Every event demands a new material or token to
- Maintain the exclusivity of the event
- To give no one an unfair advantage
- Demands a timely investment of grinding
- Sacrifice your current timely investment of grinding for cr
I propose that instead of using the said new material or token, we use hundreds of the many hundreds of mats we already have. This will
- Help with the material surplus
- Reward knights (which we are in a lack of rewards in every stage except boss missions, danger missions, and SL)
- Fluctuate the economy between mats, encouraging trading (+reward to knights, +reward to merchants)
- Give events a long-term effect to the economy
If you think about it, a lack of mats is a good thing. It encourages the knight to keep playing, so you are encouraged to play for events... until you just hate the event.
There is fair amount of bloat for the standard mat sets thanks to the great mat drop reorganization from last year.
There are complete chains from 2* to 5* of the big 4 status mats, in addition to the 'cell' style 2* mat.
Each of the 6 monster families now has 2 complete chains of 2*->5* mats, previously each particular monster had a unique list of mats it could drop but switching to a common family drop list left some mats left over that they chose to keep by introducing even more mats to complete the chains.
Maybe the 'cell' mat was originally meant to be 1* but 1* (and 0*) have their own set of rules, possibly designed to keep tier 1 simple (well distributed) which wouldn't fit in so well. If they were to remove (combine) one of each monster family mat chains it would certainly reduce the complexity.
What does all of this have to do with your suggestion? Well now that the chain of mats are established, you can then consider the possibility of transmuting them to and from exact values:
Consider the ability to convert 5* Primal Ore and Dragon Scales to and from 8 'raw beast material';
4* Warp dust and Chroma Tear into 4 'beast',
3* bushy tail and drake scale into 2 'beast',
2* monster bone and critter carapace into 1 beast.
1* and 0* deliberately left out for ease of understanding (not beast centric so should they also be converted to and from 'beast'?)
If your paying attention, this essentially converts materials into their own form of currency, along side crowns and energy. Whether or not this would cause more problems that it solves is beyond this discussion because I really don't know.
But getting back to the topic of Event Mats, there are elements of this concept in the game right now - most notably with the token trader and the Apocrea materials. However none of the current token value-mat systems support bi directional transmute and most of them have one or both halves untradable between players. The ability to trade your spare 'Apocrea' currency to those that don't have it could be extremely handy - or exploitable, I'm not sure. But I don't think it will ever happen, the current system seems to be based on throttling trade mostly as a 'do not compete' effort based around a single vendor selling energy and that mindset seems to have crept in almost everywhere.