Suggestion: create a merchant who can convert a pile of materials into a small, random amount of shards.

Many of the materials in Spiral Knights have crashed to minuscule prices. I can't of course say that this is "wrong "-- after all, it is supply and demand -- but I would guess that the reason that the two star item Swordstone (150cr as of 7/17) sells for thirty times more than Static Clinger (6cr as of 7/17, one crown above vendor price) is that we have an extreme imbalance of popular recipes that utilize each item. In this case, the problem will only get worse over time as more surplus develops. No one is eating up those Static Clingers. They may never be valuable. Poor old Static Clinger...

My resolution to this is based on the existence of one material that seems to have maintained worth despite its ubiquity: shards. Certain shards are worth more than others, it's true, but they retain a baseline value because they are used so commonly -- every recipe requires some shards.

So my suggestion is to use the ubiquitous value of shards to help balance the worth of crappy materials, without actually changing their crown value at vendors, which would inject massive quantities of crowns into the market. To do this, we create a merchant who accepts piles of materials, combines them in a mysterious fashion, and then gives the player a small amount of random shards.

This is a win for the economy because it provides an inherent value to materials by connecting their worth to the potential worth of shards, which is more stable due to the ubiquity of shards in crafting. It is also a win for players who have a %$#^-ton of materials sitting in inventory, being useless. I can guarantee that this process would also be more "fun" than selling crappy materials directly to vendors, because there would be some randomnity involved. And everyone knows that gambling is more fun than giving your money away in incremental amounts.

I would suggest it be about 50% more efficient than vendoring the materials and buying the shards off the AH with those funds. I'd justify the increased efficiency through the fact that the player would be taking a risk in that they may not get the specific shards they needed.

Example:

You give the vendor, "Shardelain," twenty scrap metal, twenty gel drops, and five gel cores.

Scrap Metal 1star item: 20 x 1cr = 20cr
Gel Drop 1star item: 20 x 1cr = 20cr
Gel Core 2star item: 5 x 5cr = 25cr

Total vendor value: 65cr

Here's a proto-formula to convert that vendor value to shards, which will probably need tweaking, but it's a starting point:

(total vendor value of materials) x 1.50 / (avg shard market value) = (random shards returned)

Say the average market value of shards is 50cr. The return for converting the above items would be:

65 x 1.50 / 50 = 1.95 randomly colored shards

(Edit: Instead of rounding one way every time, best would probably be a remainder-based chance of rounding up or down.)

Other examples:

Two hundred Scrap Metal: (worth 200 x 1cr = 200cr to vendor)

200 x 1.50 / 50 = 6 shards

Twenty Gel Cores: (worth 20 x 5cr = 100cr to vendor)

100 x 1.50 / 50 = 3 shards

Five Reaper Ribs: (worth 5 x 50cr = 250cr to vendor)

250 x 1.50 / 50 = 7.5 shards

Admittedly the value is pretty poor for higher star items, but this still means that if their market value falls below a certain threshhold, they will be worth more converted to shards, and the value is less likely to completely bottom out. The coefficients could also be modified for various star levels if the devs wanted to give a boost to shards produced by higher-star items. Just use the selected coefficients instead of the standard vendor values (1cr, 1cr, 5cr, 10cr, 25cr, 50cr) when determining values for each set of materials. You can hopefully see how this could be played with to come up with something that conservatively reflected the actual rarity of other materials as compared to the rarity of shards, providing the player with a more equalized value from unused piles of materials.

Again, the overall goal is to ensure there is inherent value in materials, no matter what recipes exist to utilize them. The vendor prices established in the game are supposed to dictate this baseline, but given how abysmally low they are, they really do not factor into market behavior. I think we need something else.

What do you think? I'm curious to hear how desirable other players feel this might be, or speculation on the impact it would have on the game economy.

(Edit: fixed a few math typos)