Greed was always there, freedom fighter.

Grind FSC.

If we are going to roll with payout changes we have two options: decrease boss payouts or increase Arcade-normal-floor payouts.

Boss missions are often favored for the instant gratification of boss tokens (which can be exchanged for items which may be sold to NPCs or other players), decent heat, and plentiful crowns. People want crowns. Boss missions are fairly short and give more crowns per floor while only having to do very few floors. All you have to do are the three/five floors and you get a giant payout. What do Arcade runners get? Access to recipes not available through the Hall and spending more energy for less monetary reward. The Arcade is supposed to be the main appeal in common gameplay, but its only appeal is access to recipes which cannot be found through the Hall since a significant amount of players complete the mission series before even looking at the Arcade. If boss missions are bumped down in payouts people will flood to the next best thing, which will most likely still be boss floors due to the significantly higher yield of reward in terms of money. On the other side, increasing average Arcade payouts would simply create more inflation without any counterbalance. What if boss missions have their rewards decreased while average floors have their payouts increased? It would eventually boil down to numbers: which floor gives more money to squeeze. Seeing as boss floors are supposed to be more difficult, therefore more rewarding, for Three Rings to do this is highly unlikely. More boss runs means more boss equipment, meaning more unbinding, meaning more energy spent, meaning more money for them. If that process is interrupted they lose money. Losing money is bad for them.

After getting through that indigestion and sitting on the toilet for an hour, what do we do about this nonsense? Do we go back in there and sit down again? No, that is stupid. Stupid and boring. We need an independent incentive for the Arcade without fondling crown payouts. That gets you arrested. We need another reason, something that everyone would want but is not necessarily crowns; materials, heat, and equipment.

Materials are already too abundant because they have very limited use and are commonly obtained. We have a tidal wave of materials coming into the market and barely two truckloads being used to feed the children. What do we do with all these materials which are not being eaten by crafting? Nothing, they just sit there like idiots. Millions of idiots. With the guild update, more specifically for the guild hall, I hope they make a crafting system which primarily consumes materials (it can still use some energy, but the majority of the price should be materials) to create furnishings (decorative flags, furniture, etc.) for yet another cosmetic appeal. It would eat up some of the giant mountain of blubber everyone has sitting in their arsenals without creating a major imbalance because it is solely cosmetic.

Heat, as explained not too long ago, is the Spiral Knights version of experience. Again, for the guild update, heat should be useful for something. Maybe a trinket or some kind of equippable item which takes heat as if it were an unheated item and dumps it into your guild. Your guild could use that heat for previously referenced guild hall decoration/improvement building or simply to increase maximum guild member numbers. When your equipment is burning hot from all the heat pumped into it and you have nothing to do with all the heat you ripped out of zombies in Firestorm Citadel, throw it at your guild or something.

Equipment is a major part of this game. Your equipment identifies what you are capable of, supposedly; by wearing 4*+ you are assumed to be experienced and skilled. However, due to the mission update which brought the depot there has been an influx of "pay to win" players. They buy a bunch of energy and dump it into the market, which is a decent counterbalance to rising energy prices, but is not significant enough to last. They get their vanilla equipment and Three Rings makes a few quick bucks off their impatience. That person then goes off to do some T3 only to find it far more difficult than T1. They throw a tantrum, whine, cry, soil themselves, and eventually quit never to return. What a waste. Before anyone points out the obvious I know equipment available through the depot is based on your rank meaning you have to get clearance to buy prebuilt equipment before you can grab it, but that does not stop the pay-to-winner from buying their equipment from someone who already cleared it.

What do we have left? Nothing. This is going well. Actually, go back to equipment; not necessarily having equipment drop from enemies, but the means to obtain new equipment. Currently there are four means to obtain equipment: token exchanges, crafting, depot, and dropping from enemies. Bosses have tokens. Crafting consumes materials, though not very quickly. The depot only takes energy. Enemy drops would make something too abundant. What do we do about this? With tokens we could have a separate system of tokens, based on the amount of Arcade floors consecutively run; the more floors you run at once the more tokens you get, but not to a magnitude scale; every X amount of floors would increase the Arcade token amount per floor, not multiply your end token count for that run. That way using an elevator pass is not absolutely required to get ahead and running on mist is still worth running the system. What do these tokens do? New recipes, equipment, accessories; something. Most likely accessories. The token payouts would be fairly low, starting at one per floor and increasing based on a system which may be explained later, but the system would end up eating hundreds to thousands of tokens for the items which are likely to be accessories to have a reason for cosmetic punks to jump in the Arcade. The accessories would be untradable. What about the equipment you attach them to? Untradable and un-unbindable unless the accessory is removed. Painfully.