You raise some valid points, but these subjects have been discussed in many threads already, so I'll just hit some high points.

For the game to survive, some players must spend money. For them to spend money, they must get something for their money. In a perfect world, that something would not affect the game play, but rather would be an extra treat for pure personal entertainment. In this way accessories are an incredibly perfect way to fund the game. Paying players get fancy costumes, and non-paying players can ignore them.

On the other hand, paying players also buy fancy unique variants, which do affect game play. And the equipment is of course grossly unbalanced. So those parts of your post make sense to me.

Finally, there has been constant complaining about the Forge since it was introduced. 2-, 3-, and 4-star fire crystals are not hard to get. 5-star fire crystals are very hard to get, although the new Dreams and Nightmares mission helps a bit. My suggestion to Three Rings is to increase the starting damage of 5-star weapons, so that they are clear upgrades from 4-star weapons. Then players could start to view heating as a long, gradual process, rather than something that must happen immediately.

TL;DR. Lockdown doesn't make people leave, people make people leave. You playin SK or Dressups? Free Elevators and 5* gear.

I think the main reason is the lack of things to do, after end-game. Especially if you don't enjoy lockdown.

Lockdown's pretty much end-game content, it has little to do with players leaving. A lot of people don't even play it. After end-game, there's not much to do and there's a lot of other games out there to experience with a lot of other things to do. If you're that sensitive about AT, you probably wouldn't last a day or two with the LD community's toxicity anyway. You don't need fancy gear for lockdown, it's fun as long as you play it the way you want to play it. It's not AT, it's not pulsars, it's not the skill gap between new and old, it's not the gear that pushes people away from lockdown, it's the community.
Newer people think they need UV'S and specific gear in order to close the gap between their level and a person that's actually good. You don't. Sure, it makes it easier and faster to close that gap but you don't need it to be good. At all. You'd still need to practice footwork. You'd still need to practice aiming. You'd still need to practice juking, duping, shield cancelling, input queuing, single switching, double switching and timing. The skill cap for lockdown is a LOT higher than in PvE, that's because there are a lot of good people. And that's what makes it so fun. It's fun learning how to play, it's fun playing it, Lockdown's the reason I still log onto spiral knights. It doesn't push people away, the mechanics have kept me playing the game longer than any other game has. I was slowly getting ready to stop playing spiral knights back when the binding system and missions hit, but when Lockdown was introduced, it pulled me right back.

Accessories are highly optional. Not everyone wants to play just to have pretty lil' pixels. I'd rather spend my hard earned crowns on different weapons and pieces of gear to increase the number of things to do. I find playing spiral knights a lot more fun than playing dress-ups. And that's just me, people play for different reasons and that's absolutely fine.

I LOVE the new forge system. You get gear for FREE. No energy needed. Not to mention free elevators. The radiant shards make up for the time that would have been taken earning CE. It's kinda like, "Buy now, Pay later." You get the 5* item now but you gots to pay to get it to level 10. Bad analogies for everyone. Im done, rant finished. Tanks.

TL;DR : It's like fencing, Buy the most expensive foil you can and you'll still lose to a skilled fencer using a russian/chinese foil.

It's not necessary to buy any fire crystals. It's just an option that's there if you want to. If you don't want to grind for them, you don't have to. You can go at your own pace. You can play the levels you want to play - except for shrooms. ( Id rather buy crystals than accessories if I was rich anyway lololol and even then I'd still play levels for them - coz SK's still just a game after all )

People do make people leave. All the complaints about AT/Pulsars/Lag/Latency ( yes, even I've done this before ), have made me want to leave lockdown. Oh and I almost forgot to mention name calling and cussing right at each other. Just because of the annoying immaturity. But you find out how to use the ignore system and then you get the most annoying hundred people on there and you're fine. If you can't deal with someone working harder and getting better gear than you and you leave just because of that, then. Well. I don't even know where to begin.

Pendants aren't bad. They let you play longer. Who'd want to play a game with a 14 second respawn - on average, where you die in 1 hit in T3?
If the respawns were instantaneous or 3 seconds long, sure, no pendants would be awesome. It would also eliminate the time a person has to make up excuses for his/her death, complain and call names so it'll make LD less toxic as well. Too bad OOO won't improve anything anyway and that's perfectly fine with me coz I have grown to like the way lockdown is right now. LD could use some improvements but it's still very fun IMO.

"New players try out Lockdown in Tier 2, and they happen to be wearing Cobalt and some newbie weapon. However, the Dusker clones eagerly destroy these newcomers before they have a chance to learn."

You're trying to define skilled and unskilled players by gear. A skilled cobalt could easily destroy an unskilled Dusker. Skill > Gear
And also, no matter what type of gear you have, you'll still be sh--crappy ( censorship @_@ ) if you're first starting out anyway ! I got smashed on my first few games of lockdown. I'm pretty sure my 5th game, I tried gunning and couldn't even >hit< one person - I got 0 damage. That was my most memorable game. But it was still fun since hardly anyone called you names and that sort back when lockdown first came out.

"Waste your money on Unique Variants."
Though I assure you, you don't need them, it's still a much better option than wasting your money on Accessories.

Edit : That's my last post/reply on this thread I've spent way too much time in way too many pointless arguments. Coz Opinions.

Nerfing 4-star items, instead of buffing 5-star items, is also fine with me. All of this would be subject to rebalancing anyway. Cheers.

Id like that, for lockdown to have ballanced, equal gear choices for everyone, but then there is also the problem that striker class is better than the others, and here is why, at least how i see it:

1) When you hit someone in lockdown, if that person was about to hit as well, his hit gets canceled. I have no idea why this is a thing that happenes, i find it a design flaw. Anyway, if your hits interupt enemy hits, then who hits first wins (i dont mean just the first hit...), and striker offers the most attack speed bonus for swords, therefore he would win. You might say "recon has same amount of speed inscreased but for guns, so you can hit safely from a distance" but striker has his special dash with which he can close the distance in a heartbeat, and then you are dead.

2) Guardian shield and Recon stealth, once depleated, after a delay, they start to slowly regenerate, but striker's dash fuel completely fills up in an instant after that short delay. So they are less punished for always using their special ability, and in my opinion, it should be more punished or at least demanding a more careful use, as that dash is very powerful.

SK loses players once players beat the game far enough for the grind to not be worthwhile since they have other things to do.

Besides, it's work. People come here to play a game, not work.

Excessive grinding...