This update reminded me of why I like League of Legends developers so much; even if they're making an unpopular change, they explain their reasoning, even if their math doesn't work out or their change doesn't quite do what they wanted. But of course, we don't have anything from Three Rings, so I'll try to dissect every part of the update from both an optimistic and pessimistic perspective.

Haven
* The new Advanced Training Hall can be found on the west side of the Haven Town Square!
* The new Auction House can be found just north of the fountain in the Haven Town Square!

Optimistic perspective

The auction house was made to make the market much easier to get into; it allows players to buy and sell quickly and efficiently, preventing tradechat from being filled with dozens of people desperately advertising how they are selling every single material in the game; now you can buy common items easily and tradechat is slow enough you can keep an eye out for those prized items with a great UV.

Pessimistic perspective

In addition to being a feature request from the players, it lets players craft more easily, which helps them play in the new crafting system, and devalues the crown immensely (because sales are now much cheaper), making CE buying more necessary. It's also to keep players from leaving due to the inability to find materials, since every player (who wants to advance) is now forced to be a crafter.

Boss Tokens
* Bosses now drop a single, giant boss token that distributes boss tokens based on participation in the boss dungeon. The more levels you complete of each boss dungeon (in that run) the more boss tokens you have the chance to earn. The only way to guarantee a chance at the maximum number of tokens is to start a boss dungeon from the first level of that boss dungeon (from the terminal).

Optimistic perspective

This update prevents "moochers" from joining up with a party right before the jelly, fighting halfheartedly against only the boss, collecting the tokens at the expense of those who worked, and using it to flood the market with cheap equips

Pessimistic perspective

But tokens aren't shared so people who join late don't hurt the people who play, you can make your party private, and cheap guns are now either unviable (the cheap 4*s) or weren't that valuable to begin with. This was just to make it so that people had to spend more energy (in, admittedly, the highest crown and thusly highest energy maps) to get the tokens that allow people to subvert our CE crafting.

Levels
* Clockwork Terminals are now free to join. There is no entry fee like other levels. Their minerals have been removed.
* Fixed a minor bug in Royal Jelly Court where some monsters weren't spawning.
* You should no longer get stuck between the door and exit elevator in Spiral Court 2.

Nothing here, just minor fixes (though why didn't they fix the damnable "any time you leave/get kicked from a party moving the key, the key disappears" bug I'll never know.)

Shops
* You will not be able to purchase 2+ star items from a terminal vendor if you have not completed an entire floor before reaching the terminal. Never buy a 'Basil port' from another player unless you're in the market for 1* items!

Optimistic perspective

This allows the recipe market to flourish and prevents people using basil sales to cheaply buy high demand recipes (vog cup cap line, vile striker line, owlite line, etc) to subvert the market.

Pessimistic perspective

OOO is tryiing to make people spend energy going through at least two floors to get recipes, along with further dropping the value of the crown by decreasing the amount of people who are attempting to for-profit recipe sale. Basil ports will still go on anyway, because anybody joining the same instance and then leaving, as far as I can tell, has the same items; it will just require one person to run ahead from two floors ahead of basil, and the people left behind to fight their way to basil. I assume this will be fixed since I've let the cat out of the bag, but if not: THAT IS HOW YOU WORK BASIL PORTS.

NOTE: The above "how to Basil run" thing may not be true, since it's only based on a single trip I did with a friend. Try it yourself, it only costs 20 energy extra to get a friend to run while you wait.

Crafting
* Using a bound items in alchemy will result in the finished product being bound as well. For example, crafting a 4* item that requires a item of heat level 5 will result in an item that is bound to the crafter.
* Crafting energy costs have increased.
* Alchemy machines have new art.

Optimistic perspective

The increased crafting costs are twofold; one, to keep the economy in check because of the decreased recipe prices (items should cost roughly the same if energy doesn't increase in crown price that much, right?), and two, to prevent/minimize the amount of Mist Energy crafting accounts who bought 75 cents and decided to flood the economy with 3* UV equips. The item bound thing was to prevent instabuying your way into T5 (See, they don't care purely about money!) and because it's kind of silly to "unbind" items by crafting 'em.

Pessimistic perspective

Crafting costs were increased to, along with the joint attempts to crash the value of the crown (more on that later) force people to buy energy in order to run and advance, and OOO assumes that any sales lost because of a few players buying their way to victory are more than mitigated by the number of people buying CE just to craft their way up to T3 the "slow" way, since that now requires tons of extra energy spent in crafting and item diving; even if the player isn't directly buying energy, they're going to be burning a lot more CE adventuring to earn the surplus to craft their equipment than they would by flat out buying it. Plus, this burns energy from the economy, whereas T4 and T5 sales, while indicative that we are actually earning CE, do nothing to encourage adding CE into the game since they are purely player-to-player.

Items
* Items now display their star value and number of unique variants on the item pill. Handy!

Handy, but pointless! I guess it helps to alleviate pointless scams, though? (Aside: The only time I've ever had an attempted scamming was when some guy attempted to, no joke, scam two blue shards from me after offering 100 each for them. Either that, or he was stupid and, after putting up 200 crowns, removed them and hit confirm for no reason at all).

Recipes
* Recipe item costs have been reduced.

Optimistic perspective

The decreased crown costs on recipes were a purely benevolent maneuver to help players get their recipes at a lower price to compensate for the higher energy costs (to prevent exploitation, of course) and getting rid of basil ports (purely to prevent exploiters, even if it hurts people who just want one recipe). Maybe the economy didn't react quite right, but their intent was to make crafting cost about the same value in money earned from adventuring, just in ways that prevented exploitation by the big bad bulk sellers.

Pessimistic perspective

Recipe prices were decreased to, yes, make players feel better, but also to crash the value of the crown since the only legitimate crown sink in the game has now been neutered to nearly half its original value. By doing so, they are either attempting to make it impossible for T1 and T2 players to earn enough CE to play indefinitely and work towards better gear, or to make it impossible at T1 and on the razor's edge of possibility for perfect T2 play so that players who wish to advance both buy CE to keep playing and/or burn CE other players bought by getting rid of their crowns.

Bugfixes
* Fixed an issue where excessive upstream bandwidth usage would cause persistent lag.
* Fixed an issue where you would sometimes join a party in a deeper tier than was specified
* Fixed an issue where you would sometimes join a party behind a closed door and were unable to proceed
* Fixed an issue where you would be charged double energy when proceeding from a subtown

OVERALL

Optimistic perspective

The optimistic perspective says that these were all changes meant to prevent exploitation with a minimum of harm to the playerbase, and that the economy is not settled (and if it settles in the wrong spot, was simply an unintended consequence). By preventing such exploitation, the intent was presumably to allow new players to more easily get into the game and especially into the trading market, after the initial hurdles, because there would be less competition from those using "underhanded" exploits, hopefully leading to continual expansion in both overall playerbase and the number of players who participate in marketing above simply buying a mist energy bots level three equips and maybe getting stuff crafted by friends.

Pessimistic perspective

This update was intended to try to put as much polish and makeup as possible on what are measures obviously intended to influence the energy trade towards requiring real cash to continue adventuring, and the fact that the net "value" of creating one item with a recipe and energy, assuming pre-patch energy prices, was not a coincidence; it was intended so that people would feel more comfortable, even though it massively increases the amount of energy siphoned from the game (requiring more cash to flow in), especially if more items are crafted. Eliminating ME bots and basil teleports weren't to help the economy, they were done to force people to buy CE to sell the last worthwhile set of items for a profit (making the items much more expensive for newbies, requiring more cash) and to make sure people grinded away CE trying to get the recipes they wanted since everybody is going to want recipes now. Even the auction house, on the face of it something many players wanted, helps make crowns less valuable because goods are cheaper and the auction house will take a while to decrease the crown supply enough to counteract the price drops.

I don't mean to endorse one position, or to indicate the developers cannot be anything either than those two extremes, or even to say these are the only two positions the developers could have taken. These are just my thoughts, but I feel they were worth sharing.