It's seriously embarrassing that mat vendor prices are so low. 1 crown per 1*, fine, they're by and large worthless anyway and if they're not you can get a good price for them on the AH. 5 crowns for a 2* is a little harder to swallow, but again not that big a deal.
But 10 crowns for a 3* is terrible, and it just gets worse from there. With so many materials in the game flooding people's inventories, the vendor price of them needs to go up to make them marginally worth something.
Why is this important? 2 reasons:
1) Up the price of the material on the market.
There are 4* mats selling for 200 crowns. Hell, Blighted Bone is selling for 90.
2) Make the vendor and listing price match the listing fee more.
Currently, in a fashion that completely reverses the trend of any other game, the listing fee for materials is 10-100x the vendor price of a material. It's nice that they reduced the listing fees, but it wasn't low enough to match the insanely low prices most mats are selling for.
Ultimately this is a suggestion to make materials that are largely considered worthless, less so. If 4* materials vendor for at least 400 crowns, it would automatically set a "floor" for prices of them, and all the hundreds of Gel Cores and Rocky Cores acquired could actually mean something again.
Yeah, this could also be solved with a sufficient material sink added to the game, like doubling the mat requirement for everything made, but still on principles materials should be selling to vendors for more reasonable prices, especially considering their listing fee.
And for anyone worried that this would just increase the amount of crowns people have and cause inflation, please. Crown inflation is already rampant, and isn't going to mean anything until there are legitimate end-game crown sinks to stabilize the market some more.
"And for anyone worried that this would just increase the amount of crowns people have and cause inflation, please. Crown inflation is already rampant, and isn't going to mean anything until there are legitimate end-game crown sinks to stabilize the market some more."
So... you propose to just kick the inflation into higher gear while we twiddle our thumbs waiting for a crown sink? This is the way it goes in every MMO with some item synthesis component. 90% of the player base plays only 10% of the game, and correspondingly use only 10% of the items because those are the "useful" ones for the 10% of the game they play... thus materials for making those items are far more valuable. I can't say I have a good solution to that, but I can say that your idea is likely to wreck the economy even more. A well designed alternate material sink and a crown sink however, would revitalize the game.