Spiral Knights - We need to seriously address risk & reward, and punishing game design.

We need to seriously address risk & reward, and punishing game design.

27 replies [Last post]

Tue, 07/07/2026 - 23:43

Calinou

Hello,

I have had this topic in mind for a long while, and I briefly addressed it in my "all purposes" suggestion post, but I think this topic requires its own in depth post, as I'm of the opinion that the situation at hand is particularly katastrophic (typo intended).

The current running event has exacerbated an issue I have been noticing for a long while now, almost since the very first days of SK; This game does not understand what a "reward" is, and what a good "reward" is for the amount of risk, or investment people put in the game.

I have heard of tales where people just re-run the same missions on repeat for some items, including progression-important ones, and all for said items to be abysmally low in their drop rate. The current event shows this beautifully, as even tho the Kat drops are not necessary to progress, the gear they give access to is often spoken of as some of the best armor(s) in the game, but the road to reach just ONE of these armors is not shy of a punishment. Yes, I would call a lot of this so called "grind" a punishing game loop, as just how waiting is not a game mechanic, repeating the same course of action repeatedly ad nauseam is also not a game mechanic, it is madness. It's what people are pushed to do when the design behind these sequences is so punitive, so demanding in effort or investment, that people's best bet is to turn into machines.

The game stops being a game, the player just mindlessly repeats these strategies in hopes that they may get a minuscule chance to obtain, I repeat, sometimes progression important items! I am aware that a potential upcoming "balance patch" was mentioned earlier this year, and I really hope a lot of these abysmally low drop rates will be addressed, as they contribute to what I called "punitive game design" earlier.

All of the above applies to things as trivial as collecting crowns, given that a lot of items in the game go off for prices that can easily jump up to 50k, 100k, or even near the million crowns marks (knowing that the most rewarding mission known atm: King of Ashes; only rewards between 7.8k and 9.5k crowns per completion)

Another related thing in this game that can be considered punitive, is how the auction house practically operates like a black box, despite a LOT of the items being sold on it having been obtained through real world currency, and there being a limited supply of a considerable, and growing amount of these items.

When such cosmetics are being traded on a platform of this nature, the minimum requirement would be that things like outbidding, common/average per-item pricing, or logs of what has been sold recently wouldn't be either; hidden from players; or an easy to miss memo in a sea of other messages.

As it currently stands, for something like outbidding, the game will near-silently whisper to the player that the extra-rare, knowingly supply limited item they bid all the money they earned after playing for weeks was just snagged by someone else. In such a way that if you aren't manically stuck to your chat box as you play to wait an auction out, you would absolutely miss it until you come back in haven, and potentially realize you just lost an opportunity to get what you wanted.

Another way to obtain items for sure, since the auction house feels free to royally screw you half the time, is trading, however, since the game doesn't keep track of common recent prices for items, players have had to log these prices themselves. Which again, adds to the punitive game design to me, we shouldn't have to do accounting to make sure that the DAYS we spend collecting resources and in game money don't suddenly go poof when some shady trader comes out a bush to sell you things at 500% their common price.

I realize that all of the punitive aspects mentioned so far were probably never envisioned to be this serious at any time during the design phase, but nowadays, they are serious enough that people felt the need to develop quite insane strategies to farm some notoriously painful to obtain things, and that the economy was easy enough to screw people over, that entire leagues of loggers formed to log prices for cosmetics and non-cosmetics alike.

I could continue on and on, but these were my main two examples as of recent times. And the rest of the punitive aspects are often related to how much players need to juice some of the game's unassuming missions to obtain resources, or how they had to organize to avoid getting screwed upon by mechanics that could use some kind of overhaul.

A last honorable mention however; on the "lack of reward" part of this post is that "danger" missions, despite being MORE dangerous than "king of ashes", barely reward anything, if not prestige, the least useful "resource" in the entirely game, and a pitiful 3.6k to 4.5k crowns total. Which is abysmal in my humble opinion.

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 02:40

Sir-Pandabear

God I got anxiety just reading about the auction house sniping. It's why I've never bothered with the system.

Danger mission payout might have made sense when it was 2 floors and that meant it cost only 20 mist to run it (I believe the final reward floor was free?), but that hasn't been a relevant factor in about 10 years. It needs to scale for clear time, which is unfortunately a task that can only be done by someone who understands the game.

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 11:48

Vyre-Acidlashed

Here we go.

I think I'm about ready to stop dancing around the point with pretty words and insistent diplomacy - I agree with your post, to be clear, but let's call it what it is.

They're player-abusive dark patterns. Calling them "punishing game mechanics" stances them as being designed around game engagement with a poor understanding of the rationale of play and from a design perspective that just doesn't track. When viewed through the lens of maximising time-in-contact with the VERY LIMITED RANGE of items that are desirable, things start coming into close focus. The game stops being a facilatatory mechanism for play or player expression and instead becomes busywork that a player feels incentivsed to engage with to have a fair shot at *getting any value for their time or money.*

Watching someone pull the lever on the same slot machine repeatedly isn't an expression of play, it's an expression of desperation. If someone's doing Kat Sprints it's because they feel like they have to, running a treadmill for the lucky shot at getting a big crown payout from selling a margrel slot.

The adversarial player economy - as previously pointed out in the original post - only adds to this by leveraging the fear of missing out, and causes yet more players to succumb to design patterns that don't feel like healthy play. Auction sniping or camping out on Haven's main plaza means not playing the game.

I've heard while standing in Haven that some players will set clocks based on how the "time left" indicator changes in order to minimize the actual bidding they have to do, and even though this activity could be "fixed" by adding a small amount of uncertainty to those timings, it doesn't mitigate the inherently adversarial design of an auctionhouse that relies on rare lootbox pulls and crushingly slim grinding sessions to function.

The meagre rewards from missions coupled with the exorbitant asking prices of in-game items and the increasingly spiralling cost of energy all work together to foster an environment where players are overpaying and underbuying. They're getting ripped off for their time or their money or their effort, or all three at once. Calling this "Bad Game Design" is generous at best. This is an expression of predatory monetisation that's spiralling out of control because of outdated and outmoded systems interacting in unpredictable ways, and I am not entirely certain that saying "the playerbase is at fault" is fair any more. This house of cards was always going to come down catastrophically because it incentivises spending first and gameplay second and it's eating at the health of the ***game*** as a ***thing to do*** from the inside.

This system has some wretchedly vicious externalities and I think that there are enough people across every "class" of player now that it's becoming pressingly noticeable.

Incidentally, I've looked at the other post quoted by Calinou and I thoroughly agree with their proposals to reduce the incidence of these grinds and widen the suite of positive experiences a player can have. Let's not pretend as though the gameplay here needs to keep this up - those of us that are still here are here to stay. We already like the game enough that we're still playing it even in this state. Mechanisms that keep us here using anxiety, compulsion or gambling are neither healthy nor compelling - and they're certainly not inviting to new users. A wider range of positive experiences to look forward to that are achievable through play or patience will make for a significantly healthier and more inviting play experience overall - and playercount will likely only go up in the wake of that. "Less stick, more carrot," no?

To be absolutely explicit about this matter for whomever is reading this post or posts like it - This Problem Is Imminently Fixable, but it very closely depends on a candid dialogue about historic monetization patterns and game design ideologies, and it absolutely requires designers being willing to walk back some decisions that will, ultimately, upset some people who are depending exclusively on the sense of satisfaction of having a rare item to continue feeling like "playing the game" is "worth it", because it is a matter of empirical fact that this isn't intrinsic play - it's extrinsic, and that's not a healthy impulse to encourage in a playerbase. PLAYING THE GAME should be worth it.

A pricing overhaul that diminishes this value will almost require refocusing on improving the overall experience to offset the impact of that, and done correctly with careful planning and design, it will HUGELY limit the extent of player retention loss, but it requires developers having faith in their playerbase, and most importantly, it requires them keeping to a philosophy admitted in the steam discussions by Cleaver themselves in the steam discussions page on August 26th. "If it were about the money, we'd've done something else."

We'll pay you for your time and effort. If you meet us not in the middle, but just a tiny bit closer.

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 10:13

Draycos

People mindlessly playing the same highest-profit missions because it's their best option is a consequence of the Forge system, the abolishment of the original Mist Energy / elevator cost systems, and a general shift toward time efficiency being the dominant factor over total rewards in a stage. The lack of a cost per-level and the introduction of direct UV rolls with crowns/tickets instead of crafting is more casual, but had some big ripples where levels held afloat by their unique materials relative to the energy cost of running them are now just irrelevant. This combined with Orbs/Firecrystals to drastically constrict the stages worth running if the player wants to progress. When's the last time anyone said anything nice about a Wolver Den besides "at least it's not a Compound"? And yet Dens used to be highly valuable despite their low raw crown/heat payout as their materials were used in Brandishes and Wolver armor.

Danger Missions are a great thing to bring up since as Zeddy mentions, they were initially energy-efficient stages despite taking longer and giving fewer rewards relative to realtime. Additionally, they also dropped loads of 5* Firecrystals before the drop range for them got pushed almost out of range. All of the 4* crystals it's clogged with used to be 5*. Today, we are lucky to get more than six 5* crystals.

You can see Kataclysm in its current state as all of that sifted and refined to a logical conclusion: running past enemies, ignoring stage design, and aggressively restarting the same shortcut-to-Candlestick missions over and over because the drops aren't worth the time it takes for enemies to finish their death and loot-spawning animations even when instakilling them with certain weapons; there is no reason to play other stages when targeting Black Kats and no reason to fully complete the stage either; and it's time-limited so you're incentivized to grind it as hard as possible before it's gone. It's the perfect distillation of everything wrong with SK's reward structure and the manipulations intrinsic to its monetization.

Supposedly they're doing some database migration in the background. It'd be cool if that extended to significantly expanding the capabilities of the Auction House, like more permanent listing options without fees so players didn't have to exclusively judge things through word of mouth where people looking to trade their prices up will always have an information advantage (and either being able to haggle for a raw deal or scam them).

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 10:28

Jcyrano

I have no idea what to say except...

SO we are finally calling predatory design, predatory design... are We going to held GH accountable for undoing what the previous companies that had the tittle, Did?
Are We going to applaud consumer friendly designs and refuse bad faith and predatory, artificial extended, anxiety inducing gameplay, are we going to prevent players from social pressure others into the same niche they are/want?

Are we going to have serious adult conversations?

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 11:43

Vyre-Acidlashed

@Jcyrano:
I think most of us have been trying pretty desperately to have those conversations, but for the most part we've just been talking to eachother. I'm sure you're as frustrated as I am that the talking we want to do - where we get to ask the GMs some hard questions - doesn't seem to be possible at the moment... I've seen you a lot around here though, and you seem to want this game to change for the better more than any of us; I like that.

@Draycos:
Where do we go with this? Seriously. A mobile-game adjacent energy-cost-to-play system might have been pretty acceptable back in the day but stanced against what is available on desktop right now we're left with the pressing question of "Okay, what do we fix?" Because on its face the real answer seems to be "we start over from the ground up with new incentive mechanisms and try to turn the game into something a little less than a token taker." I admit that the CE/Mist-Offset costs of elevators were a part of the games design, but I *remember* those days, and I remember those days *feeling awful* because it was a long time ago and I couldn't tag along to events the same way my friends were. It's why it took me (let me check my forum settings) 13-and-a-half years to bother coming back to the game.

How do we rebuild an experience LIKE SK without drawing up a legitimately maximal technical debt when Mist's greatest contribution to the game was obscuring the fact that a play session is, generously, 20 minutes long until you're just doing it out of obligation? I had this belief in mind that somehow the monetisation strategies we were seeing were a result of having to sate a publisher's lust for pocket change at all costs and I had hoped in vain that the consequence of being freed from those shackles was "Okay, Now We Get To Make Something Fun Because Big Bad Sega Isn't Pulling Hard On Our Leashes," but if the call for these adversarial mechanics is coming from inside the house what can we, as players, do to spur constructive change?

I genuinely don't want to be sitting here b****ing all day because someone said "we're doing a revival project" then went quiet, because I think I owe it to hardworking artists to be patient, but after a while it's just a matter of due diligence to ask myself the question, "Am I being fooled??" and DOUBLY so when so many other people are sharing legitimate horror stories of what they've been expected to put up with, from shortsighted balance changes, to opinion-blind reruns of gear at full price, to the pretty reprehensible infantilisation of an adult playerbase by trying to express secretive mechanics changes through a narrative light, of all things. This is REAL MONEY being spent. These are REAL BUSINESS DECISIONS that are encouraging people to give in to their WORST IMPULSES as a matter of design decisions made years ago. GH wants to look like the hero in this? Then how do we help them refuse the legacy that looms over them and make headway forwards into a game that I can recommend to my friends because it means something to me? Less politely, "how can you trick me into marketing your game for you so you make more money without making me say "it's good, except for all the parts that are trying to bleed you like a still-warm deer??""

And if an administrator or god forbid game designer wants to instruct me on what part of the business model is designed to be appropriate for children in this game then I don't think I need to point at anything more than changes to terms of service that have marked this platform as "mature" nor the ethical burden you'd be taking on to make that claim in a mature market of existing regulatory practices that are protecting them from absolutely exploding their parent's credit cards. I don't think anyone should make that claim until we see a plan. There IS a burden of ethical responsibility here and it is absolutely NOT on the playerbase yet here we are. Does someone have to say 15 USC 45 before someone takes notice? Can we at least start with probability disclosure being visible in-game?

@Calinou:
I'm not sure whether or not you feel personal anecdote has any place in the post you made - you might be trying to do a metaanalysis by example and I appreciate that if you are - but I am still curious; can you share some of your personal experiences with this event and other events? At this point in my time with Spiral Knights I just want to hear what veteran players like yourself have issue with and what (god I REALLY hope) they appreciate. From your other post it seems like one of the things you're focused on really addressing is tackling availability issues and reducing that venomous FOMO that seems to keep being prybarred into all of these discussions by (seemingly) quite shortsighted depot listings while increasing player-facing reward.

Half of my change of stance comes from realizing very suddenly that we have a lot of suggestion and discussion threads on this where most of us are just talking to eachother about things we already agree on. As yet I don't think I've seen a clear strategic dialogue for instituting any kind of change and while I don't necessarily think that's *our responsibility*, I want to at least shoulder some of the burden other players might feel if they fall afoul of these patterns of monetization and game design and I think that starts with figuring out what language I have to start speaking to the game and it's designers with.

Of the foundational tenets this game claims to excel in it's still got a fair shot. It LOOKS charming, it FEELS friendly, it SOUNDS nice, and for an at least *decent portion* of the experience, it's KINDA FUN to play, but there are big and still-rusting fissures in its construction that need fixing if it truly, TRULY wants to claim that it is relaunching.

Rebirth implies doing something genuinely new from scratch and wiping away all that was broken and aged about it. This is a FREE AT-BAT, a CLEAR RUNWAY, a genuine golden opportunity. Better games than this have been buried without so much as a whimper because they couldn't make margin.

What happens now?

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 11:57

Draycos

@Vyre
Part of what made Mist work was that it leaned into the game's social aspects (taking your time, hanging out doing things that don't cost energy) and, as you suggest, working with the fact that this is a tiny game if you have unrestricted access to everything it has to offer. There are games that sell for less than 20$ that have more content. I really liked where it was going initially, and it absolutely had a market cornered for 4P 2D Zelda, so I don't mind having gotten a couple of its energy packs over its lifespan. It taught me not to support games by what they could be and instead support what they presently are, at least. Important lesson that helped me dodge some similar wasted-potential games.

There's nothing to really do about the game's current state besides voting with your wallet and making a bit of noise. Maybe make some longwinded critical posts or negative Steam review saying "hey this sucks but here's how it could be better", or inform other players about what's going on so they can better decide for themselves.

A number of people writing these posts are itching to cheer for positive change. It's not possible to cheer for changes that haven't happened yet. It is possible to see where things haven't changed despite advertising the game's continuing development. The reason people are getting critical now is a bunch of returning players checking out the game (because one of the worst aspects of its progression got a healthy bit of kneecapping) realized or remembered it still has huge problems, including how many things have remained stagnant even after all the posts about how things will be different and you should tell your friends to play the game too also here's $4~6 lootboxes with costumes that have flavor text about your teammates benefiting from being able to see your rear.

For example, rerunning time-limited events to drive player engagement with zero adjustments besides adding costumes that require the tokens to be used during the events first demonstrates by inaction that there were no efforts to improve them, and doing it three times in a row starts making that a pattern suggesting they will not change and we should also curb our expectations for the quality of any upcoming patches since what we have right now is considered okay.

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 12:35

Vyre-Acidlashed

I appreciate you reality checking me but the thing I'm spitting the most venom about is what is slowly mutating into complacency if not outright dishonesty. Like you said, "it suggests a pattern," but that blade cuts both ways. Playing friendly in the very limited responses on the forums at best feels fair at first but if nothing changes it starts to feel like playing the long game to limit the amount of work that has to be done and I can't think of anything more cynical than that. When someone goes all in on saying "we're gonna do it right this time," when assurances are made that it's "not about the money," and when old hatchets are buried in what I am reluctantly but VERY generously going to call an attempt to rehabilitate the game's image, I have to also believe that a complete overhaul and a second try are on the table and I'd like to be part of that - what I won't do is put on a blindfold and do all that marketing copy for them.

For the most part, my finally catching light here is an attempt to organize my thoughts and try to stir something up. We'll see, I guess; from where I currently stand, though, a lot CAN be done to fix this and with very little effort.

And besides! I'm willing to do my part - if the PvE Level Editor you've personally mentioned a couple times comes to pass, I'll build the mission packs myself. : and ), I guess.

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 13:48

Draycos

not trying to reality check you at all, I totally agree with you lol. (Edit: the “we can’t really do much” bit was mostly in response to Jcyrano.)

That quote sure is amusing to read after months of lootbox reruns and event reruns. Not in it for the money! OCH is free! But also here’s a new lootbox with the usual bad rates, also after rerunning Solstice boxes which still have unique equipment held hostage behind them. If that’s going to change, 1) why not talk about that instead of stringing people along by their hopes and 2) why wouldn’t at least the gameplay events be different already since clearly they can add costumes to event traders without issue

A friend of mine put it pretty well some time ago. If the game WILL be different, then it’s dishonest to advertise it totally will before it actually IS different while maintaining the status quo. Blown a lot of opportunities to change that. In the grand scheme the forge changes and OCH were baby steps and the lion’s share of what’s wrong with the game seems all but endorsed beyond them apart from a “we’re thinking about it” maybe here and an eventually there with no concrete cause and effect, but coasting like that is GH’s M.O.

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 14:11

Vyre-Acidlashed

Nah, you're good, but you know how much I treasure a balanced perspective. (I did say I'd probably end up making SOME kind of post like this though...)

I want to believe what I'm told by GMs because the presumption of honesty and good faith isn't just good practice but it holds the dialogue open, but as you've said, the other side of that coin is responsive action.

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 14:55

#10

Calinou

reply to @Vyre-Acidlashed

@Vyre-Acidlashed
On your first reply:

I completely agree that a lot of these systems are dark patterns, I called them "punishing game design" because I was frankly tired when I wrote this, and quite exhausted after playing the game for a week, just to see all the hard earned cash I gathered go "poof".

This being the cherry on top of seriously mind-numbing Kat Sprints, which had me, I kid you not, actually enjoy running FSC in between runs, because despite all of its flaws and shortcomings, the FSC levels are still some of the most enjoyable to me, as I don't feel like they're trying to screw me over. They are a "easy to learn, hard to master" kind of deal in my sense. Even if I understand many other veterans have ran them so many times, that they've developed what I can only call a "toxic relationship" with the King of Ashes mission.

Dark patterns in SK are sadly not uncommon, some can be attributed to technical limitations of the time, others to oversight ("this won't be that serious" type deals, like the Auction House). I would actually attribute a lot of them to these two things, because the game loop (the actual gameplay, where your player kills things or solves puzzles), is genuinely enjoyable to me. The defunct Three Rings team simply worked with the limitations of their time, and the pressure of their hierarchy, which I can only speculate about. We all know what SEGA was; and is still; best known for.

The matter at hand nowadays is to voice these things clearly, which I tried my best at in the OP, and I'm glad it resonated with you guys :>

On your second reply (specifically on the part addressed to me):

My personal experience with the game, and with its events, are surely something. I don't know how representative of the average experience these are, but the truth is, teenager me back when I was playing the game a lot, before returning, had always skipped event such as the Apocrea, Kataclysm, and March of the Tortodrones. Why? I'm tempted to reply that the event's time frame wasn't adequate with my schedule back then, but I know for a fact that I had ran these missions, as I had some pages, kat hoods, and sigils left.

So my second best guess is that I ran the prestige missions, expecting to get any sort of progress, but quickly got very bored, and went back to play arcade (I barely had enough sigils to buy two materials), and arcade must have been where I found a few of the BKs I got my pages from.
The fact my 15 years old character; "Calinou", still didn't have ANY of the event weapons, and instead had their inventory filled to the brim with Hallow costumes speaks volumes to me.

The halloween, anniversary, and winter events gave immediate rewards for playing, where the Kataclysm and aforementioned others gave nothing but little lottery tokens to maybe spend once you're a week into intensive grind. This is the experience I had, not only as a long term player, but as one that started playing in the mid-2010's, when I was still a teenager, before mobile games were this big and social medias started to farm for our brain times.

I played spiral knights like any kid my age would play Minecraft or Portal 2, or TF2, or whichever other game. To have fun, or because I genuinely enjoyed the game's proposition for a story/universe/game loop/aesthetic, I only really started to truly "farm" when I returned in 2025, and my gosh what a PAIN.

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 14:52

#11

Calinou

oops

Editing this out because the Forums lagged so much it duplicated my last reply, lol.

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 15:18

#12

Vyre-Acidlashed

Thank you for your response.

Thank you for your response. I can only apologise that the first you've seen of me is in the midst of me finally deciding to be a little more forthright. I'm usually so much sweeter :(

Your commentary on limitations and pressures stands out to me as being the one thing I'm hedging my hopes on. With creative freedom and the benefit of hindsight I... basically just have a lot of hopes and wishes. You already saw what I wrote, bleh.

What's funny is a lot of the perspective I have today comes from me playing the game on its own merits just recently, much like you used to - with the tragedy of having so many more years of experience just enjoying games. (edit: i meant this to be interpreted as my own "not falling for tricks that would have caught me out if i were younger", not a statement of experience over anyone else) Apparently before today, I made it all the way to Ironclaw Munitions Factory without spending a dime and that was around the time Mist Energy was only just removed - I'll tell you for free, I do not remember beating that mission at all... (Though, Ironclaw Munitions Factory still sounds, looks and feels great. (I know, "a gremlin WOULD say that..."))

I blew through the content it had to offer pretty quickly over the course of the last month with steady sessions, got some decent gear under my own effort, and I'm now left with the less-than-compelling reality of "that which is left over." That's part of why I think the game would benefit so enormously from more activities, objectives beyond extrinsic impositions or simple gambling.

Good grief, if I could just do a bit of coding, stage design or showcasing and get it into someone's hands...

All that said, though, if anything's got anyone enjoying seeing Lord Vanaduke's freaky face for any reason, something's gotta be wrong...!

Wed, 07/08/2026 - 20:29

#13

Jcyrano

You are right about it

Draycos is not wrong, as players in this moment is not much to do, except talk in forums and ask, so DM can read and transcribe into digestibles tokens and board markers to the Devs. That is Daunting, because is a non-conversation, there is not even evidence of being heard... or read in this case. Nor should be because A) is a non conversation, DM are not developers, and B) Development times are not immediate nor easily measured.

Vyre-Acidlashed, thanks I don't thing I'm the one who wants the most changes for the better, I'm just willing to be vocal about it (ackshually I'm just horribly loud and annoying, XD), and You are also trying to get good changes to happen, and Draycos, and many others that are cautious-ly complacent about how things are, not less critical, but less vocal... Yes the game gives small steps into good player services and falls back into common (not tat good) practices... Both Devs and Players are part of the same community, thru this forums DM get to collect, digest and pass info, that ensures that We are a WE and not an Us and Them... however GH must be cautious not to speed out of what previous teams developed and deploy otherwise they will hit a technical wall, happen with the 1 energy cost... good intention, bad systems to work with... the Unsurmountable task ahead is unmake such bad systems, to do that they need to check an enormous amount of logs to figure out When how and why(greed, this one is easy) some systems where made.
Calinou is right, some are plainly punishing others are deceptively predatory, others Artificially encourage senseless grinding, some offuscate vital information to the player causing decision paralysis or needlessly resource sinking.

I'm happy that we are talking this subjects in general but with the intention of being specific if the matter comes to discussion.
Thanks!

Thu, 07/09/2026 - 14:53

#14

Werewolfkirby

If I can add on

I wish it was easier to understand the dev's directions, especially with the activity we are experiencing now. While I pray there may me some DM reading through these, I want transparency above anything, Especially for how much we've been teased about a new beginning for SK. The game itself is finally receiving new parts after years of the cogs mindlessly running. I feel we deserve to know when we are being noted and seen in some capacity.

Lurking and collecting information is one thing yes, but if WE dont know when we're being listened to, it becomes a divide between two completely different sides where we will only wonder especially in this stage if we will see true changes.

On the other half of this spectrum, maybe they have noticed, and they understand how much of a MESS this games status is rn. Its very unclear whether they are able to make any progress or they just have been collecting notes, pretty much pushing towards trying to identify everything first and trying to push simple things they know how to fix relatively quickly. As unfortunately, a lot of the predatory mechanics in this game would require full attention to not break the game or create an entirely different/bigger issue to arise.

We need to understand these are human beings, They aren't perfect, and both sides of this coin see things very differently. I dont speak for anyone obviously but small steps is the best we need to take right now before we talk about bigger goals. It'll just crash our hype and expectations if we try and go for big changes and be stuck waiting for who knows, a year before we get the thing we wanted?

Thu, 07/09/2026 - 18:52

#15

Pdtopgun

Ugh...I had a whole long post responding to some of Draycos' points typed up, but I guess my login session timed out and completely ate it. I can at least try to give a Cliffs Notes version because I'm not writing all of that out again. The gist of it was that I can't agree with the original Mist energy mechanic being more respectful of players' time, because as Vyre noted the basic gameplay loop felt worse to me back then than it does now. To put the conclusion at the start, I think the fact that many players choose to grind the same few levels ad nauseam is getting conflated with the fact that one doesn't actually need to play like that.

--Back when the game was designed around Mist energy, there was a hard cap on how many levels one could run in a single day. Having a good time with some friends and want to keep playing together? Really close to having enough resources to craft your next item? Too bad, you're out!

--The only way around the Mist cap was trading crowns for Crystal energy in order to keep playing. (I'm not accounting for elevator passes because a monthly real-world cost to keep playing the game beyond 10 levels a day was a complete non-starter for me.) This feels like much more of an incentive to me to play only the most profitable levels, since you'd need to make sure you were at least breaking even. Also even in the best case trading for Crystal energy would seriously eat into your crown profits from the run, so now you'd have to play those profitable levels all the longer.

--Under the Mist system there was an implicit understanding that any daily energy you didn't use on something profitable (or crafting new gear) was being "wasted." Today that issue doesn't exist. If I decide to do a few T1 runs just for the fun of it, I'm not losing out on any opportunities by doing so. I have the freedom to play as much or as little as I want without needing to worry about that.

--The alchemy orb system is a complete objective upgrade over the pure energy crafting system. Back then you were forced to either trade for or spend real-world money energy to craft any gear above 2*. You still have that option today at the same exact rates, or you can just play the game normally and get completely free orb drops over time. And yes if you choose to buy orbs you do lose out on the 100 free Mist per day, but if you did the efficient thing and used that, you couldn't even play the game for the rest of that day until your Mist regenerated. Not fun. Elite orbs could stand to drop across a wider range, but that's about the only issue I have with them.

--I get that it used to be profitable to sell certain types of materials like those from Wolver Dens, and I remember doing a bit of it myself, but as far as I'm concerned interacting with the Auction House for any extended period of time is a painful experience. it feels much healthier to give players the freedom to get materials they need by just playing the levels that drop them.

--Related, but I don't mind playing through Wolver Dens at all from a gameplay standpoint (certainly much more than Compounds or Graveyards). The only real issue they have is too few treasure box placements, which could be easily solved by putting a half-dozen or so more in there. I wouldn't even bat an eye at seeing them if that was the case.

--Forge crystals have been beaten to death already, but with the recent update I think the only true issue they have left is the poor Radiant distribution. Otherwise I've never found them to be much of a barrier for leveling up gear. Warm are useless anyway (unless you're hunting for Forge Boxes), and you only need to get 3* gear to level 5, which requires only a handful of Glowing. Shinings are literally everywhere right now so I don't see how it's possible to run short on them. (I think I'm up to nearly 5000 of them at this point, and that's just through normal gameplay.)

Heh, that probably wound up being about as long as my original post anyway.

Thu, 07/09/2026 - 23:47

#16

Draycos

Touching on what we've already discussed elsewhere, I'll try to be more focused on the big picture than I've typically been, since I feel like I've previously gotten mired down in minor detail weeds and while that's satisfying for completeness it's gotta be terrible for readability.

There wasn't a hard cap on how much you can play. There was a soft cap where you'd have to start burning CE instead of Mist.
You only had to worry about 'breaking even' if you were using CE, which was trivial at the game's launch or Steam rerelease where there were less aggressive energy sinks and more energy bundles or purchase bonuses keeping CE prices ranged from 2~4k. I never had a situation where I had to pass up playing with my friends because I would go net negative - except when CE prices spiked to insane levels from extenuating forces like lootboxes and the game was borderline unplayable for new players without Mist, which is mismanagement on late OOO / GH's part rather than a fault of the model. For example, there were periods post-Forge that saw >10k prices where it was similarly prohibitive to craft anything without finding your own orbs. (Personally, comparing both cases, I was much happier playing around Mist since this was never my only game and the fact it wasn't trying to be was what made it cozy...)

In terms of raw crown payout, it has always been most realtime-efficient to play stages quickly rather than thoroughly with or without Mist. The value of Mist as a system was that it facilitated playing in moderation because we got a lot of relative value off of playing around it; a little implicit reward for full-clearing Charred Court or Red Carpet Runaround instead of skipping optional sections. Without it, there is no longer any smoothing between someone playing 10 stages in a day vs. someone playing their 100th stage of FSC, and though we now have opportunity to do as we wish, the opportunity cost is sharper, which catalyzed poorly with the simultaneous devaluation of crafting/materials with neighboring changes. I understand the psychology of this is unappealing on paper because it's a literal stamina system that presents itself as punishing the player for exceeding it, but in the context of a player-driven economy and net value, it's functionally similar to getting a variable amount of free crowns for completing stages or being reimbursed for crafting costs. Many modern games present the same paradigms as 'bonuses' rather than waived penalties to dodge that negative presentation, but it doesn't really make a difference either way.

Crafting eating up the day's energy was good as an option. Choosing not to craft because I wanted to play, or choosing to craft when I did not want to play, gave more agency than everything being measured in raw grinding exclusively as the game shifted to later. Blowing Mist on crafting costs did comprise a lot of time spent waiting on a fresh character, but served very well as an out for players that didn't want to grind perpetually that had already broken into T2 and especially T3. This was extremely important for a game that did not (and still does not) have enough content to support constant play. Likewise, the original crafting-for-UVs economy and Arcade tier latejoin fees encouraging playing the preceding tier at least once first played supporting roles keeping player choice of stage variegated (pun intended).

Granted, attendance bonuses can be leveraged as their own kind of manipulative strategy - and although I'm going to bat saying Mist was more holistic than what the Forge deconstructed the game into, it still had a lot of room to improve. Aspects of it deserved to be critically panned. Being unable to avoid paying CE when crafting higher rarity items is a valid criticism of the original model, and it's one that I levied myself back in the day since a lot of content both in terms of player movesets and in stage/enemy design is restricted to the higher rarities. Really could've used a higher cap and/or lowered energy costs in crafting. The idea of doing away with that strict requirement to pay or subsidize someone who paid in order to experience the game is good in a void in pursuit of true F2P; orbs presented themselves as this but were poorly / manipulatively executed.

Orb drops are limited to treasure boxes which are not well-distributed across stages, and as a replacement for Mist, generally increased crafting costs (especially for 2* and below!) without extreme amounts of grinding due to their prohibitively low droprates, ultimately doing more damage than good to the game's progression. Technically free crafting, far slower crafting with far more of a time requirement and designed to goad you into playing or paying more than you normally would. To your credit, the same things I can say with "Mist would've worked here if it were handled better!" extends to orbs. Orbs could also be handled better than orbs currently are. Today, I could see them being salvaged as Arcade tier/gate or Prestige Mission clear rewards which would potentially kill multiple problems with one well-thrown stone. A similar idea was recently presented for accessing Shadow Lairs via Danger Mission clears.

You're correct that firecrystals are basically irrelevant until 5* equipment and are mostly an annoying extra step capping Heat between equip levels, keeping it fundamentally slower than release SK's heat. Setting aside the consensus around Radiant distribution per stage type, their droprates still being glacially slow despite being cut to a relative third of what they used to be (matching them only dropping in the last third of T3 lol) shows how much the depth drop ranges ought to budge. Just getting rid of Shinings beyond D26 would be big.

I don't mind Wolver Dens; mentioned them because they're out of scope of the game's progression systems and no longer desirable with little reason to seek them out rather than because they're offensively bad - unlike Compounds which are actively unpleasant and take double the time for the same or worse rewards.

Fri, 07/10/2026 - 04:00

#17

Vyre-Acidlashed

@Draycos: That'll be the

@Draycos: That'll be the difference - I only ever saw the game where CE was prohibitively expensive to get with crowns in the later part of the Mist days. This, and - petty as it is to say - I prefer to be able to set the amount of time I spend with a game rather than letting it make this assessment on my behalf. Fair, though - in the vacuum of ideal design, you *are* correct that it moderates value. Seeing the wood for the trees on this is a tough ask when my personal memories of the system had previously been so unpleasant, though.

It's pretty plain to see from the numbers that with low Crown-to-CE cost, the intent was never to stop a player playing at least in the early days but to discourage seeing it as more than a 30 minute instant-action foolaround, but as incentives changed and costs spiralled - coupled with the player concurrency (understandably?) going from "a wide range of players interested in trying a new thing" to "a devoted core of limited players who stuck around despite some mechanical friction" - it also feels reasonable to say "the people who play it now are looking for more than 30 minutes of fooling around."

What that thing is, I don't actually know, at least for most players - but for me, oddly enough, it's the ability to set myself a crafting goal and set about achieving it. That's actually the wild thing to confess here, at least for me - I *like* the crafting system as it is! It's slow, but at least up to the 4>5 star transition, rewarding, even without spending money. It's actually to the point where I'd get kind of a kick out of being able to alch permanent/inventory-stored consumables to sell to other players for more endurance-based gameplay, but, that's its own little "wouldn't-it-be-fun" that I keep to myself. If armor and weapons had better gamefeel (five hundred energy to anyone who can figure out what i mean by that because not even i know :/ ) I'd probably find that progression even more interesting because it means doing more than charge-attack chains.

Credit to Pdtopgun, though Draycos did also touch on it - there definitely would have been a certain kind of player that saw unspent mist as a lost chance. It probably would have stuck around much longer if it wasn't possible for the price of CE to go absolutely nuclear the way that it once did and I imagine the cap would have been raised at some point rather than the mechanic removed entirely, but I also don't know if we're ever going to end up with it coming back...

@Werewolfkirby: Well put.

Fri, 07/10/2026 - 04:38

#18

Calinou

Yes @Werewolfkirby

I fully agree with you @Werewolfkirby, my post's main goal is not to bash on the GH team, or to vent in the void about frustrations. The morning I wrote this, I was angry, yes, but I was also seeing quite clearly what made a lot of this game's systems very frustrating and unfun to me, and I tried to put it down with minimal sugarcoating.

As others have pointed out above, a lot of the complaints player make tend to be sugar-coated, and to wish to put things in the kindest or least dramatic ways possible. While this is not what everyone is doing, I am also of the belief that for GH to make the right moves, they need to be fully aware of what people think, what their precise pain points are, and where the overall experience that is SK stands.

My hope was to highlight these issues in terms that aren't diminished, yet remain respectful in regards to how difficult the task to fix these pain points is, and polite to the people at GH that are looking to tackle them :]

Fri, 07/10/2026 - 09:52

#19

Draycos

"I prefer to be able to set the amount of time I spend with a game [myself]"
These are two sides of the same coin, and why I have so much beef with the Forge doing its best to obfuscate how much time you need if you aren't buying from the depot. It was a choice to have them drop as rare thirds instead of consistently in proportional but higher quantities. Wouldn't work as well at fooling people if they saw they were only getting a hypothetical consistent 5 out of 300 required orbs per run instead of reality's random 1 out of 3 orbs between long dry spells (just look at all of the posts about people having wasted their time on Kataclysm)... Anyway, this is going in a circle so forget about this part and let's set aside all the subjectivity about whether habit-forming is better or worse than intentionally opaque grinds when they're both arbitrary barriers targeting and fostering similar kinds of addictions.

The primary thing I wanted to illustrate was the value of holistic game design. From a design perspective, it's not about 'conflating choice and need', where a player can always decide they're going to do some oddball stage for the hell of it because it's more enjoyable than exclusively doing what's 'best', and indeed ignoring the worst of the progression and just playing the game is mutually inclusive with enjoying it more. Choosing to play 'inefficiently' on purpose because it's more enjoyable and there's more to a game than making icecubes is the player's right. It's instead the responsibility of the developer to ensure a game's systems leave the player with as many good options as possible so they don't HAVE to say "ah to hell with it" in the first place, and that's where the Forge and related updates dropped the ball by removing most of the mechanisms in place to do that and adding in a bunch more to exacerbate the disparities instead.

The Mist genie's already out of the bottle and is never going back to the form it took. It'd be neat if it came back with no other CE cost changes, this time presented as a bonus rather than a stamina system. Would account for low-level crafting or those pesky energy gates, knights, and turrets vestigial of a forgotten time; silly to me they were never removed wholesale, but I'd be very surprised to see either thing happen. It's still possible to pursue these ideals without heavily modifying how the Forge works with aforementioned things like fixed rewards for clearing rotating content such as gates and prestige missions.

This game is too small to afford to waste its content or implicitly punish players for not treating it like a job.

Fri, 07/10/2026 - 10:09

#20

Vyre-Acidlashed

oh lol okay, uh...

oh lol okay, uh... embarassing but, i confess i *fully* wasn't understanding you, previously

I somehow had it in my head that you were advocating for slower pace in the absence of any capacity for new options, but the "making icecubes" line was what helped me figure my disconnect out.

Basically, yeah, I want more to do but the odds and drops make the grind sort of flat. Seeing what you mean about the forge, too. That's why I said what I said; i meant it to mean "I don't want to be subject to habitforming mechanics OR opaque grind BECAUSE they foster compulsive behaviour," but I phrased it clumsily; i probably should have said "I don't trust the developer to guide my experience beyond trying to make it as unhealthily long as possible in the absence of being able to force FOMO through grind efficiency, I'd rather they built more game that I would find compelling," but you know that already.

It helps me understand what you mean in your closing statements on a bonus system, too.

Connecting back to the core of the OP, it feels sort of nasty that the only things seen so far are event reruns rolling out the same carpet to people who've already been here, but at this point I'm just shaking my pitchfork.

Fri, 07/10/2026 - 15:47

#21

Jcyrano

These are two sides of the

"These are two sides of the same coin, and why I have so much beef with the Forge doing its best to obfuscate how much time you need if you aren't buying from the depot.
This and the Sprites chugging resources are 2 of the most egregious way of artificially extending playtime I've seen... Yes the forge is in better state now... I still want the crystals GONE! because it was punitive for the sake of being so, and now is less punitive but all it takes is a number changed and get back to being Worse! and I don't want to level another sprite the same way I did the 1° and gets worse since You don't get free Evos and You don't get skins but re-skins of sprites... Instead of a pale re-color of the Drakon they gave a Drakon that You have to "level up" fo it to be "usefull" for 15k Energy!

Sat, 07/11/2026 - 09:16

#22

Draycos

Battle Sprites are their own can of worms. There's so much wrong about their progression and so much about their function left blatantly unfinished to this day even by SK standards. They're visually well-made, and their fundamental gameplay concepts are interesting, especially Maskeraith's, but all three are sabotaged out of the box by their shared cooldowns even before all of the bugs and numerical fumbles they're riddled with. They occupy the same "make sure you log in periodically!" nagging that old Mist did with none of the benefits, and the reskins and remodels charging as much as they do on top of requiring you to farm up an entirely new Sprite is very dishonest since Drakon still has this weird bug where it's occasionally capable of doing damage.

Tue, 07/14/2026 - 02:06

#23

Calinou

Kataclysm is over, what now..?

The culprit that started this post is now over for the moment, but the many issues we glossed over are not gone, and will continue to plague this game if not addressed.

Will we allow these topics to be addressed? Or leave them to fall back behind a couch, like a rotten prey your cat brought home last night?
I hope a lot of the tedium this game contains is to be soothed by upcoming updates.

Tue, 07/14/2026 - 08:21

#24

Jcyrano

the culprit scaped... and

the culprit scaped...

and there are a lot of things to address. to keep in memory and to make sure are fixed when "the fixing" comes, if ever does.

Tue, 07/14/2026 - 12:03

#25

Pdtopgun

@Draycos: Thanks a lot for your detailed response, especially since I think we wound up having a similar discussion in another recent thread. (Please excuse my goldfish memory!) You made a lot of well-reasoned points, and I think I have a good understanding of where you're coming from now. What I've also come to realize is that I engage with the game in a different way than a lot of other players, maybe even most other players. Which is fine, but sometimes it makes it a bit harder for me to see the other side of an argument.

For instance, back when Mist was a thing I never spent Crystal to continue a run. That 100 daily Mist was my own hard limit, and once it was gone, that was it for me. I think the crown conversion rate may have been somewhat low when I started playing some time after the Steam launch, but like Vyre said I mostly remember the era when it was going for several thousand crowns. Every bit of CE was precious to me, and I hoarded it all for crafting. The only time I can remember burning any on playing normal levels was when I went for the Dauntless Delver achievement, and that required saving up for a while before attempting it. Besides that I maybe used it occasionally for revives after a party wipe, but I'd only do that on something like the Vanaduke fight, and it always felt awful to do it.

Actually that's a good side-topic, how reviving has changed over time. For the record I dearly miss being able to revive fallen teammates by spending half of your health, since that led to so many fun emergent gameplay moments. (Especially when the players who were down could drop their health capsules for the lone survivor to use, that was great!) But in terms of playing solo, the current free revive + Sparks of Life system feels way better to me. I do think that Sparks could stand to use a significant drop rate boost though.

The other way I differ from most of the playerbase is that I don't really give a fig about "efficiency" in terms of crown production, especially when it comes to FSC. Like, I would never skip one of the rooms in Charred Court. I am freeing all 8 of those Sprites and killing every single Slag Walker in there, and that is non-negotiable. Likewise I was amazed when watching a recent video of someone going through Ashen Armory and zipping through the right path. I was taught that the ancient wisdom was to always choose the left path, because it had more enemies and thus more crowns. And for any level I play, you know I'm going to break every single bush and torch and get those single crown drops, because that's just How Things Are Done. Maybe a big part of it is that I don't really have that grinding mindset, so when I run through something like FSC, it's as a one-off thing (and not very often at that, because honestly I don't enjoy those levels very much). So when I'm making one of those runs, I want to milk it for all it's worth.

So yeah, I guess my point is that there are different ways of approaching the game, and because of that what works for one player may not work as well for another, and vice-versa.

Tue, 07/14/2026 - 12:32

#26

Vyre-Acidlashed

@Pdtopgun: I still play exactly the same way you do! Thorough floor-clears and testing myself on survival. :)

I think Katastrophe stung so much for me because it was the first time the game grabbed me by the collar and said through its mechanical design, "You're a speedrunner, now, or you don't get to take part in the event." That stings, man! I'm here to see the sights and ride the rides, not do a quick walking tour of the same stretch of candlestick keep in the hopes of... catching a shiny, basically... Ugh, It really flattened the game experience to the point that it drew the other mechanical shortcomings into REALLY close focus for me and it really disrupted my patience and affection for the game.

Tue, 07/14/2026 - 19:18

#27

Draycos

@Pdtopgun yea we talked on the Steam forums previously, though here I tried to be more coherent lol. The big thesis is that I like that you and Vyre choose to play the game in a way it originally encouraged and find it very lame that the game drifted so far away from that thoroughness over time.

Can't believe I forgot to mention shared drops; those are another big part of what made thorough clears so natural. The mist system de-emphasizing raw speed; the lack of backtracking thanks to shared drops keeping stages smooth; the little things like breaking bushes or fighting weak enemies out of the way ahead of your team to proactively wait for them serving to nudge the team into sticking together and mindfully splitting up... Those are things that helped both 'thorough' and 'efficient' players share space happily. Lot of things got removed or added that stripped that away from the release vision. That's what I really miss.

Health revives were great yeah; agree that energy revives were very punishing in turn. On some level, I liked the weight it gave to the run - are you SURE you want to do that danger room? - but it scaled way too harshly for sure and shouldn't have scaled at all imo. Capped somewhere in the hundreds of CE. Wonder how many kids blew their mist (or worse, their CE) not knowing it was okay to fail? Meanwhile, the spark revive system feels simultaneously bad to blow a finite resource on and we still end up drowning in them anyway once you've hit critical mass and stop dying in most stages or open forge boxes. Functionally infinite lives. It could've worked though - health revives, one free self revive per stage, and a limit to how many sparks you can spend per stage on top of that... maybe pausing drops if you've been dead for too long to dissuade afking or multiboxing.

@Vyre It's hard to even call it speedrunning since it's not playing the same game anymore; people don't even complete the stages they generate since it's significantly faster to restart than to spend a minute opening a key door. Hardly a point in tagging the elevator even if it's right in front of you, provided you're not heating a 0* weapon on the side... There's a specific room where you can see the kats that spawn past the gate by lighting a nearby candle and a BK must spawn for it to be worth going out of your way for the key. It's ridiculous that a statement like "it is statistically not worth the time to wait for an enemy to complete its death animation and drop its items even if you can instantly kill it" can ever apply under any context, but that's what all these changes ended up doing for a lot of stages.

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We need to seriously address risk & reward, and punishing game design.