- Cyber monday should be more eventful. It is an annual event, and should be enjoyable to the player base, rather than exclusive to featured auctions. The common consensus is that Cyber Monday is only in part about the item sales, but more so about the nature of it, the vibes, etc. People like to hang around with their friends while waiting for more depot sales. It gives something to look forward to every half hour in the past scheme. There is an air of excitement throughout the whole day. Spiral Knights streamers have a reason to live stream and spend time with the players, do something more eventful on the side while staying online in game. I personally had attempted a 24 hour vanaduke marathon for it last year. In 2020 I'd also tried something similar, and had spent most of the day playing with my guild, my girlfriend at the time and close friends, which was honestly one of the highlights of my year. However now, removing the depot sales rotation throughout the day and shifting everything to overly inflated featured auctions which almost no one can stand a chance at, just removes any fun from the event. There's almost no point to logging on for it unless you have tens of millions of crowns saved up, which unless you're a merchant or spending a 9-5 job's amount of time running Vanaduke with no concept of burnout, you will not be ready for in the slightest. Even though this year, two of the richest players were banned during Cyber Monday, the prices on items were far beyond reason. The snarblepup pod had gone for 42 million crowns, when the next highest it had ever gone for was 24 million. This is nearly 2000$ worth of energy. In my country's economy, this is a good 6 months of living expenses. How is this fair or enjoyable to players?

- The recent featured auctions after Cyber Monday have been rather random, and we would like some elaboration about it. Is there an active attempt to deflate the prices of totems and mixmasters? Since there's been a bunch of them being posted on Auction House. Why are items like porkular vents randomly popping up on featured auction? Late harvest ear muffs? Toasty extension cord? 2 sets of anti-personnel spikes after dangerous prize boxes just came back? Hunter splash trunks? And now we're getting tabard and chapeau sets? What's the reasoning behind the selection?

- The economy is in a volatile state right now, where almost anything and everything is over-priced, and it's nearly impossible for anyone to buy any item they wish for, specifically cosmetics wise. This point both differs and also stems from the featured auction issue. Too much in this game has gone extinct nearly, and there's just not enough influx of items to replenish the economy. And on top of this, the influx of items we do get, sometimes just ends up worthless anyway and doesn't resolve anything. For example, putting volcanic and divine flowers on supply depot when they're already common, or mech-tennas which nobody uses, when instead this could have been used for similar but harder to find items like roses, porkular vents (not the ones on featured auction), bent vertical vents, or anything lovely, verdant, etc, prismatic halos (the community REALLY years for these please, it's been 2 years since these were removed from depot) and more. There needs to be more items posted on depot sales, and better selection of it to fix the economy, or a revision of promotional box schedules and selection.

- There should be some more active communication between Grey Havens and the community, which could happen through the community discord servers, and Grey Havens could use a new community manager, but not hiring from within the community. About this I have a little bit of a hot take that might get hate from the community, but, I feel that Grey Havens joining the community discord servers will be a horrible scenario. I'm sorry, but I don't trust this community to not just get aggressive with Grey Havens, start clowning on them, etc, and just result in no progress made whatsoever. In contrast, I would implore Grey Havens to reach out to community discord staff and communicate with and through them in a civilized manner. I've been putting in active efforts myself to build relations with Grey Havens and make my intentions to help this community clear through my event hosting with them, which I greatly appreciate, and would like to continue working on. Hopefully this can speed things up, and while I can't speak for everyone in the discord staff side of things, this is my formal request to Grey Havens and the community to let me (and potentially others in the community) help. We do care for this game and only mean well for it. You have my email, and my discord tag is @sylvieonmtf.

Wow, that's a lot of typing.
I may or may not have forgotten a few more points that I'd wanted to make, but I feel this should cover a lot of the issues to be addressed for now. If anything else, I will be making another post, or people are free to discuss as well.

My one request to anyone commenting here: Keep it civilized. I don't want any rude behavior towards Grey Havens. This just hinders any forward progress. I'm not here to make hate. I'm here to make solutions.

Thank you to everyone who filled my survey, whoever's read this far into this wall of text, and whoever contributes their thoughts on this matter.
Once again, my discord dms are always open if anyone would like to discuss this further, both players and Grey Havens.

And as a bit of a teaser, to all you event lovers out there, as of now I should have something in the works to make 2025 a more enjoyable year for everyone in this community. Stay tuned for more updates on that.

See ya all, and Merry Christmas <3

To be clear, I do agree that items shouldn't be made too easily available with minimal effort.

There should be some distinction in rarity of items, some items cheaper, some items more expensive, all for different reasons, yes.
My main complaint is that with the featured auction focused model, it doesn't address the issue of availability of items too well, and in turn drives up the issue of expensiveness of items. The more that items that are already unavailable are posted exclusively to featured auction, the more that item becomes more expensive. And the more expensive an item is, the more it's technically unavailable to the players still.

For example, if there was only a finite amount of dangerous prize boxes posted on featured auction, say 10 boxes, rather than on supply depot, dangerous items would still be absolutely extinct, these dangerous prize boxes would go up to maybe 10-20ke on auction, and then their drops like dangerous hound coats would remain at 150ke or go higher.

The main purpose of my form asking how much/how fast do people run FSC to farm is to correlate to the question of how much people deem is an expensive item. The people who do not farm much or take a while to run FSC seem to have answered 1ke to 5ke range, which is fine since they likely have other commitments in life, but this is a minority and what I'd deem the "lower economic class" in the game. Appealing to them shouldn't be the primary focus of adjusting item rarity or pricing, but there are some items available to them already (flowers, roses, almost all scarves, vertical vents, hallow, frosty, flame/love aura, divine/volcanic halows, standard color items, etc.)
The majority of answers are in the range of 10-45ke per item as expensive, from either experienced farmers or merchants, which is what I agree with too, and feel would be a healthy benchmark for items meant to be intentionally expensive AND available to deflate to. This means items like dangerous hound coats, AP spikes, spiral soakers, caladbolgs, etc. These items are now within the lower half of this price range

The issue lies in the classification criteria for what items should or should not be intentionally expensive. Because clearly some items like lovely tailed helms, tech colored items, prismatic halo, prismatic seraph wings, iron shackles, iron dragon wings, etc could stand to be lowered to fit this price range, and are actually extinct. Why are these items being kept expensive as they are? What's the reasoning?
Items like mixmasters, totems, orbitguns, snarblepup pods, one of a kind items like moonlight and dead leafy auras etc being intentionally expensive makes sense, they're quite unanimously known as "trophy" items right now, more than actual use items. But for others, the metric to determine why they should or shouldn't be rare is unknown to us.
There was some controversy about the thunderous, raging and frenzy costumes' prices when they were posted on depot, something about 22ke plate mails? Which, is a big upgrade over its previous 200ke market price. And if this is an item that's intended to be semi rare, then 22ke price is justifiable. People who want this to be cheaper than that with that intended rarity are kind of just asking for minimal effort items. Say these drop to 10ke. Having these at similar price range to a Crown of Summer (Available in prize boxes twice a year) when they're depoted ONCE is unreasonable and weird.
However, if these plate mails are not depoted again for another 3-5 years, then they rise back to 70ke, then 100ke, then 200ke range again, then we have a problem. If these are put to featured auction only, they will still inflate to as much.

While constantly decreasing the rarity of an item to make it more affordable kills merching, there also comes a point where the availability of the item overall comes into question, and where the item may have inflated TOO MUCH. Consider, 30-40ke prismatic halos due to being absent from 2023's depot sale. If that keeps up being exclusive to featured auction, it could reach 50ke+ in the next year, or more. This, I feel is unhealthy to the game's economy.
I'm not asking to bring everything down to like sub-10ke range where people can do vana casually for a few days to 1 week and buy anything. But some items that should be more available to people or have been in recent years have inflated to unreasonable amounts, and needs a stable solution.
You could say the items like lovely, verdant, spritely have inflated as much because their prize boxes haven't been out for years, but even some previously depoted items haven't been depoted again, and instead moved to featured auction. And there's the problem.

Also a key consideration. Accessories and gear tends to inflate much slower than costumes, simply due to the fact that they can be unbound. Costumes though, need to be regularly replenished in the economy since they can't be unbound, only hoarded and resold.
Hence in my opinion, it would be fine to depot accessories once as an initial economic control measure, and then move them to featured auction.