Some drama about "sharking" came up on reddit recently. "Sharking" is the act of bidding below and item's value and selling above the item's value, also known as "merchanting". The practical difference is in scale and behaving in good faith. The act is possible because the value of an item is unclear to players.

In the interest of players who may not use externals tools and sites, and may not want to or know to ask around the community for what an item may be worth, the game could simply tell them. I can think of two good ways to do this:

#1: An audit log

When hovering over an item, display everything gone into the item. How many orbs were used to craft it, how many crystals used to heat it, how many UV tickets were used to punch it, every time the weapons has been unbound before and whether the current owner did this or not. Tally up their total worth but show the breakdown. For instances, we do not want to count the energy cost of fire crystals since it's ridiculous to actually buy them, but the amount of rolls is quite valuable. Every time the item is traded from one player to another, add that trade to the audit log as well, noting what it was sold for. I believe all this data exists in the current Spiral Knights framework, but I'm not completely sure. This would be the most accurate and complete solution to the problem, in my opinon.

#2: An estimate

Since you, the developers, have access to all the internal values of the game, you can provide an estimate. First you add up the cost of enough orbs to craft the weapon or what it cost at the auction house. For something like the Kat Hat, you can simply note the expected amount of hours it takes to acquire one book, and for a Krogmo piece how long it's expected to grind the materials necessary to craft the item.

Next you can evaluate any UVs on the item. Since you know exactly how rare each UV is, you can simply divide the cost of a UV ticket with this rarity, then divide the cost of a double UV ticket for the rarity of the second UV and so on.

Add the cost of unbinding and there's your estimate.

You may also add warnings if a UV might be useless, ie Shadow Max on Skolver, a little note like "this UV will mostly have effect in the Clockworks, it will do nothing at all in Lockdown."

For things from lootboxes, just divide the cost of a box with the chance of getting the item from a single box, or something of that. I'm not qualified to make these exact judgements, which is why I'd like to see the feature implemented.