Many players don't read the forums. From the forum readers, some will not read this thread. From the ones who read this thread it's not certain how many would abide. I'm willing to guess not many.

There is already a process by which the players collectively agree on the price of CE. That process is bidding for and offering CE on the CE market. Discussing it is pointless, but an absurdly popular pastime nonetheless.

I would like prices to stay right around 4-5k, so I can make a good even price selling it and I can still go do a Jelly King run and make a 2-3k profit after buying 100 ce, that being said it will not stay low because there is a huge amount of free players that will be coming on and buying up the energy like crazy.

It being a common complaint doesn't necessarily mean we have to create a system to alleviate the issue. Likewise, I really prefer it when the price is about 5k. It makes mental conversion back and forth pretty easy; I like things that are 'chunkable'. I was playing when the energy sold for 2500 crowns and it when it was 6700 crowns or so. I actually prefer the latter, because I can sell my energy for crowns to buy things and not feel like I'm wasting that energy. I actually can't sell energy right now without feeling wasteful. It's like I survived a bizarre economic downturn or something...

I will be bold and make the following assertion:

People who want energy to stay low don't fully understand the value of their time. I love playing this game, but I only have so much time to dedicate to it every day. I have other concerns like family, education and employment. Sometimes it is really nice to be able to drop 20 bucks (cash made in less than two hours) and have 7500 energy. That's about half a million crowns (at the 6700 crown rate) to spend on recipes, cool UV gear on the AH or whatever. I love playing the game but I want my play-time to be quality and not just grinding the Royal Jelly for the 76th time. I want to be running T3 in my super-cool max UV armor and saving the day as I revive my teammates. It's a blast.

For people that are full-time students (I'm jealous, seriously) and don't have employment, I can see how you would want your ME to allow you to earn additional play-time efficiently, while still being able to craft your gear and buy your recipes. It's a tough grind.

Still, being able to spend $2.45 on a Friday night to make a piece of 4* gear and play for several hours doesn't seem like a bad deal at all. The system works and loudest complaints seem to come from people who just don't want to put any money down.

Also, people might consider the possibility of having more than one paid account. Twice or three times the mist energy. For the scanty price of six dollars you too can farm UVs in your spare time. Similar to other economies, the people who thrive are the ones who think harder and work harder than everyone else, making the most of their resources. (Those resources can be time, money, or in my case, dumb luck.) Three Rings has to take into account that there are some brilliant people playing this game.

Commence with the flaming and feel free to remind me that 'crowns are worthless, lolz'. :D

The point of this thread was so that (hopefully) the majority of players

Ignoring the migraine that has come because of, yet another, energy thread, you severely overestimate how many people browse the forums.

the majority of players, both free and pay, can allcome together and agree on a price that's equally beneficial to everyone.

Yeah, no one really cares. By that I mean, those who are driving the price up are doing it because they're bored and those that are buying just want their fix. Going "oh, can you keep it at this price so I can buy it?" or "can you not buy it when it gets to this price?" is silly; we are ignoring the fact that if it were too high, it wouldn't sell at all.

Market equilibrium itself is intrinsically a compromise between sellers who think the price should be higher and buyers who think it should be lower. Attempts at fixing some other price intrinsically lead to either shortages (if the fixed price is too low) or gluts (if the price is too high). If it cost 100 crowns to get 100 crystal energy, then lots of people would want to buy, but hardly anyone would want to sell--so the people who wanted to buy, couldn't. If it cost 100000 crowns to get 100 crystal energy, then lots of people would want to sell, but hardly anyone would want to buy, so again, the people who wanted to sell, couldn't. Trying to fix the price at anywhere else apart from market equilibrium only causes a different degree of one of these problems.

I know that I tend to use a lot of big words and people say I'm writing at too high a level for the average reader fairly often, so I'm probably not in the -least- qualified to do this, but...

What Quizzical is saying is that the price of CE is roughly what people think CE is worth, slighty more than buyers think it is worth but not too much, and slightly less than sellers think it is worth, but not too much.

I wouldn't say that's -quite- accurate. I feel CE is 'worth' around 5k, and I'm quite happily buying at today's prices... however, it is true that 'supply and demand' decides the market price. What people think something is 'really' worth isn't so relevant when someone can afford something and buys it despite their misgivings.

There's a saying about many things that are found in commodity markets or auctions... 'it's worth what a buyer will pay for it', and that is -completely- true of CE. There is no real need for it... playing the game for another hour or crafting an item is not a -need-, it's a desire. The value of crowns relative to CE is almost completely in people's minds and only resolved into anything remotely concrete by the values in the energy exchange.

Anyway, no amount of forum discussion can actually -change- the price of CE in -any- direction, though hopefully it can help people understand why CE is sold at the price that it is.

This isn't to say -nothing- can be done, but players cannot do it. Three Rings developers can change the value of CE indirectly - if we rolled back to old crafting costs, the price of CE would go down with reduced CE demand. If the unbinding gremlins only accept crowns, the price of CE will go down as crowns become worth something. If unbinding gremlins and/or PvP require CE but not crowns or only a few crowns... the price of CE will go up. Every design decision with a cost or a chance to drop coins has an effect on the ultimate stable price for CE. The high price of CE is largely based on the lack of interesting things to spend crowns on. Recipes are cheap; materials are cheap; UV maximum gear is sold in the forums and channels to avoid the extortionate auction house fees, and non-UV and low-UV gear is cheap... but with a mist tank to everyone and hundreds of starter packs being sold, CE is in plentiful supply - for now - but the fundamental balance is unchanged so 7000 crown prices are in the future, unless the next release of SK changes that balance.

There's been a topic like this before, all that happened was energy rose again until Steam players showed up. As nice of an idea as this is, this will never hold because as mentioned before, not enough people, and even so, why should they care? The ones who don't read are fine with it as it is.

If you want real advice, if you're not a paying player, stock up on CE now, as much as you can afford while progressing, you're going to want it later. If we're lucky, it won't hit 7k again for another month. (PS make lots of friends so you can run half tier runs for profit :D)

I said it within the first couple weeks after release, and I'll say it again.

I have a dream that one day, grade school economics will not need to be explained to each and every new player of every single new MMO.

As far as economics goes, if you're referring to how they work in-game, then this doesn't need to be explained. I've seen how these markets work, and the price will settle on whatever it is people are willing to pay. If the prices are too high, that's just because there are many people willing to pay high prices. Instead of walk out the door.

If you're referring to the economics of a software developer looking to turn a profit on a "free" to play MMO, then I might rise an eyebrow in this particular case. I don't know how much Spiral Knights costs to run, but I can tell you for a fact that the game isn't nearly big enough, expansive enough or - let's face it - cool enough to be worth even the standard $15 a month that far larger MMOs charge. Excluding the initial purchase price (which tends to be $20 after a while), I can play Aion, Lineage II, City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, DC Universe Online or really any other subsctiption-based MMO for $15 a month, and this gives me full access to all features. I don't miss out on specific gear, I'm not prevented from entering instances, I'm not level-locked, I'm not forced to grind just so I can keep playing. And all of the games I listed have significantly larger production values than Spiral Knights. They are "worth more," as it were.

Take City of Heroes, for instance - last I checked, I could make 165 characters across 15 servers with just the base monthly fee, and a great many of those can have a drastically different playstyle, all the while the game gives me enough settings variety, storyline, gameplay variety and added subsystems to need years to see it all. All of this for $15 a month. How much will fifteen dollars buy me in Spiral Knights? 3000-4000 Crystal Energy? Think that will last me a month if I were a new player just starting to gear up and not being very good? I know I burned through over 1000 Crystal Energy in a single day just making stuff and going deeper than I should.

To my eyes, Spiral Knights is worth - again, to me - a single $20 to $40 purchase, more or less what I paid for Left 4 Dead 1 and 2. I'd pay that. Hell, I've ALREADY paid that for the Starter pack. I'd pay that for Spiral Knights and play the hell out of it. Barring that, Spiral Knights would be worth a $10-$15 subscription a month if it removed energy costs from the Clowkwork Elevators. I'd pay for that in a heartbeat. I HATE loss of progress, like what happens if you spend more energy going through the levels than you can buy back.

But the kind of money it looks it'll require for me to keep playing it at the speed with which I'm playing it, that ain't worth it. Like I said before - we'll see how far the 7500 CE gets me.

---

Also, Dirt, my math was shoddy. I have six pieces of gear that I want (WANT, not necessarily NEED). Each three-star piece costs 200 energy to make, so that's 1200 energy. Each four-star piece takes 400 energy to make, so that's another 2400. All told, that's 3800 energy, or over half my Starter Pack without even using a lift.

Also, no, I generally don't pay for revives aside from the very cheap ones. On average, I pay 2CE for one T1 revive and 5CE for one T2 revive. If I play smart, I don't need to pay for more. If I play with other people who aren't smart, I usually pay more and don't make it to the end, especially since most people I run into are sporting at best mostly two-star gear, which gets them killed past the T2 Clockwork Terminal. Yeah, and you try telling your team-mates not to bum-rush that swarm of death laser robots. Whenever I try it, it ends up with a team dining on laser explosion spam and me having to share three quarters of my health for them.

My cost is almost entirely Clockwork Lift fees. When CE was a little over 3000 for 100, I could make around that much from a single T1 run. I spend 60, buy 100 and slowly make progress. Yesterday, though, I considered myself lucky if I could spend 90 to buy 100, and that's just lift costs, no crafting considered.

Honestly I love playing with the newbies who rush in and die lots. I'll gladly take their heat. ;P

Well you can get about 5k per jelly - thats 20 CE if you join there so 5k x5 is 25k so we're looking at like 30K per 100 CE NOT to mention 100 free mist - so I mean CE price should be somewhere in the ballpark of 35k per 100. conservatively