Forum Thread

(Quick word- I was going to put this in a profile feed, but decided it was too much information and built kind of like a suggestion, so I hope this counts and is taken into consideration.

Oh, dear, sweet, dreaded Gem Exchange. How my heart burns when I look through your lustrous mountains of garbage deals and cheap tricks.
Its about time for that to change

I think we are all well aware of what the gem exchange is, I don't remember if brand new users have access to it or not, so if you don't have a gem exchange tab yet, just take my word for it and consider yourself lucky. For now.
So let's get right to the chase, cut the salt out of this post's diet, and talk about our topic on hand.

.
.
.

The Gem Exchange: The Problem

The gem exchange, by definition, is "The meeting place for gem trades". It is a centralized, and heavily simplified GTS, which is totally fine and absolutely very useful, especially for users who use gems as a huge boost in their shiny hunts. All of this is great, the concept is easy enough to understand, and it has a general usefulness to it that makes it a key recourse to this game.
Unfortunately, the gem exchange is a victim of users' blatantly swindling others, whether they actually realize they are or not.
Before I get eaten alive by people claiming that I've said everyone is cheating everyone else, just hold on- because I'm not.

Whether this issue is coming from the fact that people are severely uniformed or perhaps they are trying to rip off of some unknowing rookie, is completely situational. I can't speak for the users' who make the trades, but I can speak for how the trades look themselves.
And honey, they ain't lookin too good.

(Yes. I ripped this from price check. It's what everyone should use)
Dragon Gem: - 45,000 - 50,000
Fairy Gem: 1,000 - 4,000
Bug Gem: 500 - 600
Normal Gem: 1,000 - 1,500

Common Gems (Ground, Fighting, Grass, Steel, Rock) - 400 - 600
Semi Uncommon Gems (Poison, Psychic): 500 - 800
(People often Common and semi-uncommon together at 500pd- which is fine, they're not much different to one another)
Uncommon Gems (Fire, Flying, Electric, Water, Ice, Ghost, Dark) - 800 - 1,000

These generally accepted prices in mind, I've copied a few trades from the GE to list below. I'm not listing screenshots because, frankly, I'm too lazy to crop and upload the image someplace else to put here. Especially when you could just go to the GE and find about 100 other extremely similar tades. I've done enough editing for this post.

Fighting Gem [x28] for Normal Gem [-/60]
14,000 for 60,000


Water(x3),Flying(x2),Grass(x5),Poison(x5),Electric(x1),Ground(x3),Psychic(x1),Rock(x7),Ice(x1),Bug(x1) for Dragon Gem (-/5)
17,000 for 250,000


Water(x3),Rock(x5) for Fire(-/1),Fighting(-/1),Grass(-/1),Psychic(-/1),Dragon (-/1),Ghost(-/1),Fairy Gem (-/1)
4,900 for 55,500
.
.
.

I'll be honest, that's enough of a headache for now. Just go take a look at the GE, you'll find plenty of trades just like those. Also, if you recognize your trade... sorry, but not really. There needs to be a fix.

My Suggestion
I have suffered on this for a while. How do you fix a feature that is so perfect, simple, and useful, and yet so cripplingly flawed, it's practically of no use to those who need it?
One of the main ideas I've come up with is to implement a value bar that adds up the general value of your offer and compares it to what you're asking for. If values don't match up withing the correct range, the trade doesnt go up.
Also, I'm making these edits at 3:30am on my phone, dont laugh. I draw, not edit.

Show hidden content

---

If you have other suggestions, or need me to go more in depth, please comment below. Supporting this post isn't necessarily supporting my specific idea. It's supporting a change to a flawed and aggravating game feature

Thank you, and goodnight.

I like the idea but market prices tend to change? Idk about gems tho

---

As far as I know, gems' value haven't changed(much) for quite a while. Should they change drastically, it should be easy enough to go into the code and change values.

This would work if gem prices didn’t fluctuate when people are hunting to shinies or shiny Megas. Like how ground gems went up in price and so did electric gems. If there is a set price in Gem Exchange, you’d never be able to trade them that way and then GTS would be flooded.

As much as I despise how the Gem Exchange looks now, it's going to remain like that as a free market concept.

And as much as I dislike saying so, Price Check is in the "Guides" section of PH's forums. It's not maintained by Riako or any moderators that actively discourages players from pricing higher or lower from the numbers inside. It's a starting point for prices, but it's not set into the PH system.

(Exception: selling gems at the Item Shop, but that'd be something of a waste given their usefulness to other players.)

---

I agree with Argentis on this. While I do realize wading through ridiculous offers can be frustrating, I don't think going big brother on the users is gonna be a good solution. Bad offers and people trying to scam others is an unfortunate byproduct of out freedom. Good thing the most blatant scams are obvious to anyone but the newest users who might not have realized the value of dragon gems (for example), which is unfortunate and not easily solved.

To add to what agayjew said: While big hunts like that can momentarily affect the whole site for a bit, I think there's a smaller individual scale to this. I imagine people are going to value the gems they're looking for at the time higher and are thus willing to pay more for them. So even if the price check was the official prices as set by Boss Riako, the actual prices as we'd see around the site would still fluctuate somewhat from user to user and change over time as their goals shift. My point is: The price check is a good place to check averages and go from there using your own judgement on what is fair to you at the time. To me, trying to police a set price on certain items for the whole site seems aggravating and doomed to failure.

---

I have thought of something similar to this, however with somewhat different approach.
In my version it would work like a "filter" - that x amount of some kind of gem(s) must be around a certain value for the another gem(s) to pass.
Examples:

I will add more examples as I get home.

---

As others have mentioned, the GE is free market and the Guide is just that, a guide

As such (and at the request of the OP), this will be rejected.

//locked and rejected

---