Its cause nobody plays this game anymore. Basically, the developers need to stop babying and holding everyone's hand and let people deal with challenges on their own.

Terrible at LD? Use AT. Terrible at PvE? Use AT. Want stronger gear? Farm a small selection of repetitive stagnant missions to heat this one piece of gear. Want money? Farm missions and get a terrible return on your investment of time.

It's all connected. Auto target is the reason the energy market is doing so poorly.

Ive played this game back as when it was released and i came back to playing it about a week ago. it seems that the dev team did alot to the game in order to make money out of it. now i feel how hard it is to farm those crowns through infinite amount of floors i grind. the market seems to be going to a dark place where eventually players will give up on this game. i think the devs need to remove some of those changes in order to keep players in the game so the impact of currency on this FTP will be minor. right now its up to the community to set the market price to some red line where people will refuse to buy energy for over then X amount of crowns. they also need to give us the option to earn energy freely while we grind by adding it as a dropable item. in the mean time ill keep testing the game and will try to find some fun in it tho as i started gathering mats for the t4 gear i feel like the game is doing the best it can to make me just buy energy by using money or quit it...

What they should do is make there be a infinite amount of energy for 5-7k CR

Economically speaking, people desire crowns and energy and actual money and even their time for that matter at different rates, and some combination of that can still leave room for people to buy energy with money. You're just cutting out the people that would value their money and energy more so than their time and crowns at ratios greater than whatever amount you set the energy ratio to, and not changing much else so yes, people would still buy energy if there was a cap on the crown to energy conversion.

Honestly though, a few basic things need to occur for the game to function. I listed them in a thread which can be found here, but the gist of it is that the prices are wrong.

Fire crystal costs are far too high for what is being sold- we're talking 6,300 ce which is around twenty dollars to heat a weapon. If you lower this to say, 630, then it becomes feasible for players to want to buy their way to victory. In the past this was 800 energy - 100 mist = 700 CE to craft up, so 630 would be a more balanced estimate, or 70 energy = 50 radiant fire crystals.

The other side of this is that farming is dead, and that no new content comes out, no new words, and people fear the worst and so are scared to buy energy because lets face it if the server goes down and you bought all that energy you're gonna be feeling a bit like a chump. Not everyone thinks this way but I doubt anyone would rather buy something that's going to evaporate from their grasp over a very similar something that won't.

while I think the idea to make radiants (or just fire crystals in general) cheaper is a good one, it wont really affect the issue of energy to crowns pricing, at least not how you want it to.
the current problem is that energy is worth a whole lot of crowns. we want energy to be worth less crowns.
this can be done in two ways, increasing the supply of energy and decreasing the supply of crowns.
with your suggestion there would be another sink for energy. F2P people would buy energy with crowns just to buy a couple more radiants. in turn, even more crowns and even less energy will be on the market, the exact opposite of what you are aiming for.
if you were instead to reprice radiants in crowns, paying players would buy energy, trade it for crowns and then sink the crowns into radiants, removing crowns from the market and adding energy instead.

another thing I have noticed is that a lot of crown prices seem to have gone up. this is subjective and I might be wrong, but might be interesting nonetheless. over the years I have played I often checked the auction house for CTR med autoguns. they have a good demand for obvious reasons and can be found semi-commonly. what always seems to be the case is that they are sold for a little under 2kCE worth of crowns. in earlier days when CE was 6kcr, they were about 120kcr while they are around 200kcr nowadays.
so I posit that CE is not increasing in value, but cr is decreasing.

this also makes sense if you consider sinks. you have a lot of CE sinks, like the whole supply depot with reviving, crafting, sprites and so on; even lockdown has an energy sink. but crown sinks are rather rare. for one you have recipes and fees in crafting, which is barely anything and then you also have punch, or UV rolling. other than these two, there is no major crown sink. this needs to be fixed.
you could try squashing another "issue" while you are at it, so why not have the overabundant lockboxes be opened with overabundant crowns (in some form)? you could go even further and expand on the number of items purchasable with crowns instead of energy.

Featured auction sales would be nice, especially if on a schedule or just had desirable items on the featured auctions always. I'm talking stuff like gold dragon costume, prismatic accessories, mixmaster, various rarities, and various auras. Have those be on featured auctions every day, week, etc, cycling out, and then having a monthly big sale would create a rather constant crown sink.

Energy is used for so much but crowns are used for so little.

Gatr, explain then why Hera keeps responding to lots of posts on the forums. xP Cronus too to a lesser extent.

They can only do so much so quickly, pretty sure they're still working out behind the scenes stuff from the move. I'll be concerned if we don't see anything in another month or two.

And, I admit that giving 'em a month last month was a bit too short, I didn't realize how complicated it is to deal with moving two games over. xP

What we really need is a real reason to spend time/cr/ce in game.

We Need:

Gear Balance overhaul (No longer would you need just a small handful of gear to win the game, you'd actually have to invest in crafting multiple sets to get you through levels)

New levels (Levels that are punishing if you aren't prepared but are greatly simplified with the right gear.... Ghost in the Machine and Compound 42 are great examples)

New Sprites (We've been asking for ages and we'd love something that encouraged us to get out there and work)

PVP overhaul (a real matchmaking system and some handicaps that limit AT and encourage class diversity would go a long way)

Auction house overhaul (What exactly? How about the ability to sell items for CR with the option to buy for CE at the going rate)

Good good, sell your CE so you don't buy it back when it goes up more.