Looking at the current Crowns to energy conversion rate, 6.7k per 100 energy, i think we already know people are manipulating this market, but this system worked in puzzle pirates to a extent, so why is it diffrent here? Well here's my theory that i came up with in a discussion.

In puzzle pirates, the things you bought using doubloons and poe degraded, and ships sunk, this provoked people to buy yet even more, this differs with spiral knights, as in spiral knights, the only thing you do is make gear with said energy/crowns, so once you've made your final set, you have NOTHING to pour your crowns into except energy. Nothing breaks, you have no concerns once you hit that peak.

(PP also had games like poker to spend poe/crowns)

My idea? It's simple, though many many people are NOT going to like it, make gear degradable and break, now i can understand the work put into 5* armor and the dislike of breaking entirely, so i propose a 1* degrade (costs CROWNS/Energy to make/fix), this means people will buy more energy to fix said armor. I believe that this would provoke also making 'spare' armor sets to run lower tiers to avoid breaking their more precious armor (lol gollum), this will create a place of which crowns can now flow into that isn't just the energy market.

How armor breaks can be decided by many different ways, i DO NOT recommend login time however like badges on puzzle pirates are based, i would say 'levels completed,' i do NOT say full levels, every end elevator can degrade.

Now we hit a complication in the idea...heat, if armor degrades how long of level 10 do we have? the answer is simple, broken gear gets marked with a green star, and a special NPC fixer that fixes as long as you have the recipe AND the price of making the item to begin with. He will fix said armor to the exact standard it was before. (there is also a opportunity here to increase the use of materials)

A new durability bar can be added to gear to show how long before it breaks, i recommend % as this can then add a new system of 'gear refreshing', a total % used can be deducted off the fixing cost. fixing it for the correct price refreshing it's durability. Now i realise what i said before about making spare armor sets to avoid breaking more precious armor, refreshing renders this quote useless, But not entirely useless if the correct armor for that tier, degrades at a slower speed than incorrect armor for that tier.....had to put a snag in somewhere >.>

To upgrade to the next * up a gear must be at 100% durability, it cannot be upgraded if it's broken.

Leaving only one more problem, the already sky rocketed prices, OOO will have to lower it themselves to cancel all offers above 5k if this update were to take place, or nobody could play properly.

To shred out this idea and to put in a main idea of fixing, more places to spend those crowns.

Sadly as the games new there isn't a fantastic amount of content and this is about the only idea i could come up with, i am NOT expecting it to be popular and i can see already why many people may choose to hate the idea.