I personally never had a problem collecting dusts - in fact, I came to discover that most people throw them out as trash in certain high-traffic barrels next to certain npcs, and if I was ever hankering for a few dusts, I could grab a few and leave some for others behind me. This isn't counting the many glorious souls who just... leave their unwanted dusts sitting around in a crafting station, and go elsewhere. Being an artist let me cut gems and make my own dusts, but the truth is, I never really needed to!AstralUniverse wrote: ↑Wed Sep 08, 2021 8:48 pmYou need 4 emeralds to make an essence that sells for 20K-ish, not even including other ingredients. You can use two raw emeralds to make 10 dust and 1 gem, so selling 10 portal lenses for about 20k seems entirely reasonable. You might be surprised about just how much gem dust gets piled up in gem pouches of faction storages and there's little else to do with it other than making consumables.
Still, I think the main point of my thrust was that, iirc, it's not outlandish to say you could sell emeralds for 5-7K apiece with relative ease depending on the particular season and their saturation level. If you can sell the four emeralds for as much or more than their final crafted end results, that's not really an incentivized market to pursue.
My example with lenses was a poor choice in this regard, since you get to keep the gems you cut regardless; but weighted against that 20k essence, unless you want to use the essence yourself for your gear, where is the impetus to spend your day's crafting points to make potentially less gold than if you just sold the gems in terms of a trade market?
I'm not trying to nitpick at any one particular item or detail; I'm just saying, I think the way the value of these items is assigned in some cases would probably benefit from a review based on the depth of all their lesser crafted components.