Balancing Shroud Ingredients

[Xenostrata]

At the moment, if you are looking for large ingredients, you have two options: either buy them or farm the Shroud for them. In the latter, you hope to pull scales because they are worth the most and can be traded for several others, in the former, you end up paying 10 times as much for a scale than for a bone. This mostly makes sense, since the DDO economy is based entirely on a laissez-faire supply and demand system, and scales are the most commonly used ingredients - most recipes require 5.

Then, the new crafting system is implemented. Included in this system is a means to trade ingredients in order to get what you need more easily. This could also be applied to Shroud materials: set up a trader in Meridia that allows you to trade in any 3 large ingredients of one type for a single different ingredient of the same size. This should simultaneously make scales less expensive as they become less hard to obtain and make the other cheaper ingredients more expensive as they become more useful.

OP? Easy Button? Not really. This won't make greensteel easier to make or take shorter to farm, it will simply make the gap between the prices of ingredients smaller. BTC shards guarantee that people won't use the newfound equality to make a lot more greensteel items. The overall price of ingredients should more or less balance out (top ones go down, bottom ones go up), so the overall cost of buying all the ingredients should stay more or less the same.

The only negative impact I can think of right now is that it would **** off a lot of higher level players that seem to rely on large scales and FRDs as currency instead of platinum, and unless they ONLY have large scales to use as currency they should still be incredibly well off compared to everyone else.

Feel free to give reasons for agreement/disagreement/ambivalence/apathy.

This might have been mentioned before, sorry if I'm resurrecting a dead topic.

[Calebro]

This won't make greensteel easier to make or take shorter to farm, it will simply make the gap between the prices of ingredients smaller.

Not entirely true.
It's true that it wouldn't make GS easier to make. It absolutely would make it take less time.
Once you have a bag full of mats, and all you're ever short on is scales, this is no longer the case. Many players have dozens, or even hundreds of mats that they'll never use, because the only ones that they're ever missing are scales and sometimes stones.
Having the ability to trade up for those scales would make the grind for Shroud even more trivial than it already is.
Not that I would be opposed to that, but I felt the need to correct. This would indeed be an easy button in a sense. It wouldn't be a Big Giant Red Easy Button, but it would be easy enough to be considered trivial.