idk about you guys but maintaining an online game is pretty hard with a small team
recoloured items and simple accessories are easy to make than new armour/weapon models that require balancing

Off topic, but really, Asgores' surename is your account name XD

On topic, personaly, if OOO wants me to return to this game with money to throw at the screen, i actually expect playable content which i havent already exhausted, because, i have nothing to do, and pvp doesnt interest me.

Costumes, dont bother me with that joke ;)

In this world, its play or be played...Or... You know, PAY and have some MERCY for the developers.

Support the game and "play the game by" buy a couple of prize boxes.

Basically, SK is a box-opening lottery machine with some side aspects of RPG at this point...
Games that exploit whales get no sympathy from me.

The company's been for a while, really.

I'd always thought a new project would work, but with the lack of a budget and staff plus living expenses for the staff and the work site, money dumping seems to be the best option.

except afterbirth is terrible
Implying that superbum, greed mode, hush, and the lost buff are all terrible things.

How about a Q/A thread by the current producer in charge of SK before we say anything more? I've been speculating heavily myself, and people are countering back and forth with me, so my only response now is why is the company thinking it's worth it to stay silent through all this negativity. To say throwing more money at prize boxes will fund new content (that we want) is also unfounded speculation. I think we're at the point we need a sit down discussion on the future of the game, as the speculation has gone haywire due to game stagnation.

I also don't understand why GMs/admins don't want to put prize boxes on AH featured, as people will just use their money to buy energy to buy crowns to buy the boxes instead of directly buying the boxes with cash. The company could easily change box prices on AH to accommodate against what they perceive as the value of their box contents, AND they could re-release older promos in parallel. They also could do limited quantities to prevent market flooding of specifically one kind of box, if need be.

Seriously, a sit down Q/A thread with the staff is overdue. I'd prefer bad news over no news at this point, as the lack thereof news is just fueling daily speculation on the worst outcomes. Throw up a kickstarter if you have to for new content, I just want to see the proof that people spending on promos will fund new content rather than get funneled to sega sammy holdings.

I'm under the impression the game is in investment return mode. I'll doubt any throwing of money at the company will do anything other than give sega the cash out return it wants until I see a Q/A about the future of the game. I just feel my past efforts at spending on the game were moot in encouraging the content generation of the game. I'm extremely hesitant to agree on anything until I see official discussion on this, like what nick used to do.

But, there's not a new single Sonic game in a long time, not counting Sonic Runners.

Honestly, besides that, all Sega's been doing is keeping them in a cyclized loop that signifies their many indecisions of business decisions that apparently never ends, without a linear solution to solidify the matter, & all it does for them is costing money & time while- well, you know, excessive waiting for everyone & all. Nothing more than boredom & restlessness. Not saying negative about this, you know.

If that would have been the case, they'd be pouring a lot of money to keep it flowing.

Nevertheless, let's not forget that Sega's still in their tough times. I'm not certain of whatever word they have of going forward with their plans because of Sega's continued silence.

lol

ps rete rete

This is quite simply an ill begotten attempt to breathe life into a game that has had half of its torso ripped off.
New prize boxes are just prize boxes. It's nothing new and it's not going to elicit any heartwarming reaction from me because it's not making SK any more fun so I can't call this Content.

I understand the need to support the game, but if the developers show no indication of making the game better with anything other than lukewarm Prize boxes, accessories, and more bulletpoints on the mission modes...
Well that tells a lot about where my money is going.

I'm not saying...OMERGERD DAY NEEDZ TO DO DIS N DAT FER MEH GAEMH N ORDEr TO GIT MEH MONEH...
No of course not. That's just showing my arrogance as a player without any development experience.
But rather small, inexpensive things would influence me as a player that this game has a future rather than be a money sink.

For example...The developers talking to the community base, it's completely free, just a simple post on the forum to immediately clear any fear that the developers just up and died. It doesn't even have to be about the game, it's preferred but not necessary, Devs are human beings after all.
Or perhaps A road map. We might not like it, but at least we know the game is going somewhere or at least TRYING to go somewhere and they need our support to get there. It would CLEARLY show that there is an intended future to fuel.

It's not unreasonable right?
They do that, and I'll be more compelled to fund this games future.

Shoving pretty looking Prize boxes and Accessories that will only look good on me for a couple of days and then I get sick of them...
IS NOT WHAT I WANT AS A PLAYER TO PAY FOR.
And so...this is not new content, and I'm not supporting this trend.
There's basically more dignity in just buying energy. Support it in that way.

not really, because if it took them nearly four years after acquisition to break even, why would they suddenly decide, "hey, do you know what we could do? it sounds crazy but let's give them what they want and bounce back into their hearts" and devote any kind of developmental manpower towards content?

let's not forget, doctor who: worlds in time was the first - and currently, only - game they've openly worked together on since sega's acquisition of three rings and it fell through in 2014 with no reason ever being given as to "why". this can be due to a large multitude of things, such as licensing for the game expiring, interest dropping in the gameplay aspect, or lack of financial return from three rings as a whole. this combined with the fact that they may have expanded too quickly based off of some of their other acquisitions from around that time or beforehand and may translate to a form of over-investment in their expansion.

looking at steam analytics to compare some of their online investments should help clarify my point though: two other games/franchises that were acquired by sega include total war by creative assembly and football manager by sports interactive (here's SK's for comparisons). let us assume that there was no published pricing for any of these for the sake of fairness, since there was no price announced for three rings going to sega. looking just at their activity, we can see all three games have been on a decline of some kind, for whatever reason (i'll be honest here, i can't be ^*(#ed with going to look up their update schedules and such). of these three, SK is arguably turning the least profit due to the F2P model it runs off of, whereas the other two games can justify paying for themselves just off of the fact that they're mostly purchase-only.

numerically speaking, SK development would return the least amount of money in relation to potential effort being put into it just off the fact of how small the studio is compared to creative assembly and sports interactive are. i'm drawing this conclusion from the fact that both total war and football manager both have playerbases fluctuating in the thousands and ten-thousands in several cases while spiral knights has... 800 during it's peak on steam, rounding up. even assuming we can collect data for all places that host SK clients (kongregate, aeria), i would be willing to bet it doesn't break even 3k unique players total.

none of this is even acknowledging the fact that the SK engine runs on is java-based, which also probably limits development despite OOO making a good portion of their java from some of their games open to the public, nor the fact that a decent chunk of their development team (creative, programming, etc.) have probably left for greener pastures as well.

tl;dr - boxes won't jumpstart SK's creative development and get sega to commit to helping with game development with more funding when they could give that funding to something bigger and see more results faster. they've already driven off enough of their playerbase to where it's likely irreversible no matter how many boxes we suddenly buy, so sega's more likely to do this.

> This combined with the seeming apathy of the dev team to the playerbase outcry and to known problems (apocrea memory leak still hasn't been fixed) has distanced me from this game.

More worried about people abusing the method to glitch force the map to show for the grasping plateau map. Also that memory leak applies to apparently most, if not all sortable lists in game (If you sell enough stuff on ah to get 1 fps, try re-opening your "my auctions" page a few times in the same session, each time will double in load time until a boot to login).

I don't understand why they don't release another tf2 hat, this time making the requirement to obtain it a bit harder. That'd literally revive sk, I'm not joking. The TF2 hat method was how so many of us found SK.

OOO has kept up Puzzle pirates for a while now, I don't see any reason Spiral Knights shouldn't be receiving the same treatment (if not a better one).
People easily forget there's no closure on the game's story line yet, I'm sure we can expect new missions at the very least. The new T3 boss is still a thing, even though it's been unofficially announced a while back. Arcade Redux I like to hope is still a thing too, as can be seen in the game's resources, there are lots of unused images for entirely new items (dating back from April this year). Perhaps the game is in a bit of a development break right now due to other priorities, but I doubt they gave up on it.

Let me make it clear that for me the Arcade redux is somewhat comparable (relative to the game) to a second coming of Christ (go figure the first one out). It's the saint update. It's the update to rule them all. I feel like it's something so huge 2 years of development and testing aren't quite enough to release it, judging from the increasing size of the game directory it's massive, a complete game changer (see what I did there?), and if it ever come out it will throw SK back into a new era of prosperity.

Herex was a boss? More like a punching bag..... it was honestly much harder to get through the level than to fight the "boss".

Let me make it clear that for me the Arcade redux is somewhat comparable (relative to the game) to a second coming of Christ
Let's not go there. People went this way with the gunner update and overhyped it to the point that when it was released people were really upset despite the huge content update that was included.

I'd like to think we're getting more content unique to the arcade, such as minibosses and more scenario/danger rooms. I'd love to see a danger room themed around tortodrones that ends with a tortodrone fight, or a gremlin-themed one where you fight a tier-appropriate Collector. Maybe even branching arcade paths with a "harder" variant and an "easier" variant, where the harder variant is a completely different theme than the rest of the level (monster type/status type) so it's harder to prepare for it.

But again, Three Rings has a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes most likely. They've taken more to the whole "don't say anything until it's released", which would be great if they weren't supporting an MMO which needs new playable missions/levels/etc to stay afloat and retain interest.
I will say I have loved the last few non-gemstone promotions. Disguises were really silly but looked fantastic, and then the wooly pullover and the night caps are both so cute!

implying that time gated content, hp scaling on ultra greed greed and hush, character nerfs and item nerfs for no reason is good
go away edmund

implying that time gated content, hp scaling on ultra greed greed and hush, character nerfs and item nerfs for no reason is good
go away edmund
except no.

- Two potential "time gated" content bits - first was a bug with the greed machine. Second was the ARG, and not promised nor advertised in Afterbirth.
- HP scaling Ultra Greed and Hush - these make fights able to last longer and have higher stakes, making defensive builds have a place in the game outside of "oh i didn't get good devil deals". You've gotta play your cards right, even if most of them are handed to you. If you can't get overcome one of these bosses, then you can always hope that you find a chaos card along the way.
- Azazel was OP from the getgo. The initial nerf was miscommunication - the current Azazel is fine. I think the box of friends should have been a 3-room charge but the 2-room charge broke greed mode so much. In fact I got a 9-volt and a car battery on a greed mode run after the update and it was pretty chaotic.

So yes, I am saying that nerfs done well, release bugs that are (dev-time) quickly patched, and bosses that aren't pushovers are good.
You might wanna stop using that glowing hourglass because people calmed down about these things over a week ago.

Don't diss the Gunner Update. It's amazing.
I agree with you there! What I was getting at before was that people made the gunner update our community's "half-life 3", and so when it came out people's expectations met reality and were crushed into the earth. I've personally enjoyed the update, but I also don't expect much out of updates other than what we've seen, and what is advertised.