - that isn't to say it is the fastest way to gain wealth, but I don't I'm getting 4 gold/day in actual direct drops or trash I can sell to merchants, but then I don't do a lot of fractals.

Though if actual gold supply was a real issue causing inflation, one would expect to see it beyond the gold to gem exchange - prices for most items on the TP should go up due to inflation, because best I know, the WV did not really increase supplies of various crafting materials or mystic coins that much, which would be a balancing factor.

 

 

[Cuks.8241]

More gold on the market is not the only possible cause here. Assuming its not just sales, which is possible because there is a longterm trend upwards.

Less gems on the market is the second.

[Tashigi.3159]

Next, we're gonna blame Biden for the gem prices lol

[DeanBB.4268]

It's everyone trading gold to gems to buy HP unlocks that's crashed the gems market.  🤔

[Albadaran.1283]

It's simply inflation: many prices have risen about 25% during the last 3 months. E.g rare armor used to be around 15 silver, its now more than 20. And yes its probably caused by easy WV gold.

[Danikat.8537]

I'd love to know how much more gold the Wizard's Vault is actually bringing into the game, but I think only Anet could get that information and they won't tell us.

I know we could do a direct comparison of the total value of WV rewards vs the old login rewards and dailies, but that won't give the full picture. There are probably players who skip many of the things that were in login rewards (like Tomes of Knowledge, luck, etc.) in favour of turning as much AA as possible into gold so they might be getting more than they used to, even if they did the dailies every day before.

Then there's people like me who are much more likely to make an effort to do dailies and weeklies, which might mean they get more gold, but they might also (as I am) prioritise the non-gold rewards, bringing down the total. There are at least a few people who used to do dailies who entirely refuse to do them now (and may even have quit the game) because they don't like the WV. There's also low level players who might have done them before and now can't do them until they get to level 80 (although I suspect they're a minority and didn't play every day before). Maybe other types of players I haven't thought of as well.

Also SotO might have changed the total number of regular players, either attracting new people to the game or causing some to quit because they don't like the expansion, or most likely a mix of both.

I'm not sure it would even be easy for Anet to get the info but I'd love an overview of "in an average month X gold was added to the game through dailies and now in an average month Y gold is added through the WV".

I still think the gem store sales have much more impact on the gold to gems conversion price than the WV, because otherwise we'd have seen a steady increase in gem prices since SotO launched (maybe with steeper increases around the WV refresh when players who had been prioritising other things ran out of options and bought gold and then ones who had been prioritising gold got a new set of cheaper gold options) and what we've seen is closer to spikes around gem store sales. But it would be helpful to have a more detailed picture of the overall economy as well.

[kharmin.7683]

3 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

I'd love to know how much more gold the Wizard's Vault is actually bringing into the game, but I think only Anet could get that information and they won't tell us.
 

I can't speak for anyone else, but I've been able to acquire a LOT more gold through the WV.  As a very casual player, I might pick up 3-5 gold per playing session.  With WV, and topping out on wizard coin, I end up "buying" gold ... sometimes 10 gold just for completing the daily because there really isn't much in the WV that interests me.

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

1 hour ago, Albadaran.1283 said:

It's simply inflation: many prices have risen about 25% during the last 3 months. E.g rare armor used to be around 15 silver, its now more than 20. And yes its probably caused by easy WV gold.

Or alternatively the OW Legendary due to the Ecto costs. Rare drops Ectos when salvaged, so buying rare unids at ~15 silver, identifying, then salvaging was worth it considering the price increase of Ectos.

The gem conversion has been a steady ~36 gold - 100 gem until late October where it went up to 37-42, then shot up with the sales. If the easy WV gold was the cause it wouldn't have taken 2 months for the conversion rate to go up.

[Darklord Roy.2514]

On 11/27/2023 at 10:24 PM, fatihso.7258 said:

This does not change the fact they are liquidating all they can at vault rewards including the bags of coins and mystic coins therefore it has a constant in why the volume is high. 

That has always been a constant though. We are earning roughly the same number of mystic coins per month that we were from the old daily login system, so that point's moot. We are certainly able to earn more total gold in WV than we used to from the old system, but is it so much over the old total that it would inflate gem prices by 40% by itself? No. Not even close.

Gem prices probably are a little bit higher in general after the release of WV, but the *direct cause* of the current large spike is the sales, just like all of the other large spikes in the past. There are enough easy ways in this game to make large amounts of gold that most players don't need the WV to do that for them. I think you'd be surprised how many of us have hundreds and hundreds of spare gold lying around to convert whenever we want to buy something in the gem store. Sales are *always* going to lead to higher gem prices, the reason that things are so inflated right now is because of how GOOD these sales happen to be. That's all it is.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

6 hours ago, IAmNotMatthew.1058 said:

Or alternatively the OW Legendary due to the Ecto costs. Rare drops Ectos when salvaged, so buying rare unids at ~15 silver, identifying, then salvaging was worth it considering the price increase of Ectos.

The gem conversion has been a steady ~36 gold - 100 gem until late October where it went up to 37-42, then shot up with the sales. If the easy WV gold was the cause it wouldn't have taken 2 months for the conversion rate to go up.

there's also the fact that the special ops armor collections removed alot of globs of ectoplasm from the market when everyone went for it, causing the market to shift from active trading of these items to players' individual stockpiles and thus a slow increase in cost over time. its probably the first time that ectos have been taken from stockpiles since they crashed years ago and became a commonly traded item with a mediocre value compared to mystic coins.

 

they're slowly climbing back up to where they were before the crash.

Edited December 1, 2023 by SoftFootpaws.9134