So soon we can unbind #### and sell it eh?

the response to this should be interesting.

EDIT: Language.

The Unbind Store sounds like a reasonable solution for that particular issue, although I'm a bit worried about the price being the cumulative cost of the crafting fees. Would this be under the current fees or pre-update? Currently it would cost I believe 1450ce +8900cr to do this for a 5 star item. Prior to the update it would've been like 650ce + 8900cr. Any clarification on this?

In considering this problem, we've had to balance two conflicting goals:

a) how can we retain the excitement of owning a relatively unique item that was a challenge to make and craft while;

b) allowing players to explore the option to make and trade items?

I personally agreed with the decision to make high level items bind permanently.

Another way to answer these questions would be to make certain items or certain slots of a given tier be tradeable (or not), rather than an across the board ban on trading 4* and 5* items.

Awesome. Even more awesome since I have been holding into random pointless duplicates of five-stars, which I'll be able to get rid off then.

But so, a question: How expensive do you plan to make this shop? I'm guessing it's not going to be very cheap. And how long do you think it'll take until this shop is implemented, if this is something you can estimate? Because not being able to sell premade items for a bit is still gonna be a bit hard on the economy, even if we eventually get a shop for unbinding. :(

I'd also like to know what you guys are going to do, if you are doing anything, regarding Auction House's listing/sale fees. They're pretty damn expensive - It's not really possible to sell 0 - 2 star materials for profit, it's way too costy on the beginners. And 10% for the rest? That's a pretty darn high penalty, man.

Additionally, I'd like to suggest an additional feature for the unbind shop, to further enhance this point:
a) how can we retain the excitement of owning a relatively unique item that was a challenge to make and craft while;

(copied from one other thread I had posted this in)

Unbinding alone, even if it was expensive, would defeat the point of what TRD possibly wanted with this update: Not being able to simply buy your way to endgame. So instead, unbinding would return an item to its 3-star stage, losing heat, (possibly UVs too, unless you pay an additional fee? Dunno) however not the materials/crowns/energy - You'd be able to upgrade for free once the item is heated. (Or maybe you'd need the recipe aswell, to balance it out further?)

Thanks.

And please, do not repeat this kind of major change again without at least giving us a warning, or even better, asking for our opinion. The effects this has on the economy and community are too serious to be ignored, even if just for a small while.

To be honest, many important issues were not addressed:

1. I bought CE with real money expecting it to be able to allow me craft a certain number of 5* items. But with the CE increase for crafting, the amount I could use to craft 3 items to 5* can now only be used to craft 1 item. This is completely unfair, and is still not addressed by Nick.

2. I grinded to get enough Crowns to get 4* and 5* recipes. Just because I learned them, I don't get a refund? Even though there is an increase now in CE to craft my items?

3. What if we bought recipes to complement our family/friends? Now we can no longer craft and share 4* and 5*... we all wasted our time.

4. I would never have sold my 5* items last week if I had known this patch would do what it did.

In the end we still all lose... except for OOO. You should revert the patch for 2 weeks, let everyone finish unfinished business, then do what you will.

My 2 crowns.

Which items did you intend to be rare? It sounds like you're talking about token loot, like Divine Avenger, but... the fact that these items are earned with tokens means they're not going to be rare. So what's rare? What do you intend to be rare in the future?

If you want items to be rare, it seems like you should be rebalancing items so there's an equal alternative to Vog Cub + DA or whatever.

One major issue is that your definition of "challenging" is actually just "expensive". The only way your going to make "rare" items anything other than just expensive is to have some sort of loot dropping system similar to other MMORPG's. As it is now every item in the game is a simple matter of how much real world money you want to spend. The system is flawed at its very core. The only variable you are going to be able to "tweak" is how much money things are going to cost. Your last patch simply made it more frustrating and time consuming, not to mention more expensive. I do not know how that fits into your long term goals, but I can tell you right now your really going to have to get creative to dig yourselves out of the design holes you have dug into your system.

I am aware that you are not a highly experienced development team, but you have dropped yourselves right into a strange and frightening world with this game given its structure, and its relative uniqueness. I would recommend that you find some trusted, reliable community members to be gobetweens with the playerbase much like other MMO's do, and learn when to listen to them and when to ignore them. I would also recommend you take it easy on the large, sweeping changes all at once. It may be a cliche thing to say, but look at Blizzard. Very rarely does blizzard implement a massive change all at once in any of their games. They do things gradually. If an item is broken, they will raise its damage by 5% at a time, over a period of time and watch the results each time until they get it where they want it. This is effective from the design standpoint, and its so much easier for your community to digest. Your latest update could have easily been split into 3 or 4 patches, starting with the auction house, over a period of months. Alot of the discontent you are seeing is because several massive, game changing things, some of which could be considered "nerfs" were dropped all at once with no warning.

I really, really hope your game grows and matures. I hope you can capture yourselves a good playerbase that keeps your enterprise profitable. I have uninstalled the game due to yesterdays patch, and I hate having to do so because the game is fun. This is not a gripe or a whine or a passive aggressive thing, because i am too old and jaded for that. I just like to play good games, and I like to see online games like this grow and become successful and I hope Spiral Knights gets there. As soon as I feel it is on the right track, I will reinstall it with the speed of Hermes. I am happy with the money I have spent on the game, and one day I hope to spend much more.

To start off, I for one was not too happy about the new update, I'm sure many people had the same feelings. The thing is, the update basically destroyed the economy, it's a ghost-town now, whereas before it was a growing metropolis to say the least. I do agree, you were right, it is not sustainable to keep allowing people to get and sell the best gear so easily; as it caused all of the top tier items to devalue very quickly. The only solution to save the game from failure at that point was to develop more and more content rather quickly. Knowing that you are rather short staffed, that is relatively unreasonable. The problem is that this "NEW" fix really isn't a viable solution either, at least not in my humble opinion.

**Reason being that if players are allowed to unbind items, that defeats the purpose of having items bound in the first place. Sets that are relatively useless, aka the fallen set, that people have spent time and money to make not realizing that it is probably the worst set in the game, will be floating around and worth basically nothing. At that point, "premium" items will still begin to devalue. Even with the price markups that will occur as a consequence of unbinding costs, sets such as Vog Cub will still start to depreciate in value because of the ease of reselling. Once again, this is just my opinion.

At the end of the day, I feel like the simplest solution would have been to leave the game the way that it was; allow people to craft and sell whatever they so wish to craft. BUT instead of taking it to such an extreme as to take that away from them, you could have just made the materials required to make high end items much more difficult to get. That in fact, would then make high end items more of a novelty because people will HAVE to put in time to get them. Even then, these premium items would sell for a lot of CE, in which others will have to spend abundant amounts of cash if they want to obtain these "premium" items. This would have been a WIN-WIN solution in my eyes.

Regardless, the game is still enjoyable. Mob mentality is not the way to go. I agree with everyone in being upset that this is all so abrupt, so at the end of the day, that's an issue that three rings should address; discussing issues with the community before doing anything drastic. But also, it is not fair for the community to jump down the developers throats for making a rash decision that was definitely important to assure that the game would not fail in a short period of time as they have put in countless hours to make it.

That's all I have to say, Good Luck

"One major issue is that your definition of "challenging" is actually just "expensive". The only way your going to make "rare" items anything other than just expensive is to have some sort of loot dropping system similar to other MMORPG's. As it is now every item in the game is a simple matter of how much real world money you want to spend. The system is flawed at its very core. The only variable you are going to be able to "tweak" is how much money things are going to cost. Your last patch simply made it more frustrating and time consuming, not to mention more expensive. I do not know how that fits into your long term goals, but I can tell you right now your really going to have to get creative to dig yourselves out of the design holes you have dug into your system.

^ Vitek makes a great point, imo.

I believe the idea of the store to unlock equipment is a good one, I actually mentioned this in another thread earlier today. I'm partially against the cumulative cost idea though. This makes it prohibitively expensive (more so than now) to get gear made for friends because you'd have to pay for it twice. Now, if it's "the cumulative crown cost", then sure. Even twice that cost wouldn't be bad. But if it's the cumulative energy cost as well (or even just instead) you're better off giving that energy to someone and saying "best of luck". Energy costs for crafting are already crazy high at the moment for 5 star gear, but I'll accept that you guys need to make money. Paying twice that just so you can sell something for crowns alone on the market (for the professional crafters) or give it to a friend is ridiculous, it's a shake down effort for our money.

The unbinding of gear should take effort to do. If crowns alone isn't a good enough solution (and I still recommend 10k per star value) by itself, then maybe a quest implemented in some fashion. Go to a certain level and get these materials, then bring them to NPC X in Haven and you can give those and the crowns to him to unbind some gear. Hell, even requiring us to pay the 4 and 5 star materials again (plus crowns) would be enough of a requirement in my opinion.

Addendum:
As previously mentioned by NegimaSonic, my experience is not affected by others buying their way into 5 star gear. They ruin their own experience, not mine. All this "bound on build" restriction does is affect my interactions with my guild and my friends. And if it costs energy to resume this activity it's an empty solution.

Unbinding as an expensive end-game crown sink is good. Thank you for moving forward with it.

wrt item diversity, what would be really nice would be new boss stages! You would see a few non-vogs if there was a t3 boss that was something other than four levels of fire.

Now just put the CE crafting costs back down to normal(Hell, even slightly above normal i could deal with!)and I'll wholly forgive you for that update that was pure fans-getting-slapped-in-the-face-for-nothing :) .

-EL

I was interested in trying out the Flourish or Sealed Sword series, but it was a big investment to do either. Armor is even trickier because of the opacity of the stats, since I'll have to get the sets AND experiment quite a bit against different foes to see what is really worth my time. It's not that equipment is particularly expensive, but it's just not interesting or fun to acquire. I feel like the current crafting system is nothing more than a dull hurdle to prevent me from reaching the meat of the game - acquiring gear, experimenting with it and finding the best sets for the activities I want to pursue. If I'm looking at 20 bucks in CE to buy one set after the material and crown grind, I'd rather spend that money on another game that isn't going to make me jump uninteresting hurdles before I get to the meat.

My original hope for the game was that the Energy system would be used to create interesting strategy for the players. Which is the better use of energy, to open this door, to power this robot, do I revive or do I retreat to Haven? Now everything I could do with CE pales in comparison to the 700 CE I need to get my first 5* item. Previously, I could cut my CE cost in half for 4* gear by being patient and using a day's worth of ME. Now the ME is negligible compared to the CE.

I don't regret the time and money I spent on the game before now, but if the best solution you can devise for item rarity is to simply crank up prices color me really disappointed at 3R. You could introduce new challenges to earn that gear, such as monsters or puzzles. Turn crafting into a huge challenge where players collect materials to alchemize at random to try to find the best combinations. Make the acquisition of various materials a challenge in itself by having them only appear in very specific stratum rewarded for top-level play. Make crafting into an action-based challenge where you have to precisely hit sequences of keys and solve rapid fire problems accurately to conserve materials or get a UV. Those would be interesting and stimulating, and make me want to pay money to play.

As it stands, Spiral Knights doesn't seem to be aspiring to anything much more than a typical MMO treadmill.

Before the update we could have traded a 4* (unpopular) weapon for approx 500 CE.

Now (and after the unbinding machine is available) the same 4* weapon costs 600 CE (for the 4* and 3* crafting) + 200 CE (est) materials+crafting-crowns + 700 CE (est unknown unbinding cost) + whatever the seller wants on top of this + 10% auction fees.

600(crafting)+200(materials+craft-crowns)+700(unbinding)+300(what seller wants in profit) = 1800 + 10% auction fees = 1980 CE (Estimated)

So, very approximately a four fold overnight (nightmare surprise) cost increase.

If $1 = 350 CE (Depends on how much you buy in one go).

Before 4* weapon was about $1.42

Now (and after unbinding shop) = 1980/350 = $5.65

Increase = $5.65/$1.42 = 3.98 = about x4
(I could be rude, and say that I'm being NICKed from, so badly that it is SPIRALLING into a KNIGHTmare, but sadly these THREE capitalized words are RINGED with a little truth).

The increased cost of crafting still means I won't be playing. It's too much of a grind at this point. And if unbinding requires the use of CE, it just means CE will cost more... again.

I agree wholly with Vitek (post 17).

/me fully expects the tarting to continue until the "unbinding house" is released, and then intensify again once people realize its CE only, probably in the range of 3K CE for a 5-star item, 1500 for a 4-star item, and 750 for a 3-star item. If the developers want most people to play the game the way they intended (by searching for and crafting their own equipment), and allow a small percentage of players that are ready and willing to pay anything to get 5-star equipment quickly, then that is the price it will have to be --- minimum.

uh, wow. Not only was the economy of the game booched in the initial public release of the game, but the development team then made it worse, now they are promising to go beyond booched.

This is a F2P game, vaguely similar to YPP's doubloon system, but very critical differences are completely ignored.

For this CE system to work, free players need to trade something (usually time) for CE, while paying players need to want that something and will give CE for it.

Lots of things need CE, gates, revs, crafting, and a few minor things. These are needed by free and paying players alike.

What does a paying player need from a free player? Crowns? No, not so much. The higher the crown to CE exchange rate goes, the less CE they need to spend on crowns. Crowns are abundant just by playing the game. Materials are even less in need than crowns. What do you spend crowns and materials on? Well, crafting, mostly.

There isn't a balance here at all. Free players desperately need CE, paying players need nothing. Sure, free players can always just become paying players, but then the whole CE system is a waste of time. Paying players don't need free players to be guides, or crafters, or members of the raid party, paying players work just as well. There is no network effect in this game, nothing works that much better if there are 10,000 players than if there are 100.

When I started playing soon after the public release, it was obvious that there needed to be far more crown and material sinks. Instead OOO has reduced the crown sinks and made the lack of a material sink much more obvious/serious, and increased the CE sinks.

Want to make UV items rarer? Make it so that the UV doesn't show up on crafting, but rather on the level 5 and level 10 points. Normal players would then be the most common to find a UV, rather than bulk crafters.

The basil recipe change was just down right dumb. Why did you even bother, when there are so many obvious holes? You would need to completely remove the trading of recipes i you wanted to do anything other than become an annoyance.

I still have a hard time understanding why you let mist energy be used for crafting. That is just asking for people to create alt accounts to knock off up to 100CE per crafting session, anyone who doesn't won't be competitive. I don't know what percentage of crafting is currently done via ME, but I suspect that more and more ME is being used, rather than people just playing the game.

Want to keep crafters from flooding the market? Make recipes have a limited number of uses. Or, make items bound to the crafter until level 5.

*sigh*

I haven't played a dungeon crawl for years, SK has been fun, but I'm having a hard time caring enough about the game to even be upset at the stupid things the devs are doing.

@cheeserito - If you had already learned the recipe, chances were good that you had already used the recipe. Therefore, the higher recipe cost was offset by the lower crafting cost, making it a wash. This was the case for me - I had just bought the dread venom striker recipe, but I also crafted it already, so the extra 20K for the recipe was offset by saving 500 CE crafting.

While I like the general concept of the Unbinding Store, and that DOES ameliorate some of the problem with making 4* and 5* goods perma-bound, that still leaves crafters largely screwed for selling common items for people who want them.

My biggest concern with the patch, at this point, is that I'm STILL stuck with several "albatross" items on my character - items that I was crafting to sell for a modest profit once they reached 5*. Among these is an Ascended Calibur with 10 Heat level on it - ready to be crafted into a Leviathan Blade. But now, that's pointless, because I already have a Leviathan Blade for my own usage. I can make it a Leviathan Blade, but I can't sell it. And when the Unbinding Store comes around, I can... pay yet again for the chance to sell it, or keep it as a useless albatross.

GG, devs. You managed to turn one of your supporters into a bitter ex-supporter. Feel free to look at my record to see how much CE I've bought... to remind you how painful losing a good customer really is.

Screw obscene priced just to do gifts and such, I like to help my friends get good gear, and they help me, it wouldn't be the least valid to pay twice as much just to give a friend something they could make for half the costs.
furthermore, who cares about "rarity"!? when you make yourself an item, its the fact you made it that makes it nice, screw rarity. anyone who cant handle an item they like being common surely don't like it that much, an item's good whether its rare or not.
just save the time and make something better, it's hardly any improvement from this crud of auto bind.

And yeah, you missed the other major problem, CE prices, I already had to grind for way too long to get an item, in a F2P game that's not supposed to be all grinding.

This is the wrong approach. You want to make an item rarer? Make the materials rarer, or make the item require more rare materials. That cannot be counteracted by simply buying CE with real money. That was the problem before- people were buying CE with real money so that they fund crafting costs, because getting materials was NEVER a problem. You are making the problem worse now. Materials are still just as easy to get, and you need more CE. So people simply have to either buy more CE with real money, or focus on getting crowns and only crowns. People will on average craft less things which means materials will be used less and thus become more common. This will make them less valuable as well, making it harder for people to sell materials. Worst case scenario is that the only people who buy mats are those who are buying CE with real money, because they are the only people who can make things before they have the mats already from all the dungeon runs they're doing. Before this change, I was able to craft half of I wanted with materials I had already found, and I don't even buy CE with cash.

I will point out that if people are crafting less often, buying less recipes (because they can't freely sell the items), and buying recipes for less, then there's less crowns being removed from the game via crafting. There will be more crowns in the hands of players. I... don't really know much about how money circulates though so I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.

The more that I think about, the more terrible this is. Three Rings, please read Vitek and McFrugal's posts above (#17 and #48). Hell, just read everything.