Unidentified Dyes and Gems

What do Unidentified Dyes and Gems have in common? Not a lot other than the fact that their values are both rising at a seemingly constant rate. If you have been playing Guild Wars 2 for long enough, you would know that way back, just a few months after release you could buy Unidentified Dyes for as little as 5 silver or less, and 100 gems would cost you a mere 40 silver. Come back to present day and your looking at 30 silver for the dyes and a whopping 8 gold for 100 gems! So are either of them worth investing in? Well both are very long term investments - for the dyes you could probably turn a decent profit in 6-8 months. However for the gems, you have to take into account the huge loss you make on converting gems to gold(roughly 30%) - keeping that in mind, you can see from the figures above that the value of gems has increasing at a far superior rate. Why is this?

This has happened as a result of the continuous stream of gem store only items, meaning many players convert gold to gems, increasing the demand for gems and thus pushing up the price. There are far more people demanding gems for gold than there are buying gems with real life money and converting them into gold. This means the value of gems in terms of gold is going ever upward. If you took my advice in a previous post to search for information about upcoming patches, then you might of watched last nights Ready Up livestream. If you didn't see it, you can watch it here. Unfortunately, there wasn't much speculative information to be had, however, the one thing that was mentioned was the announcement of a permanent pink Quaggan finisher coming in the Edge of the Mists patch on Tuesday. Last night, because of this announcement alone, the price of gems shot up to 10 gold for 100 gems.

So, we know the demand for gems is great. Will you make a profit if you invest in gems now to sell on Tuesday? Not a chance. Despite knowing gems will very likely spike on Tuesday as they did during the livestream, the price will not increase enough to beat the conversion cost. However, long term investments in gems are an interesting proposition. If anything, you can rely on your gold being 'inflation proof' as such if you invest it into gems - I'd advise that if you are considering taking a break from Guild Wars 2, or that you have a large sum of gold that you have no idea what to do with/will not need it for a while, you should invest in gems and reap the rewards in the long term.