GW2: How to make 1000 gold – Trading gems for gold

“If only I had bought a ton of gems before this event, I’d cash them in for booku gold, now.”

You inevitably hear this or something like it sometime during one of Guild Wars 2’s  many special events. In fact, I heard this in map chat just the other night. People remember how much gold it cost to buy gems before an event, and see that it will cost them a lot more now that the event has started. They know they should’ve bought some gems before the event started. That’s fine. We all regret missing deals.

So now you know the pattern and you’ll buy your gems before an event starts, won’t you? Mmhmm. Sure you will.

But if the price of gems goes up so much during an event, and you have the prescience to buy before hand, you might ask yourself, could you make gold doing this? Now, that you know the price of gems goes up dramatically during a special event, could you make gold off that by buying gems before an event starts?

Thanks to gw2spidy.com it’s pretty easy to find out. Let’s say you were smart enough and lucky enough to buy gems at their lowest point during the month preceding the Festival of the Four Winds. On May 8, the price of gems was at a low.  On that day, you could’ve bought 100 gems for a little less than 9 gold. Today, it will cost you about 10 gold 40 silver.

That’s a pretty nice profit, isn’t it?

Mmmm, it would be if you could sell your gems at the same price you buy them at. But you can’t.

Today, with the price of gems climbing to new highs, ArenaNet will give you about 7 gold and 50 silver for that 100 gems. That’s right. Even if you were “smart enough” to invest in gems before the festival, and bought when a 100 gems was only 9 gold, you still couldn’t even break even if you resold them, today.

So, no, you can’t make gold buying and selling gems. The gap between how much gold gems cost and how much gold you get for gems insures that. If you think it’s by design, you’d be right. ArenaNet doesn’t want people trading currency in their game – it would be another lure for gold sellers.

Now, having said that, if you want some gold, and you don’t want to make it my way – buying and selling crafted stuff – by all means support this great game. Put some money into Guild Wars 2. Even I do that, sometimes, and frankly, I don’t have to. But it’s such a great game, I don’t mind sending a little money their way.

*How goes my quest for The Legend? I’ve pull 9 staffs from the Mystic Forge, and every one of them was another rare one. So as of today, I’ve dumped 36 rare staffs into the forge and got back 9 rare staffs. Not a good return.