Hello fellow community members, and hello Grey Havens.
To preface: I know at a glance this reads as speaking out of emotion (partially), but please try to read through the whole thing to understand the logic and reasoning behind it. I speak here with the game and overall community's best interest at heart.
I just wanted to make a quick note and rant about the new forum post about the new method of hosting Cyber Monday Sales, because really, this is terrible. Can we please see what community feedback is being referenced for this? Because majority of the players last year HATED last year's Cyber Monday for being too Auction House centric, and not being able to get any good or rare items for cheap.
I can't stress this enough, that what Spiral Knights faces with item is less of "rarity" and more of extinction. There's a plethora of items that are simply unavailable. And putting them on auction house provides no solution to this, since it only puts one single copy of the item into the economy. I have no idea who even said they wanted more items to STAY rare and be auction house exclusive, but this literally only satisfies the merchants who overpay on an item on featured auction, idle in haven all day, and play hot potato with the same item, letting it inflate to the point where nobody ever gets to use the item.
In fact, in last year's Cyber Monday sales, majority of the items were won by Watergoose as he'd posted a screenshot of it on discord. And let me tell you about Watergoose, as everyone knows, he is famous around Spiral Knights for hoarding items and only selling them at unreasonably high rates. Consider the amount of spiral soakers sitting in his inventory, the last remaining unbound dangerous hound coat in the game of his being sold for 150k energy, and much more never to reach players' hands.
To top this all off, featured auctions like these serve as both reason and a way for people who exploit with scene hopping to offload their crowns and get all the items on it, leaving us fair players with nothing. And what happens when these players are caught by Grey Havens and banned? That's right, the items are gone forever as well.
Whereas with more focus on supply depot sales, every player has a chance to get an item they may have been waiting over a year for (Dangerous hound coats for example), and this produces multiple copies of the item. This puts them into circulation in the economy, allowing them to be sold at a later time for players who want them.
The concern about timezones for getting items from supply depot is moot, because if the items are on depot, there's always the reassurance that at least someone may have been around to buy a copy or two of the item, which you can buy from them at a later time. If there's only one copy of said item produced via auction house however, people who could not afford it on auction will never in their lifetime be able to get the item. This just effectively kills items and the player base, telling us to stop having hopes for these items and "just whale more".
This is the unhealthiest thing for the game's economy, the player base is already dwindling enough, and inaccessibility to items by gatekeeping them on auction house which whales and merchants would swoop up and let sit in their black hole of an inventory to never see the light of day unless you pay an absurd amount is only bound to kill the player base even more.
Many community members and I have been trying for many years to make the game more worth playing for the other players, both old and new, with community events, tools like Kozma's Backpack, and more, but to see the game being actively ruined like this by the developers is just an insult to any of our efforts.
Kindly hire a real community manager, because it is clear Grey Havens has no clue what this community even wants, nor sees the potential and benefit that it has to them. We, as players, want to give this game a chance and want to show it some love, but it's just becoming harder to do so over the years. Spiral Knights has all the potential to be a great game and produce mountains of revenue for Grey Havens while also being money well spent for the players, if only there was a little bit of effort put into actually interacting with the players.
And I am sure it is not only me, but many other community members who feel the same. I request you all from the community that I have cared about for the past 12 years to speak out against this, because this is genuinely not okay for any of us.
Do better.
its a shame things are the way they are right know,hope can only get you so far, i hope they listen to what you have to say,there are so many accesories that never are viable to obtain in a normal gameplay that does not include insane grinding,i would love to see a day where more cosmetics are availeble to players,but is a shame the game itselfs doesn´t even go forward or atleast not backwards.