Let me prefix this with I'm stealing this idea directly from Warframe, I love that game and how grindy it is, and I think adding this one little thing could add a lot of life to Spiral Knights and its grindy-ness. All I'm thinking, is add a system where you gain prestige by heating up weapons & armors, and you get prestige rewards for every rank you achieve. Both systems are already in the game, they now just need to be merged in an amazing way (Like this one :P). I think it would be a fairly simple way to prolong the game's life, and I bet if you let us take a peek at the code, maybe some community members could figure out how to do this :P.

Prestige Reward (Idea)
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Ranks 1 - 9
Single UV Tickets

Ranks 10 - 19
Double UV Tickets

Ranks 20 - TDB
Triple UV Tickets

So that's my idea (^^) for giving UV (Unique Variant) tickets out as rewards for gaining prestige. Now I don't know how exactly the numbers should be done to determine those ranks but I think we could get it figured out, if you'd want to hear it that is.

Please take this idea and do something with it, or let the community. I really think this would bring back some players and get the game rolling for a while longer, and possibly inspire people to be interested in seeing / making new content for it. I would really hate to see Spiral Knights get shut down, and this seems like the path of least resistance to keep it running.

IGN - Bwuefeather