nuff said

OP's

i dont grind so 9k is pretty big. I might as well leave :,(

eOk so yeah the CE price is fine because its a free market run by players where the demand will always be greater than the supply. Hence, being a free market, the price will reach an equilibrium with the demand (people willing and able to buy CE.

While its true EVERYONE needs it and its limited, while cr isnt, Mist energy keeps it fair. You dont HAVE to profit and grind the game to death, you only have to when you NEED the CE to upgrade to the next tier or use weapon slot unlocks (which by that point you should know how to hold a steady profit, and should be playing the game on a regular basis.)

The average amount of CR that comes in for all of the players willing and able to buy CE is at 8-9k as of now due to ways making it easier for more people to profit. More income affects the demand for CE going up,which in turn reduces the supply and causes it to be even more limited, and so the sellers try to profit as much as they can off what they can.

So as more and more players need more and more CE, and gain access to faster ways of producing more CR income, the price is just going to keep pushing to an equilibrium to which both sides are willing and able to buy/sell CE.

Mist energy is unlimited. Using an unlimited resource to farm an unlimited resource, which can then be exchanged for pretty much anything in the game, means that there will ALWAYS be a way to profit off of Mist alone to satisfy the individual CE needs of each player. It can take 50 energy, or 200 energy, but so long as Mist is available in the game, CE will always be purchaseable.

Yeah, if anyone still doesnt get that go take an Econ course, because there really isnt any reason to complain that CE is too high or that it is becoming unfair/unstable until it breaks the point where the people that need it (3*-5* [players) cannot make enough income off of Mist alone to get it.

Honestly Mist should be used sparingly. If you're saving up CE to get something, then farm FSC/KoA or any other boss. If you have enough, then just use Mist for something that entertains you. I've played only 1 FSC mission out of the past week, and played Danger missions instead, using all my Mist Energy to get thru them (revives and such.) After about 1 a day, I still managed to bring in 300CE alone just through patience and Mist only runs.

the CE market is NOT broken. Everything else in the game just caused CR inflation.

However I agree 100% with the lag. While PC requirements are a bit off at this point, and lag is mainly caused by connection issues, we do need more servers around the world, and if we want a more fair experience, the minimum system requirements should be changed, as Frame rate issues are also a problem.

the Dev's, Mod's, and Game Masters ALL have a mortal avatar.
why cant they flush the market with CE?

@Skenderbeu - Ah, I see. Apologies if I misread and misunderstood what you meant by what I had quoted. The problem is that us "oldtimers" have reached the "endgame" stage of this game. That means we own 1 or more 5* sets (I have three), have done every Shadow Lairs, every boss, soloed every boss (for personal achievement purposes) etc. I see what you mean; there's nothing really to do anymore but go on runs with Mist, or an Elevator Pass if present, and make crowns to stay rich. Buy more accessories to make your Knight look more pretty. That's it really.

I've thought about quitting at times too but many players said they'd like me to hang around. I might as well do so.

I think that if CE is gonna hit 10k even 11k sometime in the future it's gonna get to the point where most new players will instantly quit the game when they find out they have to grind RJP 6 times over 2 days or more just to get 100 CE. and with the T3 requirements, you need 1600 CE and 10,000 crowns to get there, plus all the mats which shouldn't be an issue given the endless grinding people will have to do. So if you do the math:

- You get about 2.3k from RJP on average (I guess), And let's say CE hits 10k
- That's about 5 RJP runs to get 100 CE, at the cost of 30 Mist per run.
- You can do 3 RJP runs on 100 mist, plus 1 depth given you don't use any energy with reviving, and new players aren't as skilled of course, so they're bound to use one or two revives here and there, who knows.
- So if you need 1600 CE and 10,000 crowns to get into T3, that's almost 100 RJP runs just to get into T3. (May be less if you buy sealed swords with the tokens and vendor them.)

So if you can do 3 runs a day with very little reviving, and with a party, you can expect to get into T3 in about a month, that's if you play every day and use up your mist in RJP only, AND with little to no reviving.

A lot of new players aren't very patient these days, and having to grind for a whole month just to get into T3 where you have to do even MOAR grinding is getting ridiculous.

And as for us 5* people, it will hurt us in the long run, especially if CE manages to go way up past 10k and into the 11k-12k range. That would be the point where if we don't have an elevator pass, FSC will barely provide 100 CE in 2 runs, but then what's the point if you use 100 mist or CE just to gain 100 CE? It just doesn't make any sense. No I haven't forgotten about the tokens but even with them it will be a constant grindfest with CE at 10k+. At 12k or higher, we could all say that the only would-be "profitable" run in the game is UFSC, but then again I'm not flushing 1800 CE down the toilet just to gain access to an area that pays out that much in crowns. Of course you get the material at the end, but if it comes down to people constantly grinding UFSC, the value of Maidens Tears will just drop. And that will result in UFSC being unprofitable even in a full party of people pitching in 450 CE, along with the entire game becoming a massive grindfest for everyone where the only way left to get ahead is to buy CE with real money.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again, it's only a matter of time before someone releases some sort of server emulator for this game, and if that goes viral the official servers along with the official game being developed by OOO will die a swift sudden death. I hate to say it, but if it happened to other MMOs, it can and WILL happen to Spiral Knights.

Haiz, the people here sure have a bad habit of making tl;dr posts. Lemme summarize this in the name of laziness:

1. Unbalanced crown gains from FSC and other missions result a high ce price, which is killing our new and f2p players. To make it shorter: we need them.
    Anyone saying "OOO ain't responsible for this matter", spend some time on basic economics. Yes, they do.

2. The game application performance is terrible.

3. Nick said there would be item balance and/or new features. We're still waiting (not sure about that, rara).
    P.S. the new maps are not "something new". U find that kind of additional contents everyday in other game communities, especially games that support mods.

The problem with the CE Price lies at the very Core: The Missions.

The Missions' Objective

Before the missions, new players were stumbled into a lot of stuff very quickly, before even reaching Haven. I remember going through the chasm full proto without buying anything or going through the Tutorial n°2 because I thought that tutorial elevator was actually the way to continue. And then I arrived into Haven and I was plunged into even more stuff.

This is what the missions were for: to guide the new players and teaching them all the basics of Spiral Knights. But then, OOO had to go overboard...

The Missions' Problem

You surely remember the time where you had to go through a couple of depths before reaching Snarbolax, Jelly King, Roarmulus Twins or Vanaduke, right? Well, OOO screwed it all up. We could've had clockwork missions actually beginning in the clockwork safe rooms, and then go through a couple of depths before actually reaching the objective of the mission at hand... No. Instead we get straight into the objectives.

Then between missions we get these Plot Walls that are called Hall Of Heroes. A Hall where the best of the Spiral Order are there to show the player which weapons and armor are available, with a Lieutenant at the end of the Hall, here to see if you got the right equipment. And again, OOO went overboard. Instead of just showing us what is available at this point and make us look for the recipes, they sell most recipes in the Hall. I won't lie, it does help, but there's a very big consequence to that... and which brings us to...

The Missions' Aftermath

So what happened with this overboardness OOO did? Oh, a lot, and none are positive.

1) Getting instantly into high-crown paying places, such as FSC or RJP, eliminates the need to go through the Clockworks to get to these places, not to forget that you can reach any special place of the Clockworks you want (Ex: Dark City) just as instantly:

- Arcade is obsolete;
- CE Prices rise;
- Game becomes less cooperative;
- Crown Payouts for high-crown paying places are nerfed;

2) Getting instant access to almost all recipes also eliminates the need to go through the Clockworks to get said HoH recipes and/or the need to look up said HoH recipes in the Auction House:

- Arcade is obsolete;
- Finding and/or selling HoH recipes is worthless;
- Prices of non-HoH recipes rise;

3) With Prestige Missions, you're basically doing a half-run of the Clockworks in order to get Prestige that regular Clockworks runs cannot give:

- Arcade is obsolete;
- Game becomes less cooperative;

What must be done in order to restore the CE Prices

So now you've seen it all. The objective, the problems and the consequences. These next steps is what I believe will lower the CE Prices:

1) Make all Clockworks missions start at the Clockworks Subtowns or at the Party Lobby if missions are T1. Make T1 missions make you start directly at the objective depth, T2 missions one depth before the objective and T3 missions two depths before the objective. Make "Shadow of the Beast", "The Sovereign Slime", "Built to Destroy!" and "The King of Ashes" start at their representative Tier Subtown (Party Lobby for T1, Moorcroft Manor for T2, Emberlight for T3) and make you go all the way down to the objective depths, like in the Arcade;
2) Make the Arcade give you Prestige points depending on how far you go down and how far up you started in the Clockworks;
3) Re-buff the Boss Depths' Crown Payout back to the way they were and make all similar Clockworks Depths give the same payout;
4) Take away all recipes from the HoH; make the Heroes show the current * weapons via preview instead;

These steps are supposed to bring back the Arcade into the main plan once again -what Spiral Knights has always been about- while keeping the Missions in the game.

You might not realise this but the minimum requirements are requirements that allow you to just launch the game. That said, before I've upgraded my CPU it was an old AMD LE-1600 (it's clocked at 2.2ghz) which is basically bottom of the bottom among the office-tier CPUs and on it I could play the whole game really well (60 fps on my radeon HD 4650) on high graphic settings aside of FSC, IMF and some "fog" intense levels. The game perfomance isn't as bad as you make it out to be, there are just problems with those specific areas but then again, what game runs at the same performance in every moment of the game the same? Such games do not exist.

And blast processing wasn't supposed to make a powerhouse out of your out-of-date PC, it just solved the problem of the game running badly when there was no apparent reasons for the game to run like that.

@ Prevailer Even if it doesn't happen I never said it was guaranteed to happen, I just said it can will happen if someone has Java programming experience, the incentive, and the time on their hands to do it. Don't be so cocky about it because you never know. Like I said, server reverse engineering has happened before to other MMOs because of similar problems like what we're dealing with now. So just because there isn't any hacks or server emulators for SK now, doesn't mean one can't be made.

Knight Name: Mr-Baldy
Got to 1star almost instantly thanks to missions.
Got to 2star just as fast, I can buy a full set of 2star stuff for less than 5K thanks to AH and the missions gave me the base set already.
3star took a bit of time but after grinding Jelly King (and relying on Balderus to give me a few nice 3star things.) I managed to get to 3star in a decent amount of time.
4star was taking horribly long so I decided to cheat and using the CE earned from commissions to craft my stuff. (Also using crowns on Balderus to buy me nice accessories because I splurge.
I currently only have one 5star item and things are going a bit faster now that I'm T3 but the gap between T2 and T3 is incredibly huge whereas you're barely in T1 long enough to know how to fight. This means that noobs are progressing into T2 faster than they should and are taking forever to get into T3, by which time, they'll probably have given up. With the CE at its current price, you need to do grind the most profitable things (Which are T3) if you ever want to get 5star stuff.

The CE prices rising impact those who aren't T3 the most so... I... I had a reason behind all this but I just forgot what it was.
Drink more Soda.

Join a guild? It should be easy to get others to take you on FSC runs.

Maybe not the ideal solution, but it is there.

Again, the power to change these things is not outside your hands- http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/63936

Oh wait, Beta had even worse CE Prices than now.

*sigh*