by Little_Mike » Wed Jul 04, 2012 2:01 am
The only items that sell for their original currency are pre-1.3 items that were sold for Gold Shields and Hero Tokens (also known as Legacy Gear). The reason for this was we felt that since the system changed so much, we wanted players to be able to regear themselves without having to throw away everything and restarting from scratch. We don't allow players to sell current items for their original currency for obvious reasons.
As for the gems, right now the gems that are being sold for Valor and the ones being sold for Gold Shields (or Silver) are actually two different types of items, and at the moment, each individual item has a single currency value (i.e. we can't have an item be valued by two currencies). In this case, a set of Gems are valued by Valor and another set of Gems by Gold Shields (or Silver). Since all non-deprecated items are sold for Silver, there is a different conversion rate for determining an item's Silver value if its value is originally determined by Valor or Gold Shields. Since there are hundreds of items in the game, in order to keep the sell prices consistent, we determine what the sell price is based off a formula that uses the value of the item. That also lets us change massive amounts of data with a few parameters if necessary. It is much easier to manage one value for all the items which determines both purchase and sell price instead of maintaining separate purchase and sell values. It's not perfect as you can see by this gem example, but it gets the majority of the work done.
That being said, at some point after my original post, we did increase the conversion rates because we did notice they were a bit low.