Rubies and Sapphire.

I like you please everyone listen to her sell all your gems to the trader gems are so going to useless. Sell them so I can buy cheap lets try to get the gems at 5k or less

well i want to see gemstones used in jewelry and armour customisation *exclusivley*
i want my saphire to be made into a pendant or a tiara for my char :P
purely for decoration ^^

I'm going to be controversial and hope that Anet don't cater to the speculators. Invariably all that would do is widen the gulf between the haves and the have nots. They've shown they have some concern over the "economy" as it is, so hopefully they won't cater to this either.

ok i will spill the beans gems are going to be like ecto and shards in the chapter galie grey already said it will be important. make me talk

Actually, there are as many rubies and saphires in Cantha as there are devourers in Ascalon, which will render them virtually useless as an investment.

j/k but something to think about

Ok here's my 2 cents.

If gems do carry over from Tyria to Cantha it will make it extremely unbalanced to those that do not have chpt 1.

Why would Anet do this if they are so concerned about the economy???

So I think that if they do carry over they will be worthless.

Just an opinion.

Then you wouold know better than most how very little they fluctuate in price even when you buy some. Now they are basically being bought out by people looking to corner the market.

Same thing happened with Superior runes a few months ago, ANET came in and stockpiled the tareders so that that cornering wouldn't continue.

I have n probelm with people stockpiling stuff, even if they try to corner the market. But it doesn't work in this game, because Anet just steps in and manipulates everything.

I have a lot of stuff as I have mentioned in a few threads here. I have no problem with people buyign stuff cheap. Great for them. I played the game soloed UW for awhile, got into good teams and ran the UW/FOW maps for the first few months of the game when you might get 20-30 ectos per run, and everyone generally got 4-5, and 2-3 pretty decent gold weapons if you finished all the quests. Sure it took a few hours but was well worth, especially compared to the drops these days.

I had hundreds of rubies and saphires and found them or bought a vast majority of them for less than 2K. I watched them peak at 17K+ and I still held on to them, and that was 7-8 months ago. So a good 9-10 months before they even had a use. Then I saw them drop back down to 3K and bought and bought. Then they went up to 4K and I stopped playing the game for 6 weeks or so. I came back and the price was a static 6K then this past month was peaking at 7-7500.

Speculation is one hting, but to see such a drastic jump following what heppened yesterday is too coincidental. Price manipulation? As in making the merchant charge more simply to pique interest?

As I said earlier. NO ONE in their right mind is suddenly going to start buying up rubies and saphires for 8-9K when they were 6K yesterday before the "glitch". Especially when you could offer 7500 to anyone hoarding them and probably get a nibble here or there for a couple dozen.

I _hope_ they will prove to be as worthful as bones, or piles of dust!


I will then proceed to LMFARO at all those who spent upwards of 50K on usless items, why do I think this may happen?


What other great gold sink would there be?


All richies buy and hoard these, ll poor people dont, if anet makes them worthless everyone has same gold


I really hope they do this though!

Typical and inaccurate line of thinking. But unfortuantely one that has been brought on by Anet trying to "fix" the econmy.

Basically these things are supposed to be used for one thing and one thing only...armor. Shards and ectos were never meant to be as expensive as they became. They used to drop VERY frequently on their respective maps. But as more and more people got into the game, the more Anet tried to balance, and the lower drop amounts inflated the prices of these items. That and people hoarding and setting the prices themselves.

Ecto used to be 3-4K a piece, which atthat time was outrageous. But that was the going rate. As more and more people hoarded, and them discovered that FOW armor wasn't anything special they kept the ectos or started selling them to people who wanted the armor. But in the mean time Anet in their infinite wisdom nerfed the shit out of the drops, making it nearly impossible for people (in a reasonable amount f time) to get enough ectos for a full set of armor.

I got 100 ectos in less than a week last May by simply playing the game and doing UW quests. It would take 6 months to do that now,maybe even more. So the "value" of items has been inflated by people trying to "help" the situations.

The economy itself will corrwect on its own. We see it every time they introduce a new green item. The prices are high initially, but eventually setle at a price that is more realistic. The drop rates don't decrease or even increase. They stay static but the "value" of the item becomes based more of desire and functionaility rather than amanipulated price initiated by screwing with the overall economy from the outside.

yea your right i remeber I had about 50 ectos but i turned them into dust i didnot know about how much they would be valued

IMHO Anet will try their best to satisfy existing "customers" to lure them to pay for Factions - customers who owns Chap 1 will be their easiest customers for Factions and if Anet don't make us happy, they're stupid.

Then they'll please the majority by making gem drops much more frequent if gems are required in Factions. The small gem hoarding minority won't be dictating prices for the 98% of players that don't hoard.

haha bling bling baby, id buyem for that soul purpose

This is all like the stock market. We have to make the best educated guesses on how the value of an item will rise or fall to capitalize on it, but really we don't have anything to tell us how the graph will look like.

Unless we get some insider information (sell your stocks now! corp is going bankrupt), we can only take these big risks. Big risks can equal big payout, or big loss.

I think if they are not used as the new expensive armor set, the price will plummet really quickly and only the merchant and dumb players will buy it. If there is no use, why would you want it? I think part of the hype begin when, for a temporary time, the merchant did not have Rubies and Sapphires for sale. All of a sudden people are like "omgz ecto n shards equivalent omgz".

Personally, I think the new expensive armor crafting materials will be found in Cantha not Tyria. New Factions players won't have access to the expensive armor unless they take the Ruby and Sapphire (excuse the Pokemon relationship) drops to Cantha. Like if Ecto dropped in Cantha, what WOULD you do with it if you were a new player?

Just my $0.02.

Funny, I alone made the price go from 5k - 6k.

See, one day I had so much money saved up that I had an idea to buy both the rubies and saphires and save them to sell back to the community when the prices were high. - Just like the stock market.

So I decided to buy 50 of each all at once. I looked at the price and saw that they both were 5k each. I bought 50 saphires & 50 rubies altogether really fast and I noticed that the price went from 5k to 5.5k, then to 6k. Alone, I made the price go up 1k!

Sorry for doing that guys. Don't worry though. I'm not buying anymore. 50 of each is fine with me. I'll use them for what they're worth when they're needed, then I'll sell the rest back to make 2X+ extra cash than what I initially spent!

Like I said, just like the stock market. Think ahead guys, think ahead.

Merchants have a "short term memory" and a "long term memory"

Long term is the overall price balance determined by supply and demand, which ultimately boils down to how many items he has in stock (since he cant produce his own, only resell). If he has like 5-10 in stock that means players grab fast whatever anyone sells, and based on this he makes the price high.

Short term memory is the SPEED at which items are bought and sold to him. Of course when someone keeps selling the amount is rising so long-term price is falling, and vice versa. But he will also surge the price for some time if someone buys them all at once.

E.g. If merchant has 10,000 ectos in his stock, and during the day people bought 1000 (assuming nobody sold) price will rise by some percentage (either linear or by some formula).

But if he has the same 10k ectos, and some dude starts buying them all at once, after the 100th's ecto the price will almost double, even though his stock only decreased by 1%. It will then gradually fall back to close to original price (according to the long-term ratio) if you stop buying. The same thing vice versa -- if you decide to dump hundreds of ectos to him, he will pay like 3k ea. In this way, it is more beneficial to sell stuff slowly than quickly.

How do you know whether short term memory made a difference in his prices? Check the buy/sell ratio. Usually for ectos its around 2K difference (if he buys for 6.5 he sells for 8.5). However, if someone dumped 100 ectos to him in 5 minutes, his buying price will be 3k, but his selling price will only drop to 7k, which is an unnatural 4k difference. As the dumping stops, the prices will return to their original ratios.

Why does he do that? Twofold. First, he maximizes the profit he makes (if someone is determined to sell ectos, he can make more money by paying less for them). Inversely, it prevents some smart dude or a clan to buy own the entire stock without paying way over whats it worth, and thus cause whole GW to stay without ectos letting the clan speculate with them at even higher prices. It thus balances the overall item prices.

Considering ive played 1000 hours of pve and none have ever dropped for me, prices are going to skyrocket

I completely agree. Simple supply vs. demand. As the supply of an item increases, the price drops. By nerfing drops, Anet is giving a nice advantage to the original players and making it very difficult for the new players to acquire any of the game's high-end items.

hmmmm, I think i will start to stockpile the bottles of ink

perhaps it will be a hot item with new tats

think i will stick with black dye's, i doubt they will ever make a pure "white" dye

When I first started playing I bought a few bottles of ink, had no idea what it was used for(thought you needed it to color armor or something in conjunction with dye), but figured it might be useful later on in the game. I have about 1700 hours and I still haven't figured out what the use for them is.

This comment confused me, are you saying a merchant can actually run out
of stock of an item ??? I have never saw this happen, but I am confused, lol....

thx...

yep, I once thought they nerfed the superior curse rune.
Gave it a couple of hours and I guess someone finally sold one to the merchant.

your saying rune trader not merchant. Merchants sell salvage kits and dye removal and stuff.

oh, right. Hazards of reading guru and working at the same time.