I'm going to do this one a solid.

This thread is mostly about Petater's first point, putting prize boxes on the featured auctions.

This model is fairly revolutionary in a sense-- in games like Team Fortress 2 the flow of valuable items is typically limited directly by the money you put in. What this is suggesting is to move that to the free to players and let the paying players buy that off of them by paying the company as a middle man of sorts.

Putting the burden of paying for prize boxes back on the free to players puts the cards in their hands, and values what they're doing-- which is important because without them there's no reason to pay anyway. Like who are you trying to impress, yourself? You can kid and say that you're buying that snipe aura because you think it's cool but the truth is that there's no reason to buy it except to be cool in Haven.

The only issue I see is that energy is currently pretty much useless in game. Energy walls (the ones that cost 3 energy) are a joke, and everything valuable is worth so much energy that it's just not feasible to pay for them with it. This could be solved by a simple price change- reduce the price of fire crystals so that people would want to buy them. Not by 10% but by a good 80-95%. The original pricing for items was incredibly low compared to how it is now, and fire crystals literally multiplied that cost by 10-- back in the day I crafted using energy. Now? I use a small bit here and there but it's just not feasible. I'd rather grind or just not play than pay up for 6,300 energy of crystals.

On the actual effort side of things, more battle sprites and easier battle sprite leveling would also really help make energy more valuable. Long time players tend to want one if not two of each sprite, and each battle sprite sold is a good 2K energy consumed to upgrade when finished. I'm on battle sprite number SEVEN and guess what? It's tiring and I hate it and I'm not upgrading it to 105 within the next year. All it needs is an autofeeder. Put a stack of 20K ecto drops into it and just play the game.

The TF2 hat idea is genius, and I've been thinking about it for a while now as well

Most TF2 hats you go in you play for 45 minutes get the hat done back to TF2 GG no more of that one thank god and guess what the Spiral Sallet in TF2 is no different.

So you want to get people back into Spiral Knights? Make the TF2 community get dauntless delver. They'll give up if they don't like the game and they'll get their hat and join the family if they don't. That's how you do a promotion.. and you make the hat good. We talked on Discord and well..

Option A: Give out rose sets in TF2. Rose sets are like our earbuds- a symbol of wealth and respect.

Option B: Give out battle sprites that follow the player in TF2. Players absolutely adore anything that follows them.

Option C: Acheron for demoknight, possibly Groat's pan since TF2 has pans and players adore the pan as well.

This requires a very minimal amount of money and coding, and a small amount of art. Yes it is effort, but the rewards it would bring in would be astronomical- you know why I'm here talking about this? Because I wanted to get a Spiral Sallet in TF2. I got hooked on the game when I went to get the TF2 hat and when that happened there was a HUGE rush in of players because our game is awesome and people need to just give it a chance.

1) Make bombers viable again! Make a bomb that functions the way the old RSS did, Except maybe nerf the range to the radius of a nitronome, Even then it'd be nice to be able to do that again

2) Custom lockdown lobbies

3) Revert to the old UI

1+ to all of Petater's ideas

"3) Revert to the old UI"

Why you don't like the "new" one? it should be better.

@Mafia-Spaghetti
I can't say "new" is always better. I for one love the old hud much more than the new. Mostly for the fact that it took up less space and felt cleaner in a way.

But either way these are great ideas, I must say. However I'd prefer reverting to the old hud and old Radiant Sun Shards over anything.

But what do I know? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Crowd funding a video game that's been out for 6 years seems sort of awkward. I'd much prefer open discussion/interactions with staff and the community along with a more obvious purpose to spend money on the game. Having Cronus actively answering questions about the game lately has been wonderful, and Hera popping in to be involved in the community is also a great help!

Open communication allows for us to see how things are coming along (outside of things they want to surprise us with!), especially for rebalances and things highly suggested by the community. Knowing where in updates we've come along, what's slowing it down, etc would all be great things to know.

Crowd funding works for things where a game is just being formed. It has less of an impact once key things have been re-instated. When you're making a game you can show things like "this art is finished, this area is done" etc. With an update, there's not too much to show usually until it's done.