Any kind of sink is ultimately a gold sink though. As people are buying and selling mats, increased prices bring higher gold fees.

Speculation further increases that, as does flipping. I have faith that this is a solid long term inflation hedge. It looks like a slow moving one, but increased prices are a good sign it will keep gold in check.

Higher mat prices are also a tax on the rich, and a boon to the poor. Those who still pick up everything and salvage and sell mats to increase gold supply love the higher prices, it increases their returns.

Posted by nuhertz at 02/26/2013 12:57 PM

Higher mat prices are also a tax on the rich, and a boon to the poor. Those who still pick up everything and salvage and sell mats to increase gold supply love the higher prices, it increases their returns.

It's kind of funny. I sell my Gems as soon as I find them because I know their price is only going to go down. I hold my Mats, because they're going to be more expensive to buy them later if I want to do any crafting.

Great points, all. Upvote for you!

@nuhertz yep a lot do, I was going too as well and I think a lot of players like me while they sell on RMAH they sell it as Blizz balance rather than direct to PayPal. So they need a way of getting Blizz balance out as PayPal balance and the round about way to do that is to trade out gold and re-sell it back as gold to RMAH but as direct to PP.

@ecocd yup, I'd hope so too. There's a blue post on front page that they're looking for more gold sinks in future patches.

[quote="16133"]

Posted by nuhertz at 02/26/2013 12:57 PM

I sell my Gems as soon as I find them because I know their price is only going to go down. I hold my Mats, because they're going to be more expensive to buy them later if I want to do any crafting.!

Hmm I'd not thought of that... interesting but aren't the new account bound gems a sink? You can't AH them but true enough they're not going to be as quickly made as lower gems are found & then crafted.

Radiant Star gems of all types continue to drop! RMAH rubies and topaz are about half the price of their gold counterparts when considering 25 cents per million gold.

Wow not checked AH or forums for 5 days and they've lost at least $1 in that time.

How much longer before they drop the floor?

EU prices right now:

- RS Emerald:.. 3.48 € -- 33,900,000 gold
- RS Amethyst: 2.34 € -- 21,150,000 gold
- RS Topaz:..... 2.22 € -- 21,890,000 gold
- RS Ruby:....... 2.30 € -- 22,580,000 gold

EDIT: ToS 990 gold down from 1550 gold 12h ago

Posted by theoryzero at 03/03/2013 10:34 PM

Radiant Star gems of all types continue to drop! RMAH rubies and topaz are about half the price of their gold counterparts when considering 25 cents per million gold.

Wow...half the price?? How much are radiant star emeralds? I wish I weren't blocked from the RMAH...! :-(

According to the AH tracker here, radiant star emeralds are around 30 million gold...which at 25 cents / million gold would be equivalent to US$7.50. So are those emeralds half that price right now? (i.e., US$3.25?)

Maybe someone who has access to the RMAH could buy me an emerald & I could pay them in gold, if that's the case... (well, gotta save that much gold first, of course... it sucks being poor...!)

I bought an emerald earlier for $3.48. Happily do that for you when you have the gold @eastdragon42. Saves me the AH cut! :)

Here are a bunch of summary numbers for y'all since this seems to have generated some interest again. Note the dates are NOT sequential. Calculated value based on average of gems:

Date | USD / 1 million Gold
1/26/2013 - 0.271
2/16/2013 - 0.224
2/20/2013 - 0.211
2/22/2013 - 0.201
2/24/2013 - 0.202
2/25/2013 - 0.188
3/03/2013 - 0.123

Gold has decreased in value by about 34.5% over the past week and by about 42% over the past 2 weeks.

Yesterday, the best Gem exchange rate for Buyers of Gold was Radiant Star Ruby at 0.113 USD / 1 MM Gold. there may be a typo in the RMAH, because the best Gem for sellers was apparently Perfect Star Amethyst at a whopping 0.185 USD / 1 MM Gold. More realistically, the best for sellers was Radiant Star Amethyst at 0.124 USD / 1 MM Gold.

0.124 vs 0.113 may not sound like much, but a buyer wanting to move about $10 over to Gold would have gotten 74,400,000 from RS Emerald exchanging and 68,500,000 from RS Amethysts (w/o sales tax, thankyouverymuchIllinois).

If you're sitting on 9 figures of Gold that you don't intend to use in the next week you might want to consider buying a rainbow of RS Gems and holding those instead of the Gold. You would be taking a risk that Blizzard won't raze the Gold bots causing the USD price of Gold to spike for a while.

The weekly/monthly RMAH is dying thread may actually start to have some truth if everyone is looking at 10 million Gold for a $1.25 item. Given that a good clvl 60 farming gear set for most any class can be had for around 50 million Gold, it's starting to get tempting to drop $6.50 of real money to level and build a fun Monk set.

What the hell happened? Gold price bounced back up to 0.137 USD / 1MM. I think someone might be trying to manipulate the Radiant Star Ruby market, because it's trading at nearly 0.19 USD / 1 MM and dropping rapidly.

I wonder if there was a recent ban wave or if people have just stopped trying to cash everything out.

Posted by ninjax at 03/04/2013 05:54 AM

I bought an emerald earlier for $3.48. Happily do that for you when you have the gold @eastdragon42. Saves me the AH cut! :)

Thanks for the offer! When I save enough gold, will definitely consider your offer! :)

Wow Radiant Star Rubies have dropped to $1.90 and are still around the 21.4m price range on US servers. After blizzard 15% cut, you can now get 9.57m for each dollar/ .1045 for 1m. I wonder how far gold prices will drop before blizzard changes the floor.

Bought a RS Ruby for 2.02 (after tax...damn you NYS!!)

Sold said RS Ruby for 18,502,222

Just north of 10 mil profit per.

Not too shabby.

Yeah, this is great. It seems that GAH sales have been picking up also, could be due to how cheap gold is with these gem conversions.

Posted by Baldy at 03/09/2013 10:24 AM

Bought a RS Ruby for 2.02 (after tax...damn you NYS!!)

Sold said RS Ruby for 18,502,222

Just north of 10 mil profit per.

Not too shabby.

When you say "profit" were you actually able to sell off some of that 18 million at 0.25 USD / 1 million?

Gold has resumed its spiral downward.

2/20/2013 - 0.211
2/22/2013 - 0.201
2/24/2013 - 0.202
2/25/2013 - 0.188
3/03/2013 - 0.123
3/05/2013 - 0.130
3/06/2013 - 0.113
3/08/2013 - 0.097

The gem price differentials tightened up, yesterday. Based on AH price tracker prices, buyers were looking for Radiant Star Topazes 0.0995 USD / 1 million. Sellers wanted to deal in Radiant Star Rubies for 0.105 USD / 1 million a relative difference of only about 5%.

@ninjax: If you don't mind me asking, how much are Radiant Star Emeralds on the RMAH now?

@eastdragon42: $2.56 and 27m currently.

on EU: 2.17 € vs 33,992,000 gold

Have we bottomed out? We've gone 4 days without a huge movement in price.

3/8/2013 0.097
3/10/2013 0.091
3/12/2013 0.091
3/13/2013 0.093

If the price stabilizes or only decreases very slowly from here, there's a strong case for Blizzard to lower the floor to $0.10. It's a nice round number and the "true" value would be within the 15% AH fees to prevent people from trying to flip gold. If they have it coincide with a banwave, we could have a straightforward RMAH market again.

Interesting! Could be something to do with Playstation AH too...

Why would they never let it get lower? They can't stop inflation just by adding different currency levels, no?

@Anuiran - thanks.

Good to know this is probably coming up.