Interesting topic. I've been thinking about this too.

Upward pressures (downward when the opposite is true)
The availability of easy zones in the first level under Haven(or a subtown) that produce crowns.
The availability of high crown zones across entire sections of gates.

Upward pressure - game becomes more fun to play because people won't mind spending more of the crowns they get from a run on getting energy to do more runs
Upward pressure - auction house - because it will make it easier to convert ingredients to crowns, and make it easier to collect the ingredients to create UVs. Of course, then you need ME or CE to actually make the items too

This reminds me of a comedy bit my grandparents used to listen to (on vinyl phonograph record even).

There's these two guys, Al and Bob. Al has a horse, and Bob buys it from him for a dollar. A few weeks later, Bob sells the horse back to Al for two dollars. A few more weeks later, Al sells the horse to Bob again for three dollars. A few weeks later, Al comes buy to see about buying the horse from Bob for four dollars, but Bob says he sold to a guy from out of town for ten dollars. Al says, "What'd ya do that for, we had a great racket going!"

Ahem. Okay, it's only funny when delivered right and spun out a bit longer, but that's the idea. The point is, just like Al and Bob selling the horse back and forth to each other, there's no profit for the -group- of Al and Bob. In the same way, players selling to each other does not profit -players as a whole-. For every player that can now more easily afford to buy CE, another one is now less able to afford it. Crowns only increase -average- wealth when they are fountained, not when they are passed from player to player.

I'm not an economist and I've never taken a single class in economics, but here are some of my thoughts.

Basically in SK you have two currencies, crowns and CE. Leaving aside the issue of player to player trades, SK gives us a highly synthetic system of exchanges that are possible with the two currencies.

CE:

With the single exception of player to player trades, all CE exchanges/interactions are sinks (i.e. CE is permanently consumed), as CE is the currency intended to have scarcity and value. Unlike a real currency, it isn't mined or printed, so the only way to make more of it is by player investment of hard currency, and eventually, if the players stop buying the CE will all run out. At this point we will be able to keep playing the game on mist energy but with no access to anything with an energy cost > 100. (As a corollary to this, only items with energy cost of > 100 have real world value, including 5* gear, guilds and slot unlocks.) Let's look at a list of CE sinks for consideration:

- Level lifts (10 CE/use, 5 at rescue camp)
- Energy gates (3 CE/use)
- Robo knights (5? CE/use)
- Trinket/weapon slot upgrades (150 CE/each)
- Guild formation (500 CE)
- Alchemy (10-300 CE)

Energy gates are almost certainly a waste unless you have a party of four in which case the crown payout may potentially be greater than the cost in CE at going rates, but never to any one player.

Trinket/Slot upgrades may be possible to break even on since they allow you to gamble on harder danger rooms but you would have to grind them consistently for the 30 day time period to recoup your costs.

The major factor I see affecting the day to day price of CE is limited time promotions like the Rose Regalia they're running now, which encourage players to buy more. The market price of CE (in crowns) has plunged nearly 4% and is still falling.

Crowns:

Since unlike CE they can be generated by player interaction, but not by direct purchase with hard currency, their relative value is much more difficult to assess. Let's look at a list of sources and sinks of crowns:

Sources
-Playing the dungeon (~100-800+?/level)
-Selling materials or items to vendors
-Selling tokens to vendors, by first converting to materials

Sinks
-Vendor purchases (100-75000/ea)
-Uplink messages (max ~100ish? with attachments)
-Energy market trades (at 2%)
-Alchemy (200-5000/ea)
-Skipping directly to lower depth dungeons (200/T2, ???/T3)

One interesting thing to note is that while crowns are constantly generated through regular play, there is no way to directly convert CE into crowns. The most efficient way (by forum consensus) to generate crowns from CE is to play the tier 2 depths and hit graveyard levels, arenas, the jelly king castle, and as many danger rooms as you can handle. Danger rooms and arenas are the only element that appear to incorporate player skill into the CE value equation, as they allow skilled players to get more crowns back from their CE layout. At the going crown to energy ratio of ~40:1, you break even on the energy cost of a level when you collect 400 crowns in it. This currently happens below around Depth 12. However, playing the levels on mist energy is effectively free.

The second way of generating crowns ex nihilo using CE is to do alchemy and sell the results to vendors, but this is horribly inefficient (per design) and invariably results in a net loss for the player. An example exchange is the Haze Bomb. The alchemy cost is 200 crowns, 10 CE and ~250-300 crowns worth of materials at market prices. The equivalent value of the resulting item is ~900 crowns, and you can sell it to a vendor for 300 crowns, which is technically more crowns than you put in.

Another point to note is that the most egregious sinks, the vendor purchases, are entirely avoidable if players cooperate. A player can theoretically avoid buying a single recipe or item from a vendor and still obtain all the 5* gear in the game by having friends do the crafting. This would result in the value of crowns decreasing rapidly as the currency inflated unchecked. Unless there is some hidden algorithm that modifies the payout of dungeon levels based on the number of crowns in circulation, I don't see any safety mechanism to prevent crown inflation other than a rather cynical assumption of player stupidity and lack of coordination.

Furthermore, the prices for the other crown sinks seem completely arbitrary and make me wonder if the developers put any thought into the economy at all.

In summary, the interaction between the three currencies (crowns, CE and real) is complex but ultimately arbitrary. The price of CE is fixed with regard to real money, but variable respecting crowns. The factors affecting the price of CE are the money supply of crowns (I would not invest in crowns for reasons listed above!) and player interest in the game. As the game becomes more popular, players will buy more CE lowering its price, with short term fluctuations according to promotions, etc run by the developers. The crown price of CE will ultimately trend upward due to two factors, the inflationary nature of crowns and the fact that CE is consumed in every meaningful game transaction.

Based on all the above, my long term perspective would be this. Play as much as you can in Tier 2 on mist energy only. Hoard CE as it's the only thing with real value. Smash all the bushes and trees for maximum return on dungeons, and play the market while you adventure. Any trade you make better than 2% on is profit for you (at the expense of the overall money supply however). Make a couple purchases with real money to shake up the market and keep things fun. Craft as many items as you can for people and keep the UVs as they will be desirable for collectible value later, especially so if an auction house is developed.

LOL well, I stopped taking you seriously at "So", so there.

methanol > "LOL well, I stopped taking you seriously at "So", so there."

Brilliant straw-man.

leviathan > "It might be useful to treat player types as "pressure groups""

That's perfect actually. But then you get into time-constraints as well. The play-buy-keep-playing group is limited to the times they are able to play (even after X hours straight, they will have to sleep). Prime times would be an example of this system "gone wild" and would account for the prices increasing at those times (possibly nights and weekends?). So their pressure is more cyclical rather than instant like the other groups (cash players don't have a given time they pay or put their CE on market, but once they do, it is instant supply).

I would say there is at least 2 more groups, the De Beers group (methodology based on the diamond company that bought up all the kimberlight regions to slow-supply the market in order to keep the price high), and the arbiters (in order to try and stabilize the economy by stiffening the up/down motions). The first group, I'd imagine, is an upward pressure, and the second is a counter pressure (whichever way the market faces, they tend to press the other way).

This regalia set thing is causing a huge fluctuation in the market....at one point I had placed 30 buys at 3900 and 30 sells at 4099 (a 117 crown profit per partner), all 60 orders went through within 12 hours. That's a 200 point shake, and I don't even know exactly how long it took, but even 12 hours is quite quick. I also saw the market plummet to about 3810, so I jumped on the bandwagon for 40 buys at 3820....instantly (and without me getting even 1 order) it rose steadily to the 3970 mark before crashing to 3940. The sell side stayed within the 3990-4050 range.

At this point I'm about to just give up being an arbiter and take this puppy for a ride, stiffening doesn't seem to be doing much of anything.

One can easily assume that a power surge weekend is a potent downward pressure, because it acts directly on one of the game's core upward pressures, elevator cost.

Pure speculation from this point on.

The current implementation of guild creation, weapon slots and trinket slots is based on energy. I assume that "guild perks", a frequent request, would also be priced in energy (guild perks being a guild bank or other guild hall additions). Naturally, these energy sinks would be powerful upward pressures.

The future possibility of even deeper and harder tiers (the core) would also create new energy sinks due to difficulty-induced re-ups, and are also likely to provide more crowns. If these theoretical tiers feature bigger and better gear (more than one stat bar?) the pressures may equalize.

Rose Regalia will not be the last premium item. Profit is seldom as visible as it is right now. This downward pressure will likely accompany a strong upward pressure, such as new item recipes. Oh looky, item recipes were released just before the Rose Regalia. In closing, I'm glad my free time is in the hands of a thoughtful dev team.