If you one to cut down fluctuations tell the energy depot manager to stop eating bake beans.

Energy market is supposed to be driven by the game society.

However, now it can be ran by 1 or 2 players with high ammounts of energy/crowns, either for the sake of trolling or just to make use of that inflation.

To picture the situation for those who don't get what this means (you gotta be dumb enough, but that's what '... for dummies' books are about), I'm gonna use a simple example.

This gentleman (let's call it Adolf) has around 1.000.000 crowns he got by buying energy with his mother's credit card. So he thinks, "What could I do to make even more money?", and later realizes "Ah, I could exploit the flaws of this market thing and run my own business". Market prices, by then, are 5000 Crowns per 100 energy. So what Adolf do is, he first spends his 300.000 Crowns on 6000 Energy, and then he floods the market interface with 10 offerts to buy energy of an exaggerated ammount of around 6500 Crowns per 100 energy. Now you would think "Ah, this stupid Adolf is gonna lose his money, he's offering 1500 more energy than I am for 100 energy, what a waste, and you leave the market for a while, waiting for his stupid offerts to disappear. People selling energy on the market start leaving too, since it's not convinient for them to sell energy for 5000 Crowns, if they have to buy it for 6500. So they leave and selling price starts rising too.

Now what happens is, "10 years old" John logs in and screams "I WANT TO BUY ENERGY" (spitting) at the screen, so he offers 6550, and same happens when "Basement dweller" Charles logs in and wants desperately to play more than what his Mist tank can handle.

They start playing little Adolf's game, so what adolf does now is, he cancels his offers with absolutely 0 Loss, and waits for the Selling offers to raise. And when the price is around 6000-6500, he sells all the energy he bought at 5000, making a profit of 1500 per 100 energy -> 150.000 crowns.

Now that may seem.. call it "complicated", and most of those rising prices don't have anything to do with market experts, but with trolls and ignorant people who only want energy fast and NOW.

But the point is, the game gives us a SO LIMITED window of 5 offers, we can't really see the state of the market 5 minutes ago, so you just log and say "puffles, price raised from 5000 to 6200, a shame really", then you surrender to those prices and start using the market like you always did and always will. Because you NEED the market. To craft items you NEED energy, you need 800 energy and there is NOTHING you can do about it but to use the market (or use real money, but that's out of the question in this topic).

Three rings developers are not stupid. As far as I know, this same system was used for some 'Puzzle Pirates' and, correct me if I'm wrong, there's no reason why they shouldn't have had this exact same problem. High energy prices mean the energy you buy with real money is worth more in-game money, which leads people to feel they're buying more than they really are.

TL;DR: /sign for the listing fee. But it's just not gonna happen.

"Pushing" the market in the direction it has been headed since the game has gone public is not any sort of rocket science. The vast majority of the increases I've seen have not been due to any sort of market manipulation or "market walls", they are a direct result of too many people wanting CE and far fewer people having any reason to want more crowns than they get via normal game play. More over, the more crowns people get for selling CE, the less CE they need to sell, thus driving the price up even more.

Listing fees are a horrible idea and completely unneeded. People who have more CE/crowns than they know what to do with won't care about a low listing fee, but listing fees will hurt all the new players who are trying to use the market interface to save crowns and are caught up in a rising market. They are the ones that will have to cancel their bids and relist because the market has changed.

The real problem is that the market isn't going up to the equilibrium point were supply equals demand fast enough. Instead of jumping to 7k or 10k or 20k where it will stop going up, it is being drug out over many days. It's like a band-aid that is slowly being pulled off instead of one quick pull to get it over with. To fix this, you need a larger bid increment than 1cr. Simply require all bids to end in a zero, and suddenly, the market will move the the equilibrium point much faster and once there, people will be a little more reluctant to bid over the current high bid because instead of costing 1cr extra, it will cost 10cr.

Now, if you think that 7k, 10k or 20k crowns per 100CE is too much, well that can only be fixed by OOO making crowns useful enough to be worth buying with CE.

in puzzle pirate the things you 'bought' would also disappear, boats for example would sink, causing people to buy more, and it required both poe and doubloons, in spiral knights, there's nothing, there's nothing to put a large inflow of poe in like poker,spades whatever, and none of your gear breaks so your not rebuying anything, so once you have your final gear, there's NOTHING to put your crowns into except energy, i think this is where the main problem with the game lies, that there is a limit to what you sink crowns in and that nothing breaks, with a system like puzzle pirates uses, things need to 'sink' or degrade needing constant renewal.