I'm surprised this hasn't been done already. Premium animations have existed in a lot of games, and the best thing is they can be performed regardless of armor. Runescape even has overrides for things like the home teleport spell among other things, animations that replace the default. Team Fortress 2 has Action Taunts, purchased items that are equipped in the tuant window that adds particular taunts to the taunt window, including partner taunts like Paper Scissors Rock, and Conga-ing, which anyone else can join into.

Spiral Knights could have the taunts added to the /emote list, giving animations to things that are otherwise animationless (like /dance), and possibly seeing the return of the lying down /sit animation, and maybe even adding some new commands to knights who have purchased the animations like:

• /spin
• /inspect (which might spawn a box of equipment, and displays the knight sifting through it)
• /coms (spawns a computer terminal which the knight types in some stuff all savvy-like)
• /groove, /headbang, /robot, /hoedown (all variations of /dance)
• /clinteastwood (animation for the gunslingers out there, complete with letterbox mode)
• /heater (cooks food on your Heater Shield
• A facepalm emote added to /epicfail