On 7/12 according to the Price Tracker, Flawless Square Emeralds peaked at 3151 Gold (starting from 7/10). 16 days later, on 7/27 they took a noticeable decrease to 1137 (36% of peak value). The price later stabilized around 700 Gold (22% of peak value) as the player base waned. I suspect a similar trend to occur as Paragon Levels and Legendary drops lose their novelty and players drift away again. So how about one of those stupid forum games that everyone hates?

For bragging rights only, post your guesses for the first day Market Tracker lists Flawless Square Emerald at 2239 (36% of its 8/31 value) and when it will drop to 1368 Gold (22%).

Previously, I was pretty far off when I predicted Gold would stabilize back to the patch 1.03 price of 1.76 USD / 1 million Gold. It's been over 2 weeks since patch 1.04 dropped and Gold has held steady at about 1.91 USD / 1 million Gold - a full 8.5% above the stable patch 1.03 price. Flawless Square Emeralds may never go back down to 1368 Gold.

Actually gold is at $1.75/million (B/O) as of today. It did drop rapidly this week, or I guess maybe, just today. I think a steady decline is coming, but it will stabilize after about a month.

I am going to guess that within a month, prices will bottom out unless there is something, ANYTHING, regarding implementation of PvP. Even before hard news of 1.04 was posted, rumors began to swirl and made significant changes in the prices of things like gems. I think by October, a decent number of hardcore players will (some crazies have already) reach Paragon 100. This doesn't really affect people who aren't 100, but it poses the eternal question: Now what? People will look at that and say, okay, this game is a dead-end. It is crushing to people to see a good number of others already accomplish something as black and white as farming the maximum amount of experience.

Personally, I believe that within 2 months, without any news of PvP, this game will return to pre-1.04 levels: ghost town status. I remember clicking on public games sometimes and only seeing about 200 people. I think the implementation of paragon leveling will still provide people with intermittent entertainment (logging on a few times a week to farm a bit), but it will start to drop significantly within the coming months because of the exponential growth of exp required. I think it becomes discouraging when it takes MORE time to gain levels (talking 10-15 hours per level once you hit 80) for the SAME reward. The cyclic nature of paragon leveling for magic find, magic find to get items, get items to paragon level just isn't tolerable beyond a certain point.

I think PvP will change all of that. Even if it sucks and it's completely one-dimensional from observation, it is going to motivate people to farm/paragon level/spend real $. Competition is what fuels people. A game without competition, is, for lack of a better term, mental masturbation.

I'm feeling really stupid about realizing only now that a Paragon 80 DH has 80 more Vitality and 120 more Dexterity than a Paragon 40 DH. For my DH that can just barely farm Act3, that's already about 3500 dps increase. When PvP and +experience Legendaries and Rubies will go even higher than they are now, won't they?

I hope the game doesn't get down to the point of only have 200 people in public games. I don't like public games, but some other folks on these boards have been showing me how much more interesting multiplayer can be (even if my video card/processor apparently can't handle it) so I hope people stick around.

I saw the price of Gold at $1.75/million about 10 pm (CDT) and smiled. It doesn't bode well for the player base, however, that the Gold price has stabilized to pre-1.04 levels.

In EU, the price of gold seems to have increased over the last week/s. It went from 1.16Eur/Milion to 1.45Eur/Milion

I'm a bit sad to report that FS Emeralds have droped from 9k in the weekend to 7.5k yesterday. Tried flipping some, ended up with extra gems and a 1mil cash-hole.
The same happened for tomes(from 1000 to 300-400 or less).
Essence seems to be bouncing back a bit, after diving to 700 it was around 900 yesterday.

Sorry for my bad english.

@Santient Your English is fine, especially if you're using slang terms like "flipping." :)

Thanks for the EU report! It's very interesting to see the different trends. The United States had a holiday weekend and the extra work holiday on Monday probably had more people playing which held the USD/Gold rate high. We're pretty centered on the North American market around d3rmt right now, but I know @Anuiran hopes to add more EU-related content so I hope you stick around!

Gold rate now is 1.61 usd per million . It's gonna drop even lower in the upcoming weeks .
Time to sell off the gold .

Funny thing is, that happened shortly after the patch, too, and then picked back up over the weekend. Could sell it off to be safe, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it go back over 1.70 USD / million on Saturday.

As of 7am today, the price is at $1.22/mil average. Last 10 trades were at $1.15/mil.

In EU, FS Emeralds have gone from 6k to 4k to less than 2k this morning :|
There were Square Emeralds more expensive than this :|

Gold is worse, hovering between 0.92 and 0.99 per mil. I even saw it at 0.82 per mil

While I saw Emeralds selling for about 2400 this morning, they're already back up to 3800 so the average price is still going strong.

Patch 1.05 is apparently dropping soon and previews could start going up on the main site shortly. We all know those drove the market back up for pretty much every commodity. I'm not ready to speculate on Emeralds yet since those articles might not hit until after the weekend; if the trend holds from last time, the average Emerald price could dip down into the 2000's over the weekend.

Gold, however, is pretty cheap at $1.22 / million, in my opinion. It's much harder to flip Gold for profit between auction houses due to the additional fees, but if you're sitting on a big pile of Gold, it could be a good time to speculate on that.

Other opportunities from last Patch release seem to be inferno mats and Topazes. Any new recipes they choose to release, especially something dramatic like new craftable Set pieces or ilvl 63 plans, could bounce Inferno mat prices 30% or more (and Brimstones up to 150%). If they increase the cap on MF, we could see a brief spike Topaz prices, though not as dramatic as the Ruby spike. A lot of people still have high-level Topazes sitting around from patch 1.03, but not everyone. I'm hanging onto my Topazes, that's for sure.

So i should hold on to my stock-pile of ToS?
Thanks for the little insight. I guess i'll start hoarding some mats, while continuing to buy/sell them for a small profit.

Looks like the patch will drop next week or the week after. I bet it's going to bring in more players.

I would hold onto my stockpile of ToS if for no other reason than they're just not worth a whole lot right now. If you 2,000 it might be worth selling some off, but otherwise I would hang on to them and hope they go back over 400 with the patch. No one really knows what they'll do, though. If there are no new recipes introduced, we probably won't see much bump in mat prices.

I think that one of the reasons the price of emeralds has gone down is due to the need for rubies in helms since the paragon levels came out. I think the price of emeralds will go up in the future.

What effect would 1.05 have on gems?

depends if gems are going to be part of infernal machine IMO.

I think topazes are good bet to speculate on, especially if they modify the effect on weapons. But overall gems are a good bet to speculate on, because it fluctuates alot. 1.04 I speculated on three gems except emerald, and made 10x on ruby, 2x on topazes, and no profit on amethysts. Amethysts I sold back on little loss, but the profit from other gems were worth it. Should have invested more than 1 mil on ruby, but i wasn't complaining about 10x return :)