Ehh yeah, but it was a lot cheaper in the past. Prices now are about twice as much as they were a month and a half ago. THAT'S what started the complaining. No buyer likes to see prices go up.

I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion or anything (it makes a decent amount of sense to me), just putting forward a potential reason why people are yelling about it anyway.

Lol, Gigafreak. When I started playing the price for 100 CE fluctuated between 1800 and 2500. To see it up and over 7000 now is astonishing, to say the least, considering it's roughly 3-4x as costly for the same amount of CE. I was shocked when it got close to 4000, to be honest.

But don't take that as complaining.

And maybe you should analyze the situation more logically from their standpoint. The game is "free" and it's very hindering when you can't even do a Jelly Run to get the funds to buy 100 CE anymore. It bugs me when people demand higher prices for things because they don't care about the progression of other players. People don't always complain about wanting lower prices out of spite for paying players. :|

And the people who played the beta with 12,000 per 100CE think complaints at 7000 are astonishing. It's all a matter of perspective (or lack thereof).

JTH you make an interesting point... however, keep in mind that people place value on their time -- and it takes a fair amount of time to run through 10o CE worth of dungeon levels.

I believe that if well-geared players want to convert CE to crowns in the most efficient manner, that it should be done by going through dungeons, since that's the meat of this game anyhow. Trading CE -> crowns should be a faster but less efficient method.

All of this is just my personal opinion, of course.

@Shosuko
"You're view isn't uncommon or unique. 90% of CE sellers share your view, which is that you deserve more than what you paid for. ie - what you could reasonably grind out of 100 ce.
It comes from being narrow minded, and seeing only your own view point."

You're stumping on your soapbox while calling JTH023 narrow-minded?

Let's say you and ten friends make widgets to sell. It takes you each an hour to make a widgets using $5 of materials. A lot of people like widgets; they just can't get enough of them. 100 people want to buy a widget, but you and your ten friends only worked an average of 8 hours each today, so there are only 80 total widgets for sale.

Buyer A offers you or any of your friends $3 per widget for as many widgets as he can get. This is under your cost, so you say no. Furthermore, you're offended and you tell him the materials alone cost $5, and even minimum wage for an hour makes it way more than $3.

Buyer B offers you or any of your friends $5 for one widget. You tell him if he wants to have one for $5, he can buy the raw materials and make it himself.

Buyer C offers $10 per widget for as many widgets as you guys are willing to sell. That's $5 per hour of work put into it, and you consider it.

While you're discussing it, one of your friends who is hard up for money says yes, and sells his 8 widgets to Buyer C. Buyer C tells you guys the offer is still open.

Buyer D overhears how much those 8 widgets were sold to Buyer C for, but he's not about to leave empty-handed. He says he'll buy 20 widgets, for $11 each. Before anyone can say yes, Buyer E steps up and says "Don't sell to them, I'll buy them for $12!" ...

After the dust settles, you've got offers on the table for $30 a widget, for everything you guys made today, and they're asking you to sell more tomorrow.

TL;DR What does "you deserve more than you paid for" have to do with anything? If someone is willing to pay 7,000 Crowns (for example) for 100 CE right now, anyone selling CE would be stupid to sell it for anything less. And as long as there are people willing to buy at whatever the current price is, it'll never go down. Why do you keep blaming the sellers when it's the buyers propping the price up?

People are complaining about the price of CE on the basis that it costs more to buy 100 CE than you can make using the 100 CE. Logically though does that not make sense?

In the current game design, yes, this makes sense. It is not a given though. For example, one of the other games OOO has, puzzle pirates, there is a *VERY* similar exchange. Over almost all of the 6+ years that puzzle pirates has been running, the vast majority of players can make more PoE (crowns) off of the dubs (CE) they buy than the dubs (CE) costs. This is because in puzzle pirates, there are very large PoE (crown) sinks and large percentage of the dub (CE) buyers are not buying dubs because they want dubs, but because the want PoE and selling dubs for PoE is the quickest and easiest way to get it. It is a completely different mindset than on spiral knights.

As mentioned above, turning 100CE into crowns via running gates takes time (and also skill). People with a lot of RL money tend to have less time, so they are often very willing to trade a small amount of money (a matter of pennies) for hours worth of "work".

If Spiral Knights was designed correct, the equilibrium point of supply and demand for 100CE could easily be 2k-3k cr, but crowns would have to be made *very* desirable for that to happen. That wouldn't stop all the complaining, of course, since crowns being that desirable would mean that free players would object to giving up half the crowns they earn on a T1 run to buy more CE to do the next T1 run. However, it would mean that there would be lots of people running lots of gates on CE instead of mist energy and OOO may well end up selling significantly more CE that way. There would also be a lot more players in the game, and people telling other people that Spiral Knights is a fun game that you can play for free. A certain percentage of those people would, of course, buy CE because they want crowns.

I really think that OOO is being penny wise and pound foolish with their choices of having large CE sinks, but small cr sinks. The *only* way crowns can enter the game is via running gates which cost at least 10CE per level. All crown sinks therefore *are* energy sinks and OOO really should want most of the energy sunk on elevators to be CE, not ME. Even with the large percentage of gates currently being run on ME, a sufficiently large crown sink can still match any sized CE sink that is in the game. The difference would be that people would be required to*play the game*, something that should be fun, rather than just open their wallet.

Hey, MLC, did you ever once consider that I might be a paying member? 'Cause guess what, I AM. Don't [language]ing attack me when you know NOTHING about me. I have donated to the Red Cross for the Japan Effort, and I make monthly donations to helping the US be a little less homophobic. And you know what? I can't even afford it, I'm still in college, and I'm barely scraping by. SO STFU. I've paid $15 to this game, and I'm not a greedy sob like all of you seem to be. But I'm not going to artificially deflate the prices, because it wouldn't actually help unless I had about a million other people in on it. But you know what? Everyone's too [language]ing stupid and greedy and selfish to even [language]ing CARE. SO HOW ABOUT YOU DONATE TO CHARITIES YOU SOB. Are YOU even listening to what you're saying? I swear, some people are nothing but [meanieheads]. Grow up, get a life, and [screw] off. I don't even care if that gets me banned, honestly.

[Edit: language not caught on the first pass.]

Back on track, as I've mentioned before:

The reason why CE is inflating right now is because most of the P2Pers that joined in the opening rush have finished getting their supreme 5* UV gear and whatnot. In short, there's no reason for them to keep purchasing CE to sell for crowns. Of course, there is a steady but small influx of new P2Pers (which is why there is *any* CE at all on the market right now) but these new arrivals hardly compare to the giant surge of CE purchasers during launch in April. It doesn't help either that crowns are easy to generate, and CE is a limited resource by comparison.

The equilibrium price for CE is likely to be the number of crowns the average player can earn with 100CE. Note that I say AVERAGE, not MEDIAN. Wealthy top-tier players can earn far more than a newbie, and they drive the average way up; the median player probably earns much less than average. It is possible for prices to fluctuate above or below this equilibrium- a complete dearth of CE sellers will cause prices to go up, as one can still use mist to earn crowns; impatience in converting CE to crowns if CE buyers balk drives prices down. However, by and large, prices will only go up, as you absolutely *need* CE to progress and there is no other in-game way to generate it. If you want to get 5* gear, eventually you will have to buy CE for real money or crowns, and assuming the latter, you will have to pay whatever the market dictates.

I do feel this method of managing things is unduly harsh toward new players that started significantly after launch (namely, after the 5/17 update), but I don't see an easy solution. And I'll admit I'm only human; I have most of my 5* gear and I am one of those higher-tier players raking in crowns gauntlet over fist with each run, and there is little incentive for me to purchase CE with real money or sell it for crowns. That said, I would be all in favor of being part of a solution, if the solution seemed feasible. Either that, or you'll need a really high charisma stat and a good persuasion roll to convince me. =P

People kind of 'like to' take it as a personal attack, whether or not you stated their name, but yea these kind of things always get misinterpreted easily.