Spiral knights is a great game with plenty of potential. However, there has been a steady decline in active players and players who are reaching the vanguard rank as the years go on. This is mainly because the bottleneck at defender elite to champion (4* to 5*) is very tight. This is because there are no good levels to grind because they have not reached levels such as "The king of ashes" which is available to champions and vanguards and makes grinding for gear 10 times easier because of the large amount of crowns and orb drops you get from it. If Grey Havens took a look at their game stats, they will see that the majority of players who quit the game are around the defender elite level. In early game, players are supplied with the orbs they need all the way up to 3*. So all the 1*, 2*, and most of the 3* gear were basically all handed to the players by the game through mission rewards. However, getting from 3* to 4* starts to get difficult, but still playable. But once they start to go from 4* to 5* is where things become very tedious and is the worst part of a players journey and causes a very wide majority of them to quit. My suggestion to this problem is simply to increase the amount crowns dropped in the levels available to defender elites and maybe even increase the drop chance of eternals in the higher levels available to them such as "the rotting metropolis". It doesn't have to be a big increase, but enough to make the game still fun to play. If these changes are made, we should be seeing a much better player retention rate than we are seeing now.