Who said there needs to be regulator for item scarcity? Let players regulate themselves.
What does that mean? Gauss pistol rarity is regulated by it's scarcity, it's a rare item and powerful one, exotic item that involves higher risk/reward when fighting with it.
Top gear is always wanted. The more you have, the more you risk and lose. Then you don't have that much anymore. Besides, even now we have lots of gearless bluesuits spamming themselves. If gear was so easy to get, you'd expect everyone to be in ca without being afraid to lose it but that's not the case.
Invalid argument, there's always is going to be some kind of CD, time needed to gain items, if you could get all equipment for a month in 1 day, that wouldn't be better, even worse. The more equipment you have the less worth it has, if everyone was running around in BA's and avengers only, and those items were too easy to get, no risk/no reward. No point to sell them, trade them, no value in them.
By risk. Presented either by players or npcs.
Randomness could also be a solution in this case, it's good for farming. It's more exciting to find random ammounts of materials or even random treasures than always the same stuff.
you don't understand, it's the same CD only in a different way, you just waste x time to get y items, no matter what you implement. Average time to find x encounters can be calculated, same thing for lockers in encounters, it's just your fooling yourself.
Adding cooldowns surely don't make it funnier.
By this logic, it would be much better if there was infinitive amount of resources in mines, with no cooldown for crafting, nothing whatsover, only time needed to haul ore in a dog mule and go to work bench, the shortest "cooldown" possible.
Yes but you can do it as long as you want, which creates a feeling of freedom.
What this has to do with item availability?