Spiral Knights - Why'd the CE price fall so low? PS. Holy hell is SK lagging!

Why'd the CE price fall so low? PS. Holy hell is SK lagging!

23 replies [Last post]

Fri, 06/17/2011 - 15:59

Coatl

Hey there.

I was an active member about one or two weeks ago.
But I discontinued playing because the CE price was nearly 7K per 100CE.
I also left the forums; I didn't want to be apart of SK anymore.

I log in today and see that the CE price is not even 4K per 100CE.
Never when In the months that I was grinding JK was it that low.

So I'd like to know: What caused it?
And, as a community, how are you all feeling about it?

EDIT:
Never have I lagged that ridiculously in SK.
I can't dungeon. I just can't. I'm assuming it's the steam players that caused the lag and caused the CE price to drop significantly.
So SK is no longer unplayable because of CE prices, it is unplayable because of ridiculous amounts of lag.
I play some pretty heavy MMORPGs that my CPU can take, so this is even more astonishing.

Fri, 06/17/2011 - 16:16

keenmachlne

Legacy Username

Spiral Knights launched on

Spiral Knights launched on steam about 3 days ago. This caused an absolutely massive influx of new players to enter the game--many of which are purchasing CE packages and exchanging their energy for crowns. I'm quite relieved myself as the game was on the verge of death with the dwindling population post-crafting cost increase patch, the cost of CE steadily rising through market manipulation, and the fact that new players had no chance of profiting from their energy while adventuring through t1. The steam launch was a breath of new life for the game.

The people who were voluntarily raising the price of CE can no longer keep up. It's great for the new players because they can make enough money from T1 runs to actually profit from their expended energy. It's great for crafters because you can actually make a profit selling gear again, rather than spending 3000+crowns crafting a 2* item to turn around and sell it for 2000 or less.

A great thing as far as I'm concerned.

Fri, 06/17/2011 - 16:18

Negimasonic

It was fine until this bugfix

It was fine until this bugfix a few minutes ago. I guess that's the pressure of everyone trying to reconnect.

Fri, 06/17/2011 - 17:16

bro8kenneth

Legacy Username

We Are The Same

I just played like 5 days ago without knowing that this Steam players were here already..
And it didn't lagged before..
I just hate it.. My CE was gone because of the lag..

Fri, 06/17/2011 - 18:05

Zingman

Its really basic basic

Its really basic basic economics.

Steam has caused a huge influx of new players.

People that use Steam are used to pay to play, as until now, all the games on Steam were pay to play. Therefore they're much more likely to fork over a few bucks (especally for something like the "starter pack"). So as of right now the ratio of pay to play vs free to play players is likely tipped toward pay to play. As such, the price of CE is way down.

Fri, 06/17/2011 - 18:08

Duskdash

I was having intermittent

I was having intermittent issues before the bugfix, honestly. Today, before the bugfix, is the only time I've had a problem. (Haven't played after the patch, though, been busy.)

My bet is just that it's the first Friday after the Steam launch. So we're probably *just now* getting the full brunt of the influx, with a lot of more people with the weekend to play.

Sat, 06/18/2011 - 01:10

Majikos

@ keenmachine

It's not manipulation so much as market forces as a result of shifting supply and demand. Fewer people selling CE (for example because they wanted to hoard it for crafting or whatever) combined with more people wanting to buy CE (due to increased crafting costs) would mean that prices got pushed up. The influx of new players willing to sell CE massively increased the supply, so prices dropped accordingly.

Blaming CE sellers for the price rise isn't entirely fair. People buy CE with actual real money, so it makes sense that they'd want to get as much pretend game money for it as they could. So they'll always sell at the highest price they can manage, just as people buying don't want to spend more CR than they have to, and always buy at the lowest price they can find.

Sat, 06/18/2011 - 01:42

Sven

Legacy Username

Not to worry, CE prices will

Not to worry, CE prices will eventually rise back up and people can go back to blaming "market manipulating" boogeymen rather than make any effort whatsoever to understand how a market functions and the basics of supply and demand. Can't let anything come between them and their entitlement complex.

The price rise is in fact, entirely the fault of the game design. Crowns are highly inflationary and CE is extremely deflationary. The effects were exaggerated by the crafting changes, reducing the crown sink of recipes and increasing the deflation of CE by doubling crafting costs. Inflationary economies that become poisonous to new players are unfortunately a staple of f2p games; little effort is expended by most devs in order to create a semi-stable economic system.

Sat, 06/18/2011 - 05:12

geeswell

Legacy Username

yes, as a casual it is hard

yes, as a casual it is hard to swallow doing a run every day and only being able to buy 100 ce every 1.5 runs. especially when it takes 800 ce just to craft something. tac on money for the recipes and the crafting cost and it would take weeks. in all honesty, if the market goes up again it will be pretty ridiculous to assume I will continue the grind. I had nearly stopped playing before the prices dropped. I was relieved to see that they had.

call it normal economics or whatever you want. at the end of the day it is a game, and if content is that grindy and you are manipulated that much by community folks trying to create crazy energy prices, well then, it'll be a game that only hardcores stick around for. but elites like their clubs.

The other thing you can do is simply leave the game and when d3 comes out we could see what happens to the economy then. maybe worse maybe better. but honestly i doubt I would even log in if i had to grind out and get a new piece of gear every 2 weeks if im lucky.

that being said, my buddy tells me that the gear i was making (because I enjoyed the look the most) isn't going to cut it for vanaduke and his lackys. so now i have to regrind to get new gear. I don't mind taking time to get gear, but this process just isnt fun. and soloing t3 in poor gear is a nice challenge, but frankly a waste of ce. which is why it is hard to find groups for it most times.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 03:52

blitzkrieg47

Legacy Username

Because...

OOO is awesome.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 05:30

#10

Bigindian

If you think the price will

it is

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 05:38

#11

Captain-Teemo

It is market manipulation,

It is market manipulation, not natural forces. Ppl put up bid walls and bought out offers that would be profitable after a price hike. It's very simple to do as ppl fight over 1-3 gold in an attempt to get their bid taken. It's not just the manipulators at fault, it's also the ppl who are joining them in bid wars over a few cr just to get their bid picked up first, allowing the bid wall to be moved several times in a short time frame.

It just happened now a bid wall took the price in about 1 hour from 3400 to 3800. A single bid wall continually moving up as ppl posted their offers above it. The difference in the market after this price hike? lowest ce->cr offer is less than 50 cr higher than the highest cr->ce offer, and there is a wall of 120 offers for 3900 to sell ce...

I'm not complaining about prices at this point, anything under 5k is profitable to me, but the manipulation is pretty dumb imo that someone is gonna basically troll the market like that :\

It's been a fun ride these last few days, I've upgraded TONS of gear, I hope the market doesn't get driven up to the crazy prices it was before the steam launch. This game is very fun and I'd hate to be backed down to 1 mist dive a day and buying ce on my card :\

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 06:29

#12

Loki

Legacy Username

@Shosuko

The only people who believe no manipulation was occurring are either complete fools, or they don't keep an eye on the market, or both.

Some people make it sound like the prices were rising slowly to 7k since full release, and that it's ''natural'', but that's completely false. Prices had went from roughly 4k to 7k within days, spiking drastically to 6k in a single day when everyone saw those few players basically ''toying'' with the prices, creating walls of depression in the market. They even bragged about it, though I guess someone who wasn't experiencing it that day wouldn't believe it, but for everyone who was online and saw what was happening we all know it was manipulation that drove up prices, not anything ''natural''.

After they did what they did the prices stayed high, and allowed them to profit further.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 07:10

#13

Majikos

Market forces > Market manipulation.

From what I've seen, bid walls don't make much of a difference. I used to think they were a way to sneakily control the market, but having done some CR/CE speculation myself I can tell you that if the market's trending in a given direction it doesn't matter how many bids are up at a given price, the market will blow through those very quickly and keep on moving.

The big price increase prior to the Steam announcement was most likely due to the hike in CE costs for energy, which led to increased demand (suddenly everyone needs a lot more CE) and decreased supply (P2Pers are more likely to hold onto their CE for crafting rather than sell it), pushing the price upwards. The massive influx of Steam players lead to a suddenly expanded supply (thousands of people dropping a few bucks to try out the game, and then selling CE for CR to buy gear/recipes), which caused the price to drop precipitously.

Basically with ten thousand players online at a time the CE marketplace is now too big for a small number of players to corner - there'll always be someone who's willing to outbid or undercut you by a few CR to make a quick trade, and all those 1 CR shifts in price add up.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 07:34

#14

Trouser

@Shosuko

"It is market manipulation, not natural forces. ... It's not just the manipulators at fault, it's also the ppl who are joining them in bid wars over a few cr just to get their bid picked up first..."

You do realize that the fierce competition of buyers to get their bids picked up quickly is a natural market force, yes? It's the "demand" part in "supply and demand". Your "manipulators" are simply reinforcing a process that is already happening.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 08:04

#15

Captain-Teemo

@Trouserman

It isn't natural forces when a bid wall manipulates the market. I'll run you through the paces: (playing from the cr side)

112 offers for 3552
about 8 offers get added in, these ppl wish to have their bids picked up in front of the 112 bid wall put up their offers for 3555 up to 3600...

Now the bid wall owner, at no cost to himself, removes his 112 offers re-bidding them at 3612...

The 8 offers, as well as new offers, again wishing to be bought first bump themselves up covering to 3615 up to 3675...

Now the bid wall owner, again at ZERO cost, removes his 112 offers re-bidding at 3700... And the process repeats.

This is "market manipulation" not "natural forces." What makes this market manipulation is the bid wall and the aggressive re-pricing forcing ppl to wait behind, or raise their bid. Unfortunately for the players who desire a low cr price on ce, the "smart" choice is the unintuitive one, which is to get behind the bid wall and wait for it to be bought off. Since the proper move is unintuitive the manipulation will succeed against the masses.

For ppl who believe this is some type of "conspiracy theory" - I personally watched in the span of 1 hour the price of ce rise with a bid wall of over 100 cr offers take the price from 3400 to over 3800, where the bid wall immediately disappeared and over 150 bids for energy at over 4k sat waiting to look "reasonable."

imo - These moves are toxic to the game as it eliminates diving as a use of ce. When players only dive on mist, less ce is passed through the market. While the players who purchase ce are in a better spot (less ce needed to reach their cr goals) there is less ce being bought... OOO could add 1 thing to the market system to improve this is to have the 2% cr fee paid when a bid is placed, rather than when it is picked up, so that moving a bid wall that large with no intention to actually sell out the bids costs the player enough to keep it from being profitable.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 08:21

#16

Trias

@shosuko

The fact that people are willing to outbid the price will, means that people are actually willing to pay more than they are currently paying. If people do not outbid the price wall, the person putting up the wall will be the one filling the next orders. (And this does come at a cost, since the waller is paying more than the market price.)

The manipulation here works only if its driving the price towards its natural equilibrium.

It should also be noted however that the market prices have a large hysteresis due to a large stiffness on the supply site. As a result, there is a large range of price values that may be the "natural equilibrium" based on the recent price history. This means that some manipulation is indeed possible.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 09:16

#17

Majikos

@ Shosuko

I... wait, hang on.

Why would someone who is buying CE with CR want to increase the price of the CE he is buying with CR? That would mean he's paying more CR for each 100 CE than would be the case if he just left the market to its own devices. That makes no sense at all. Surely he should be trying to push the price of CE down so that he can buy more with his CR?

More likely what's happening is that someone with a chunk of CR wants to buy up CE quickly, and thus outbids the current price so that his is the high bid and he gets the CE before anyone else. It's only if enough people believe that CE is worth more than the current price that it'll go up (which how the market moves - people's belief in the value of the commodity); otherwise the downward trend will pause just long enough for people to take his generously overpriced offer before continuing, and he'll have lost a bunch of CR compared to the people who were more patient. If the trend was upward anyway he'll probably get outbid before he'd managed to make all the purchases he wanted.

Attempts at market manipulation are speedbumps; they can briefly delay the movement of the market, but never direct it.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 10:01

#18

Captain-Teemo

Sry - I guess I spoke too

Sry - I guess I spoke too quickly... I'll break this down once more for those of you who don't get it...

He is posting the cr to drive up the price of cr to ce so that his offer of 150+ ce can be bid at 25% higher than the average trade when he began his bid wall. He was not posting cr to actually sell his cr for ce, he was posting to force the other cr bids up. Once it reached the point he desired he withdrew his bid wall selling the ce in return for cr.

nvm - if you don't get it, you won't get it... Go to college maybe? Or high school? These aren't hard concepts...

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 10:02

#19

Richy

Are you complaining about

Are you complaining about market manipulation? It is really annoying. Who cares if it goes up. If your a free player and complaining about the price of energy, remember your a free player. If your a paying player and complaining about CE prices being 7k you would be a fool because that is great for you.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 10:18

#20

Bigindian

Codemister, "who cares if it

Codemister, "who cares if it goes up"? A hint: players who want to buy CE with crowns.

FYI once you buy CE it doesn't mean you'll have an infinite incoming of it. Some people buy it once and eventually join the free-to-play crowd again.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 11:12

#21

Majikos

@ Shosuko

The patronising tone is pretty unnecessary.

Your proposed situation has one flaw - the market can generally absorb more bids than any one individual can post. I've seen it blow through 80-100 bids in under a minute and continue downwards, because since the Steam release there are so many people online at a time that it is pretty much impossible to game the market.

Sure, there are lots of bids at nice round numbers ending in -00, purely because they're nice round numbers ending in -00. But if enough people decide that the actual value of CE or CR to them is on the other side of that "price wall" you can be certain that the market will blow through it as if it weren't even there. Given that the majority of people probably just buy using the Trade buttons without even looking at the Marketplace tab, the existence of price walls is pretty irrelevant.

If someone posts an offer to buy CE that is above the current market rate, there are lots of other people who will be quick to snap it up. There might be people who outbid it by a CR or five, but if the market is trending downwards all that'll do is delay it long enough for a couple of people to click the "buy" button and get a marginally better deal. They'll get to buy their CE first, but that's all.

It's only when the market is already trending upwards that such price-hiking activities seem to work, and even then they only serve to speed up what was happening anyway.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 12:38

#22

Richy

@ iamah

I say people who play completely free have no say in complaining about energy prices. I have been playing OOO games for 6 years now for free and I have not once complained because it is not my place. They run the same system on PP except it is doubloons, just a fyi. The only reason OOO is operating is because people pay to play the game, if you are not paying to play I consider you a person catching the good graces of OOO letting you play for free, like myself. They could make this game purely subscription based only. I have played Spiral Knights since its opening and seen prices go all over, but I don't care it just makes the game draw out a little longer and it is still fun. So, that is just my belief that if you don't contribute to OOO operating you don't have the right to complain about what OOO does with the game.

Edit: Granted I would like prices to stay below 5k but right around it. It is a nice even price for everyone. Worth selling CE for and still worth buying it because you can make more than that on a regular tier run.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 13:20

#23

Algol-Sixty

When I place orders for 100

When I place orders for 100 blocks of CE on the market, it is because I want to buy 100 blocks of CE. It is not a "bid wall".

When the market was headed down, it blew right through those "walls". When the market is headed up, I have to cancel and place higher orders to get my CE.

The price of the market is directly related to the design of the game and the percentage of new players vs experienced players. Pushing the market in the direction it is going isn't manipulation.

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Why'd the CE price fall so low? PS. Holy hell is SK lagging!