Spiral Knights - how 2 get mor playerz

how 2 get mor playerz

7 replies [Last post]

Sat, 02/24/2018 - 10:28

Fehzors-Forum-Alt

There's not really a nice way of saying this-

Spiral Knights is a bastion of inequality fueled by greed.

The F2P are locked down by orbs and then radiant fire crystals while the P2P are given a constant flow of costumes, reskins, and most importantly, UVs. Armor in particular is gated behind UVs and trinkets due to balancing issues, and the existence of certain pay 2 win gear (mixmaster/orbitgun) doesn't help the situation.

If you want people to play the game, basic decency would be a good place to start

The crux of Spiral Knights for many players is crafting new gear and finding new strategies. To accomplish this I would suggest but a handful of ideas-

1.) Armor needs to be balanced and made available to players. Go the extra mile. No more black kat/chaos route as the only good one. Players will still seek out those armors, but they can seek out say, virulisk suit just as well. I would suggest coming up with some interesting perks for armor, like the ability to go invisible or adding a status effect to weapons.

2.) Crafting needs to be interesting. More interesting than collecting 3 orbs. The original idea for the sealed sword was to unseal it over 7 trials. If crafting gear were like that it would seriously boost morale among lower players. So do away with orbs, increase material costs, and make scenario rooms that both require special combat and contain crafting machines. Make these common. There are a lot of ways of working this, but finding orbs repeatedly is awful.

3.) Paying for power in the form of mixmaster/orbitgun/celestial vortex is unacceptable. These need F2P variants, or at the very least to cost significantly less. Mixers are going for like 180K CE, which is like 400 dollars for the layman.

4.) UVs need to come with a downside of some sort. If you have status resists you shouldn't have health. If you have ASI/CTR you shouldn't have damage or charge damage. If you have damage vs X you should have damage decreased vs Y. It's only natural that this occur.

I understand that you need to be making money to support the servers

Continue your prize boxes! They're good and they clearly make you a ton of money!

But I do want you to consider a scenario that happens over and over. I enter a party with my mixmaster and black kat equipped. I tank damage, shoot everything, abuse heart attack, and absolutely destroy the level. Wow they say, where did you get that gear? What does it say about Spiral Knights when I have to tell them I'm a whale and that they can't get it? Every time, because this literally happens every time I play just about, they're disappointed. They know that they'll never get to where I am without spending money, and they have to accept that... or leave the game, and too often I think, they quit. They see the prize boxes coming in, and nothing for them... and it's a crushing feeling.

Which leads me to-

5) Make it so that you don't unbox reskins, you unbox a material needed to craft that reskin from a special machine at the end of a special mission. Anyone can play the mission, but only those who paid and got the material can craft the thing. This should go for everything that isn't a costume, IMO. Something like this would at least let me say that I earned some of my gear as well as paid for it.

I really hope you consider this. I hope I wasn't too hard on you.

Sat, 02/24/2018 - 11:43

Umbra-Lunatis

Yes! Yes!

Sat, 02/24/2018 - 13:14

Lordcalvinheins

YES!!!! give us a balance update! I don't want to have to craft a chaos just to play LD!
cause vog sucks in PvP.

Tue, 02/27/2018 - 01:21

Fangel

I'd rather add have the reskin/promo items be a recipe that you can learn and craft at a special alchemy machine, just with a huge material cost (think: grinchlin assault amounts of materials per reskin/item).

This turns the item into a craftable item that isn't limited by anything other than players playing the game, collecting resources, and finding the right person to craft them the item. Material costs may go up as people start wanting to make a reskin - I'd even go as far to have this special alchemy machine be a "shared" alchemy machine where players can pool together resources to craft a single item, allowing for a proper essence of teamwork and avoiding any scamming players.

Personally I would say instead of adding "unique" behaviors to armor sets, we need to add more perks that can be adjusted by armors, weapons, and shields. Playing with weapon-specific MSI and adding new mechanics such as: bomb fuse time reduction/increase, bomb radius reduction/increase, dash time reduction/increase, shield bump power reduction/increase, shield recovery reduction/increase, etc.

After this, allow family damage bonuses to stack up to +10 with universal buffs remaining capped at +6.

One thing I will say that would definitely increase gear variety would be if family damage bonus increased heat and material drops from said enemies by 5% every bonus level. Since materials and heat are less valuable than crowns to most players, it wouldn't require you to make additional sets, but if you realized one day that you want to rage craft brandishes, a dragon scale set plus a wild hunting blade would net you a 35% increase to beast materials. To be eligible for additional drops you'd need to hit an enemy once before it died.

Unique variants should work in a fairly simple way. Damage bonuses would work by granting you one level lower decrease VS the other monster type that shares the same damage weakness. Slime VH acheron therefore becomes a gremlin resist H acheron as well. CTR and ASI should be the inverse of each other.
(Alternatively, have a "black market" where players can access a handful of rarer items in a crown shop with a bid cycle every 4 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours. 24 would always have a high or VH UV ticket, 12 hours would have a medium or higher UV ticket, and 4 hours would have all sorts of UV tickets. These tickets would say what stat they increase, and overall would be a more interesting way to upgrade your gear instead of RNG + money)

Fri, 03/16/2018 - 12:50

Yoriichi

preached by every religion in

preached by every religion in this game yet devs still give us promos. hell they seemed more intent of giving us sock wolver puppet helms than new content

Fri, 03/16/2018 - 13:02

Fehzors-Forum-Alt

We're on the same page Fangel, especially with armor balance. I'd be down with recipes being sold too, though I worry it would become mostly just merchants that can craft promos.

As for prize boxes = evil, no I disagree. Prize boxes = the developers making money, which is something we should all be behind, since paying the bills is what gets us more server-still-existing-time.

Fri, 03/16/2018 - 13:09

Yoriichi

Ofc prize boxes are amazing

Ofc prize boxes are amazing they keep the game running, especially with grey havens not being as well funded and populated as OOO, that's a fact, but we've seen so many more prize boxes than even so much as a hint to new content or events in the past few months, the devs have gone completely silent as to what's happening despite their pledge to be more open, other than to introduce new boxes. Even if they don't have enough funding to create the content for some reason, just saying "we're working on it" is good enough for me.

Sat, 03/17/2018 - 07:13

Zantaclaws

I mostly agree

I would legit love this stuff, for a long time i've joked with friends about how much I'd love something like the Guardian Shield's healing aura from lockdown, or the cloaking ability from Recon for PVE. However, I can also see why things like that most likely aren't going to happen; at least for the cloak idea mentioned before. That's basically one of the best selling points of a Maskeraith, so you'd probably be making the sprite either useless or less desirable. Also, although I'm nowhere near a huge spender compared to some vanguards, I have spent a bit over $100 on this game in total and I've got to be honest...Radiants and Crafting are still a bit of an issue. Sure, I would have the money with spending $20 to totally heat a 5* item, but why on earth would someone do that? I would say that if we were to touch anything about crafting we would have to fix fire crystals as well. I would actually argue instead that the only reason I have so many 5* items (and have them fully heated) are completely thanks to the old heating system. Currently, i'm focusing on making every craftable item in the game (just to find something to do), and I've found that despite doing a ton of clockwork runs/vana runs/offering to tank players through T3 missions they might need help with, i've seldomly been able to heat anything to level ten, and instead I pretty much only heat my gear to level 5- if at all past level one in some cases- because of the scarcity of these stupid crystals.

Also, since you mentioned giving armors bonuses for weapons, I decided to throw out another idea as well:

What if instead of directly attributing bonuses to the player the armor is equipped to the armor would instead apply a bonus to all party members (such as a damage resistance, low movement speed, etc). This could turn less conventional armors, like the Deadshot Mantle/Chapeau set giving all party members a Dmg Bonus to Undead: Low. This wouldn't exactly be game breaking, but I'd be REALLY interested to see what kind of teamplay that would create with all the various armors offered in the game.

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how 2 get mor playerz