What is driving material prices up?

in the past week rare materials spiked in price. There was no update.

Is it because of guild wars birthday after effects stimulating guild wars economy?

I think so.

Will materials go back down in price?

If i am correct on question one, then yes material prices will go back to normal.

What are some of your theories?

Materials were on an all time low during Birthday Event, they're going back to their old price, it's normal.

If as materials you mean mostly dust-iron and such salvaged stuff, i bet the price was lowered by the 2 consecutives weeks of community farming no-stop vaettirs/raptors/(whatever you want) for event drops.
And all the crap you get that aren't Cupcakes/bunnies/eggs are generally salvaged, which explaing the lowering of prices with the increased amount in the market (same goes with Unid golds).

Rare mats used for trade (aka:ectos/gems/obsi) didn't changed noticeably their price, cuase everyone was focusing on event drops.

In other words, is just matter of tim probably.

^^ agreed, right before/after birthday event, ecto went up to 8.5k at trader after it had dipped low to 7k when the event was about 2 days in. theres no event until july that will effect this again, then people will be doing 9 rings/DA/ and beetle races again

Kind of incorrect there. Ecto's went down from hovering and shifting between 8,5 and 9,5 to 7-8. Shards had an initial drop from 3,5 to 3,3 a couple of days but then spiked in price up to 3,7-3,9 because the initial supply dropped off. And gems went down to 8k \ each instead of 9,0 to 9,5k each.


This would be partly because people are liquidating ecto for boardwalk games, or liquidating ecto in order to buy cupcakes \ golden eggs. The same thing happened to gems and obsidian shards initially, but ecto have a huge supply because players keep them as a currency in stead of using them or selling them to trader. While there is a lot less shards in existence within player hands because they are not the active currency of the game. Gems on the other hand are relatively rare and don't usually get sold up because of the large supply on the player to player market and the ease of keeping them (no inventory slot required unless having 250+).

In simple terms, the most volatile currency in guild wars is ecto along with armbraces while the safest currency that can be kept in extremely large quantities is obsidian shards and after that gemstones because of the limited supply of these items. But they are also slower to amass. Lockpicks are also a viable option as they have a preset value of 1,2k \ each and are easily resell able and usable in trades ranging from 100k to 2,1 million (300k \ stack).

Closer to the launch of GW2 this will probably be of great importance if you're planning to max money based titles or continue playing GW after launch. As all the ecto in the world will hold less value then a couple of HoM points for many people.