I'm Mtax and I approve this suggestion.

Allow me to spew my opinions out all over your face.

Whenever a resource is created, it should be done so for a reason. Like lets say we create minerals. Why did we do that? So that we can have the arcade be constructed. Materials were created... so that players could craft things. Crowns were created so that we can use them to trade among each other and with NPCs. Tokens were created as a means of rewarding players for specific tasks, like killing bosses.

Then the developers introduced a new resource, energy. Why was energy created? So that the developers could make money by selling their MMO cash, requiring purchases and selling power. The dual currency system was supposed to make the game infinitely more fair, and to a large extent works to do that, but infinitely hurt their product and had to be partially removed because of this.

To compensate for the fact that energy was partially removed, we have rarities. Why do we have rarities? What do they do? These are questions that I'd honestly like to have answered. They allow the player to craft things, but materials already accomplished that in the beginning. They reward the players for opening boxes, but materials could have been used to do that as well. They slow the player down, but only one limiting resource is really needed to do that, and materials were created first anyhow.

What you're suggesting is that we allow players to take one resource, that was intended to give us access to building the world around us, and use it as another should we so choose. This whole thing is just silly- why not just have crown costs for everything if we can freely trade between currencies for the ones that we want?

As much as I like economics gone wild, what we need is an elegant way of handling all of these things, not 20 million shops and currencies and trading outposts and tokens that all accomplish the same thing with varying restrictions.

So then lets say they go to bring back arcade construction (if they don't plan to, they should just remove minerals, as we don't need them for anything.. or classify them as materials), and now they've got a shop set up for trading them for fire crystals. Suddenly, they have to remove the crystal depot and the whole thing is more complicated than it ever was before.

I'd rather them not try to bandaid fix the small issues that players come up with. I think it would be better for them to just plan everything out, and make good decisions to begin with.

I've written about it a bit, but I think that a lot of why people come on here and claim that there is too much grinding with this basil nonsense is because well.. there IS too much grinding for them. Basil has a random chance of giving recipes and the only course of action when crafting things is to go to him, grind the orbs, do the same thing over and over... this is grinding. It's not that bad of a grind, but it's still a grind when it doesn't have to be.

Now, you could do what you're saying and stick basil at the end of runs (it makes a bit of sense for him to be there), but what I'd like to see is more variety when crafting gear. The tortofist weapons are a good example of this- you don't have to grind them as much, because you haven't done the same thing before then. Instead, you get to fight the tortodrones, which are new and interesting... so why can't a lot of weapons be like that?

Basically, split up the new weapons into categories. Some of these are at Basil, some of these could be found in a dilapidated alchemy machine that almost always appears on a specific compounds level, some of these could be rare (but not too rare, for the first one at least) rewards for danger rooms, and some of them could be found by replaying a certain mission and performing some action; for example, killing Feron could get you access to the dark chaingun.