[GW2] The Movement of Gems

A couple of days ago a few of us were having a chat about the Gem Store system. I hadn’t quite grasped (and I’m still not sure I do 100%) how it will all work, but thanks to a little twitteducation I learned that whenever you’re buying your gems from the Black Lion Trading Company (hereby referred to as “The House”) you’re buying gems which a player has previously sold to The House at some point. This isn’t a closed system, as players have the ability to buy gems from ArenaNet for real-world money, and gems are then destroyed when they are traded for items in the gem store (though that is up for debate).

Here is the process, as I understand it (the black arrows indicate the movement of gems):

Theoretically, there are only ever a finite number of gems in the in-game system: moving between the players and The House (this finite number would increase/decrease depending upon whether process A or D is stronger). The price of the gems, for both purchase and sale, could either be based upon the theoretical number of gems currently in the hands of the House (ie, the more gems in the coffers, the lower the price for purchase and visa versa) OR it could be based upon the number of gem/gold interactions which have occurred between players and The House within a certain period. The latter of which is more likely, as it would not require The House to keep a long-term track on the number of gems in their “coffers”.

ArenaNet, of course, have an infinite number of gems – otherwise they would run out and we wouldn’t be able to buy from them.

EDIT (18/07/12): Made this edit to take into account Greibach's suggestions, and considering this post is getting linked to in a few places (thanks Tash!) I thought it best to show the other theories.

In the comments below Greibach has suggested a slightly altered model for the Gem system. I guess we won’t have to wait too long to find out how it actually works (and the only real difference is whether the gem prices are determined by the players or by some 3rd party process) – we’ll be able to play with the gem store on Friday evening and confirm one way or the other. See below for a quick mock-up of Greibach’s model:

How to make coins in [Insert Game Here]

Buy low early, when supply is abundant. Sell high later when supply is scarce. It's a very simple concept, and I'm sure most people understand how it applies to commerce in any situation. Games provide a nice little microcosm of an economy which allow you to more easily predict market changes and exploit them to your advantage.

I'm going to use FIFA12 Ultimate Team players as examples in this post, but the theory can be applied to most any game with an in game market and verying degrees of rarity and availability of items to trade.

In order to make easy money you have to identify a commodity which, whilst abundant at the moment, will become rare at a later date. This is easy with Ultimate Team as each week players who are performing well in real life will have an "In Form" version of their card produced which is available in packs for the duration of the week. What this means is that this in form card will probably be filling the marketplace for the week and the couple of weeks following, but supplies will dwindle once it is no longer available.

In-form Louic Remy

So, your job should be to get your hands on the commodity whilst it is in abundance. The price should be low because, no matter at what price a player is willing to sell a card, there will always be another player willing to sell lower. So, once you feel the card is at its very lowest price, that's when to buy. With any other item (one available all the time), this process would continue ad infinitum until the game ended; as more and more players pull them out of packs and seek to sell them on quickly, driving down the price. Even the rarest of item's prices will be driven down inexorably if production is steady (and could even drop as low as just above the price at which you could discard/sell the item to an NPC merchant).

Once the week is over, hold onto the card for a while. Supplies will still be high, and it is likely that players who found the card in packs will probably seek to sell him on once they've tried him out for a few days. After a week or so after the production of the cards stops, the supplies in the marketplace will begin to fall as some players discard him, stick him in their club and forget about him or the account he is on is either hacked, banned, deleted or simply abandoned and unused. As the supply drops, the price will rise. Then; sell sell sell.

This is a theory which can be applied to almost every game, there are, however, caveats to remember:

1) You have to be careful about buying rare commodities which could be substituted for common alternatives with little downside (or even and upside).


2) Rare commodities' prices are subject to the degree of availability. Hence why ectoplasm prices plummeted when the shadow form assassin build was an easy way to farm for them. Now that the process is much harder, the prices have risen again. Any limited availability item you buy will be subject to the same rules, if the items should suddenly become available again, well, you're out of luck and are likely to not quite make as much dough as you thought.

3) Sometimes you will lose, you will misinterpret where the market is going or the developers will change something which renders your well laid out plans totally pointless. It's annoying, but it happens.

Other examples include: festival items such as mini celestials from the dragon festival, max damage req7 swords and axes, runescape's event items such the Party Hats. All things which have/had limited availability and are now worth a small fortune.