There was a post the other day (which I can no longer find) Titled: I want you to make money! and in it one of the issues was something everyone is complaining about as of late, which is the tanking value of low level mats in the AH. People are relating this to crown value issues as well as various other problems and have proposed some various ideas. Mine is simple. Have the stores buy these things for more money. Paying 1 crown a piece for 1 star mats is awful. By boosting the amount the NPCs buy them for you can artificially force up the price in the AH. How? Easy. People will see a higher price at the NPC initially, and stop listing on the auction house in favor of making more crowns. Supply drops significantly, Demand stays where it always has been, and bam! Increased value. It'll probably take a few days for it to even itself out but it will. And when the AH over-floods again, this will start over. It's self correcting. So my proposed prices:

1 star: 10 crowns
2 star: 40 crowns
3 star: 100 crowns
4 star: 250 crowns

It may seem like a lot to some, but this pricing does 2 things: 1) This allows the value to go up in the auction house to a point where you are no longer paying up to 5x the value of an item to list it. and 2) gives you the opportunity to actually get some crowns out of the downright awful 4 star mats like Rocky core, etc which get used by nothing and no one and you can find in the AH for less than 50 each. 4 star mats from a purely flavor perspective should be much more expensive if for no other reason than they drop very rarely. In a perfect world 4 star mats should not run the same price as mid-grade 1 star mats no matter how bad it is.