There would certainly be an initial price spike as people who aren’t willing to wait for celestial gear would impatiently outbid each other. Afterward, the demand would temporarily (and slowly) drop until it reached a new equilibrium. It’s hard to say what the ‘final’ price would end up being; I doubt it would be more than double in the long run.
Currently, quartz represents about 50% of the 21 gold cost of Celestial Exotic insignia and about 20% of the ~12g cost of the Sinister equivalent. If quartz doubled, then would be paying 32 gold for Celestial and ~14.5 gold for Sinister.
Are those interested in a reduction of the time gate willing to pay those prices instead?
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
Easy workaround: Charge quartz before you actually need it.. Then you will have plenty when you do.
One of my 30 accounts (Malediktus.9250).
I don’t see why they couldn’t just increase the time gate but offset the price spikes with more nodes.
The demand won’t ever fall unless people just stop playing GW2 because quartz is still an absolutely mandatory food ingredient for many builds in many areas of the game, especially WvW.
What makes you think it’s that easy to “offset” — there’s no magic formula that predicts how the price will change if the time gate is nerfed. There’s no obvious number … or location… of nodes that will precisely offset a known increase in demand, since people tend only to farm out-of-the-way nodes when the price is high enough… and they’ll overfarm them if they aren’t out of the way.
And what’s to say that the increase in price is bad? For farmers, it’s great.
Another alternative would be to reduce the timegate with a new recipe using a “super-charged quartz crystal”. Celestial recipes would use a single SC Quartz (versus 5 charged quartz), but you’d need a stack of uncharged crystals (versus 125 for 5 regularly charged ones) to make one, i.e. double the quartz cost.
This gives people the choice: pay a steep premium for quartz to have their gear sooner or pay less and wait longer. That allows for the market to adjust to actual supply/demand
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
No thank you. I’m very happy with the time gate and the untradable nature of them because it means that some crafting is still worthwhile.
If you can’t be bothered to spend a few seconds charging a crystal most days for a couple of weeks then you don’t deserve the armour imo.
Being able to trade charged quartz would make them more valuable, as people who didn’t want to waste time just waiting for resets to charge enough for a fullset would buy them off the TP.
I’ll bet you one Grow Lamp it wouldn’t…
While it’s impossible to evaluate that bet, as all things will never be equal enough, it’s pretty clear from other things crafted materials that people are willing to pay huge premiums to avoid the time gates. Even jeweled dowels/patches earn a premium over ordinary ones, and those aren’t directly gated.
Still, it’s moot — all we can do is speculate about what might happen and try to address the consequences and whether we think those are important or not. Some people would love higher-priced quartz and tradeable charged quartz and some wouldn’t.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
