I've read thousands of posts on these forums. Werewolfkirby's is more relevant than most of them. I don't see why it should be specially shut down. Maybe you'll explain it to me.

Is it the third paragraph? Is that what I should focus on?

Cronus - I have a few clarifying questions if you are willing to answer them:

1) Did your team have an issue with experienced knights grinding these boxes? Done through normal, legit, in-game means.

2) Was your main goal to stop the new-account abuse you described here?

3) Can we expect boxes to go back to being unbound if your team comes up with a better solution to stop the abuse?

My opinion here is there are ways to make the exploit much, much more difficult without impacting new players & vets who were obtaining these through normal game means. Even with an alternative to farming vana I would miss this grind. These boxes were great for stuff outside of selling. For example, the Almirian Restoration community event going on right now was using them as prizes. Also it was a nice 15kcr boost for new players to sell any boxes they acquired.

I'm a bit late to this discussion but I felt maybe I could add some value by voicing out how I view this whole thing.

So as Cronus had pointed out, the intent of the update was to be a small boost to new players' progression, but in reality the forge prize boxes were instead being farmed using alt accounts to get them quick, and said alt accounts were being deleted right afterwards. And to quote:
"That's a very different pattern from actual new players opening boxes and using the gear to move forward, which is what we saw happening organically with players who were new to the game"

I want to point out a few things here:
- Alt accounts weren't even necessary, and frankly I'm baffled that that's what comes to mind. It seems rather wildly inefficient to create new knights which don't even have access to good heating spots yet or gear to clear them quickly, and deleting them repeatedly. Are you sure your data doesn't show that people buy 0 star equipment from NPC vendors, heat those for forge prize boxes, then sell the gear off to the vendors? Because that's entirely different from alting.
- 0 to 2 star forge prize boxes only drop a few menial 0-2 star fire crystals, and one uv ticket. As a new player, these low level fire crystals are barely even useful for progression since you are not mandated to heat at all to craft to 3 star, and unique variants should not at all be a concern until you reach Vanguard, let alone are they much useful at that stage unless you hit specific unique variants.
- What DOES plague a new player is recipe and orb costs. The low star forge prize boxes drop neither of these. 3-5 star forge prize boxes do drop orbs, sparks of life, shining fire crystals and radiant fire crystals, which are all quite useful to the player in progressing. When it comes to 0-2 star forge prize boxes, the new player is genuinely better off selling them anyway, since 15-20k crowns or more goes a long way for them at that stage. That's a whole pack of 3 elite orbs from the supply depot with some crowns to spare. By making them non-tradable, you've actually removed something new players could actually use to their benefit.
- This didn't stop people from farming forge prize boxes for profit, players will still do so to get cheaper uv tickets, slap them on an unbound 2 star, and sell that or use it to craft up on their main account. All it did was make things more inconvenient and roundabout. This also doesn't incentivize actual new players to try to seek these forge prize boxes either. They now just present a miniscule probably insignificant low chance drop to them. Can't wait for a newbie to get a forge prize box and roll damage vs beast low on their weapon that's anyway weak against beasts, huh.
- If using alt accounts to farm this quicker is such an unfair advantage that this had to be patched, then this is a bandaid solution to a larger problem entirely. Alt farming is an ever-growing thing in multiple aspects of the game, not only with forge prize boxes. And this has even been noticed by Grey Havens considering the change to number of winners of the Birdsong giveaways on New Years, due to single players loading in with 16 alts (cue the infamous screenshot). The better approach is to tackle alt farming in it's entirety. The extreme route which will gain a lot of backlash would be to axe alt farming entirely in some ways. However a more warm and friendly approach would be as specified in the next point.
- Alt farming exists entirely because the farm of this game has become a slog. Item prices are inflating, inflating, inflating to no end, and all of our pleas to do anything at all to address this are falling on deaf ears. All the while, the farming methods available to the player have stagnated for over a decade. It's just Firestorm Citadel. After all these years, players beckon for anything, just something else, that they can farm and have fun doing, while simultaneously turning a profit. And most of the time, these methods revolve using alt accounts in some way, shape or form. You claim to have data, feedback, etc in multiple occasions apart from this case, then you would know the one main wish from players is for new content, both for enjoyment and for a new farming means. Creativity in what you put out and presenting a viable alternative to the player's life cycle in this game is the best way you can kill alt farming in its tracks. No one alt farms Vanaduke, and this is because it's just straightforward and a high payout mission, with large concentration of enemies who can drop loot. And overall this is a healthier farming means for the economy as opposed to trading related farming means like forge prize boxes and krogmo coins, since this generates new crowns into the economy and combats inflation (as explained in depth in that one forum post by Refraizen).
- On the note of player feedback. You've probably seen this one line multiple times in the past year. Communication goes a long way. You shouldn't have had to retroactively change this system in the first place. Anyone who has remotely any idea how the game functions could have seen this farming method blowing up as much as it has coming from a mile away. Had Grey Havens been communicating or engaging with the community at all, maybe had some trusted points of contact to conduct inconspicuous feedback tests through, this could have been avoided and solved all-together. Had you had the foresight that this scenario could have occurred, bound 0-2 star forge prize boxes could have been the norm from the get-go. The entire implementation could have been revised and implemented better months ago. A change to its system half way wouldn't have been needed.

This isn't to simply bash on Grey Havens for the change, but these are points that I really hope you consider going forward. As a community we only wish for the game we love to thrive and be at its best. Anything that may seem outraged from our end is purely out of passion. And passionate people do not want their words to fall on deaf ears, for things they enjoy to be taken away due to oversights or unclear intentions from the developers end, or negligence as to what exactly the community even wants (despite voicing it out repeatedly for years).

Edit: To clarify, I don't think the intent of the change is bad at all, I just feel the execution is not well thought out. From day 1 I thought being able to mass farm forge prize boxes like that and sell them felt a bit broken, and like a dev oversight we're simply making use of for our own benefit, and it was indeed a comfortable farming method. This again boils down to my point that this shouldn't have existed in the first place and needed a change though. I want better stuff both for the new players' experience and for existing players' experience. And this whole ordeal was not the way for either of those.

I agree with Nethorse, Jedwell, Mergu-Md, and Sylveion. In addition to what's already been discussed on how little this actually addresses alt abuse / multiboxing, I want to bring to attention how insignificant creating and deleting a character would be if that really is the primary reason for this change. [EDIT: This post mostly serves to show that committing to an alt to the degree they get 1*/2* items would be inefficient, in response to Cronus saying it wasn't just Proto gear that was being looped. Mergu's got a point that the brunt of the 0* boxes were likely being generated by looping the intro stage and immediately deleting the character after forging each Proto equip, which IS a problem when automated or multiboxed.]

Forging doesn't care about heat level unless it's Lv9->Lv10 where two individual forge box rolls are made; the rate isn't doubled, it's literally two rolls; you can extremely rarely get two boxes at once. Let's say double levels don't matter because someone extremely aggressively farming them would stop before Lv6 where a suite of equipment becomes hard to max heat in a single Elite T1 level. They're burning 2~4 rolls on their freebie equipment and then remaking the character.

0* firecrystals cost 10cr per. From Lv1 -> 7, it costs 3 crystals per forge, then 6.
1* firecrystals cost 25cr per. From Lv1 -> 7, it costs 6 crystals per forge, then 9.

0* equipment costs 150cr to buy from the Bazaar Strangers.
1* equipment costs ~560 cr to craft between the 200cr cost and the 10 CE for three 1* orbs. (It costs 3,000 to buy it, which is necessary for some crafting lines, but we don't care about that in this context.)

Already looking pretty bad for the alt create-and-delete farming strategy. Even a full proto set is what, one legitimate T3 stage's worth of crowns? Why not just bring low-rarity gear to better paying stages on a main character? Perhaps rank mission rewards patch that up. I'm not booting the game up and doing this myself to verify, but for the sake of argument let's benevolently assume the player can level up everything off of every stage without doing any Arcade, trading out higher heat level fodder for future mission freebies that start at a fresh Lv1.

(Simply for starting the game, the player begins with two proto weapons, a shield, helm, and armor, or +750cr of equipment.)
1-1: Dialogue. 15x 0* FC. (150cr.)
1-2: Single stage. 10x 0* FC. There are 11 treasure boxes, but they're irrelevant since 0/1* crystals cannot drop and T1 drops single 2* FCs instead of the groups of three seen in T2 onward.
1-3: Dialogue. 0* Cyclops Cap + Robo Wrecker.
1-4: Single stage. 10x 0* FC, Fencing Jacket, Proto Bomb, Slime Slasher.
2-1a: Dialogue. Nothing.
2-1b: Dialogue. 5x 1* FC.
2-1c: Dialogue. 5x 1* FC.
2-1d: Dialogue. 5x 1* FC, 1* Super Stun Gun.
2-1e: Dialogue. 1* Big Beast Basher.
2-2a: Two stages. 5x 1* FC, 1* Zapper. Materials.
2-2b: Two stages. 5x 1* FC, 1* Super Slime Slasher. Materials.
2-2c: Two stages. 5x 1* FC, 1* Spiral Scale Helm. Materials.
2-2d: Dialogue. 9x 1* orb (30 CE). Frost Gun and Hot Edge recipes (not a net gain over legitimate play because everyone already has these). Materials. The player can craft the Frost Gun and Hot Edge immediately thanks to previous material rewards and can make a second Hot Edge with 3 more red shards from another character.

--- I imagine this is the stopping point. The player has burnt through their free 0* and 1* FCs by now. There's a lot more dialogue past this point and multiple stages with fewer rewards that matter in the context of forge box farming, plus trading off Hot Edges and Frost Guns to a main character or the next alt makes more sense than continuing. The four 1* freebies can be vendored for 1200cr total. The most of note past this point is some extra 1* orbs to send more Hot Edges to a main character and freebie 2* equips that could be vendored for 750cr per, but the opportunity cost from doing the rank missions preceding these rewards is immense. Note that with the boxes bound to the character that found them, this means that there will be less FC spillover to the main character, but boxes are so rare and give so few FCs when they do appear that this is unlikely to influence the strategy. It means at most one or two extra stages on the character that generated them instead of the main character slowly amassing FCs with which to play normally.

In review, the player has to mash through heaps of dialogue and mission prompts, do five gameplay missions with three having two depths and having peanuts for crown payout, get almost all their value off of this strategy from forge boxes and vendoring gear before they delete and recreate the character, to end up with... significantly less payout than they would have gotten by playing the game legitimately, with extra steps. I don't see this being an issue unless players are multiboxing or outright botting, which are both much bigger problems that affect the entire game. It's certainly odd, and I can only assume anyone doing this legitimately with human hands found it fun to speedrun somehow. I will not judge.

Anyway, here's some ways to better address this without hurting anyone playing legitimately like making the boxes bind on acquisition did. Any of these would work in isolation.

1) Make low-rarity boxes unbound again. Severely weaken this strategy by removing most of the firecrystals from early rank rewards, which it relies on, and make the rank reward equipment start at Lv10. This is the most elegant solution I can think of and makes the earlygame faster since players don't have to interact with Forge garbage whatsoever, in advance of any potential reworks. With only a free set of proto gear to work with for unheated fodder and no handout FCs, the opportunity cost over playing legitimately would become massive.

2) Make low-rarity boxes unbound again. Dissuade this strategy indirectly by setting forge boxes to drop only from Lv9->Lv10 and improve their rates considerably. Remove double level chance from Lv8 to prevent it from skipping past Lv9. This significantly reduces the amount of Bazaar menuing players will do in general and will weaken the alt create/delete spam by forcing them to max out their weapons, as it relies on low-Heat-level forging. (A proper rework might see a loopable "Lv10->Lv11" forge instead, but the basic idea is backloading the rewards instead of counterintuitively frontloading them.)

3) Keep boxes bound at low Knight ranks only, and commit to the stated intention of the change. Make this strategy worthless functionally by making Punch inaccessible until the player is at least Rank 4-2, after the first Hall of Heroes visit. This is when T2 opens up and the player's given access to multiple items that can be crafted to 5* by this point, helping a new player avoid unintentionally wasting their UV roll on a 'dead' crafting line. This would force alt loopers to do a Snarbolax run where they won't even keep their tokens and contend with a bunch of other rank mission filler.

tl;dr new-character-abuse farming mathematically SUCKS for forge boxes, and if it really had to be addressed anyway, it'd be much better for the general playerbase if GH did something targeting that behavior more carefully instead of with changes that hurt everybody.

@Mergu This is a good point; the line that had me poring over more than just the obvious start was Cronus saying "it wasn't just proto gear being used in these situations", which implies going past the intro stage without being restricted to obvious large-scale abuse by cheaters as you describe... and again, making the boxes bound doesn't do anything to stop this from happening.

Making the starting proto gear start at 10 would also kill it, I suppose, rather than just removing the free FCs. Anything more nuanced than what they went with here...

Adding on to this, by my limited testing around 300 forges, 0* forge boxes are about a 5% chance per roll, so one in four crash site knights makes a box on average. Individually, this isn’t an issue. Sewer Stash stage 1 gives similar results for more than the first level of heat, and slowly accumulates T2 rarities, so crash site looping is not an ideal strategy for a singular session. Does end up becoming an undeniable problem with any degree of automation or parallel sessions multiplying thet efficiency. It’s not just looping this that’s a problem, but being so laissez-faire with multiboxing in general. The former is easier to solve though; reiterating that Mergu’s ideas for breaking the chain would be good.

@Vyre There’s so much that’s been neglected over the course of this game’s changes…

You contributed so much to this conversation that it seems staff input isn't required

I definitely agree with that. It brings about far too many conflicting incentives and sets portions of the playerbase at odds with eachother, leaving developers unable to make sweeping changes because they end up interminably embroiled in the fact that they can't improve the experience of one playergroup without depriving the experience of another playergroup.

@Jcyrano: To be completely fair, the post you are responding to wasn't intended to get into the topic of the meta - I was agreeing with @Arisa-Bunni that the player driven economy drives conflicting incentives. I was making a comment on the broader economic structure of the game - the division between players that want costs high so they can retain artificial lootbox value, and the players that want costs low, so they can... you know, actually play the game without it being a completely tedious grind. I'm not actually talking about New versus Old, or PvP vs PvE - just the market. We actually saw this with the diskgun debate - there are still players that want it to stay rare because it cost a lot, meaning that players who can't afford it don't get to play with it, unless the developers are okay with annoying the players who bought it by suddenly devaluing the item - but that's a side-issue here.

Instead, to address your comment on the metagame; while I'd normally agree, the reality is that developers construct the game, and the game's mechanics and incentive structures inform player choice. The players aren't making the game design decisions that led to them feeling that these choices are optimal - they're reacting to decisions and foundations laid down by developers at the outset. You're correct to say that it's bad that players are continually steering into the BK Set thing, but they are making that choice because they're being offered no other good ones.

When a player tells a newcomer, "you should use Chaos Set or Black Kat," they're not usually bringing that with "or you aren't allowed to play." Normally, the warning that comes packaged with "you should use Chaos Set or Black Kat," is, "or you won't find the game as fun."

It doesn't actually seem very fair to say "It's the players' faults for making the wrong choices," when the choice being made is - most of the time - the best one that can be made out of a selection of other choices that are just flatly worse. For what it's worth, I want the players of this game to be able to make more choices that are off-meta too; I don't think that the armor situation should be "Chaos Set, Black Kat, or Nothing," because that flattens the experience for everyone. I do genuinely believe that there is a problem, but we can't just ask the playerbase at large to pick gear that isn't fun to play and pretend they're having a better time than they really are, sorry.

The suggestion that players alone have the power to undo all of this presupposes that - out of the very few things there are to do in the game - people want to be doing it less effectively. People turned to the box grind because it was allowing them to do something different than run Firestorm Citadel all the time, if other players here are to be believed. I think the evidence speaks for itself, really?

And just in case it wasn't clear to anyone, I haven't been selling boxes. I don't even try to roll for them. I just think that players deserve to have options open to them that developers have carefully considered, so that the mechanic isn't able to be abused destructively. The game needs more things in it to do. I don't think reiterating that is unfair - nor is it unfair to point out that players can't develop the game.

The problem to add to the list is: "the Ilusion of Choices when here is NONE, really". Yes that is definitively on the Dev side. And I agree on options are nice, but "farming forge boxes to sell" sounds like a maniacal excuse rather than option, sounds like: "I don't want to address issues so I pretend everything is fine in this corner."
All forge boxes should be bound. Options Should be elsewhere, this is trying to find options where there never meant to be... as Draycos pointed out in another post "how dry is the sandbox?", Is SO dry that people are allucinating gameplay options on a sub-system meant to teach and reward game gear advancement that is infact a sub-system on his own... THAT DRY

"without stopping players from engaging with it at all by going 0* Gear Running in the arcade."
You still can and You still get UV from the boxes, You just can't sell the box... Are we going to address the 'player driven economy' issues?

Calling forging a "sub-system meant to teach and reward game gear advancement" is unfathomable as it does nothing of the sort, and not being able to sell forge boxes does the exact opposite - with less crowns players and orb costs players, especially new players, have no incentive to experiment with and craft different weapons (tell me your pick between ASI Low or a new weapon on 4*, I'll wait).

Insisting this system is intended to benefit new players is honestly laughable, and as someone who was once a new player, can almost certainly conclude this does not come from your own experience with the system. So why insist on it?

Esphael and Jcyrano - I think I'm starting to understand what's being homed in on, but not outright stated?

I can't actually be sure, because I'm not in your minds - and forgive me if I'm wrong, please - but it really does feel like the central issue Jcyrano has is "If there are going to be grinding mechanics and reward mechanics, they each should be more reasonably attainable so that this part of the game design can fulfil its role as a bonus to new players *without* impacting the overall motives of play." I think that the hope is that forge boxes remain a nice bonus that doesn't replace the entire reason for running the game at all, and in the absence of other decisions that is kind of what happened. To that end he's actually right to say that players did choose to do this, but we've already got notes the motivation behind why. More than anything the main complaint seems to be "there has to be more to do in spiral knights than just grind for crowns," and I don't disagree. I'd love to do quests, or run boss fights, or anything other than just hustle, but... eh, it's an MMO, I'll let everyone else split hairs on what proportion of grinding is "acceptable," "expected," and "intolerable." Suffice to say I DO believe there is a minimum but that's kind of academic at this point...

But I still kind of see the other side of that, right? Half the reason why is because of what you said, Esphael; being able to experiment freely would be a direct benefit of that nice bonus for the players that want it, while not representing a wasted opportunity for the players who don't want it, right? Being able to trade that box means doing something other than joining in on a game system a new player rightly might not have interest in - that is, UV rolls. Like you said, and I'm paraphrasing a little, "What's a new player going to pick? ASI Low or a new 4* piece of gear?"

All this again connects with what Calinou and Arisa-Bunni are saying about how this naturally turns into just wanting crowns to participate in all of the other things that are so time- and money-hungry that grinding crowns feels like the only worthwhile activity, either for vanity's sake or for the vain hope of getting a build that doesn't feel miserable and unrewarding to play.

[Oh, and Cronus - if you're reading this, the forums have a bug. Putting two At-Signs to refer to other posters in the same line seems to throw 403 errors when attempting to preview a post.]

"If there are going to be grinding mechanics and reward mechanics, they each should be more reasonably attainable so that this part of the game design can fulfil its role as a bonus to new players *without* impacting the overall motives of play."

Clear an concise, Can we frame this concept? and print it big... so the Devs can also read it. Thanks Vyre-Acidlashed, thanks a LOT!

You are right, Arcade should provide exploration, there are a lot of levels some players haven seen and those tells something about the game... It shouldn't be Farming to farm, so we can farm faster to farm even more...
and yes there is a Huge caveat on how much exp coins should be granted and how intense the gameplay should be. Risk-Rewards Should be Fun, not painful, Black Kats are the second.
and Yes Calinou and Arisa-Bunni are right on the "commodifying of gameplay", because it was done thru predatory systems which is BAD (black kats for example...).

Esphael Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional, You choose what ever You want...
I respect what ever You choose, but I will stand on what Vyre-Acidlashed sumarized...

Only thing I've got for that then is, well, like others have said, maybe there's a way to keep the new account abuse from happening, or at least... happening as frequently as to break the player-driven/controlled economy down? Or something? No idea on my part.

>Crack boxes stopped crowns being deleted from the game at punch

with punch probably being the primary crown sink in the game, this means prices for everything except UVs will go up, making everyone's playtime less rewarding over the long run.

>low E prices are great for GH

lower value of energy disincentivizes swiping too, it goes both ways.

This is mostly directed at GH, but y'all can pore over it if you want to. Grab a chair, this is a long one.

I've been hanging out with a few players while running Firestorm, personally... and like Lone-Skunk said, the main thing that seems to have stung people the most in all this is the feeling that the fun got spoiled by a small subset of players, and that was used as an excuse to take out an otherwise pretty enjoyable little pocket of gameplay variety that has been sorely missed by a lot of returning players.

I'm lucky as all hell in all this - when I bounced off the game, back in 2012, it was because I couldn't progress far enough to get bored of the grind, but didn't find the game itself all that objectionable. I hadn't been "burned" the same way that a lot of other players have. Coming back to it, I've probably earned a reputation for myself in the forums here as needlessly optimistic and willing to give the developers more credit than is due, but the truth is, I see all the problems too - I'm just not as sore about it yet.

This isn't me taking a shot at people who are sore about it, mind you; I'm just saying I see it and I respect it. This feels like a kick in the teeth from a developer that's "not in touch with the playerbase." The worst of it is the lack of dialogue - not communication, Dialogue.. We had something nice going on briefly in this thread with Cronus, but it kind of fell apart once it became common opinion that nothing about this was going to be reverted. I HOPE that this change does get - if not reverted - at least transmuted into something a little more palatable for the players who viewed it as a valuable "Difference In Kind." A timer-based approach to preventing new accounts being made too rapidly could probably curtail most of the aforementioned mechanisms for New-Knight-Abuse farming methods, but that's not why I'm writing this reply to the thread - the title of it is "The Forge Box Change Was A Horrible Idea," so I'll stay on that for now. Kind of.

I'm writing to reply to this thread because it's fair to say "losing players is one of the consequences of this reputation of making seemingly short-sighted changes with ripple effects that hurt a lot of other facets of the game." This problem is sort of intractable, really; there isn't enough to do and the players trying to maximise their gameplay value at all costs *are going to resort to these tactics* that you - and I'm talking to you, GH, directly - want to address in (i hope) an attempt to curtail practices that damage the game's stability long-term, especially as far as monetisation is involved.

As reasonable as it is to not want to expose yourself to relentless criticism, it's also reasonable that it's being levelled regardless; the rationale offered for handling the matter this way just raises questions about why it wasn't handled in some other way that lets players like the ones in *this thread* continue having their fun.

Sadly, none of us know enough to be able to home in on exactly why this was an okay thing to do, even WITH your explanation, and there's little else on offer to rationalise the choice in the mind of a player, because it lowered the cost of a few things in game as a matter of happenstance - something which a few players are indicating they sorely want, not by saying it but by engaging in the practice that you've now taken behind the woodshed.

If you want to start over, you have to Start Over. That means going back and building ground-up systems that address root causes of lasting problems - not just painting over the cracks in the wall and hoping it stands up long enough for you to make a marketing event out of the big v2.0. The draw for that is measurable and I get it, but the other side of the coin here is "while you spend this time making these infrastructural changes and backend changes that players can't feel, a roiling undercurrent of "They're Doing Nothing And Taking Away Our Fun" is developing in the void that silence leaves behind."

Players feel like they're being robbed. This is why they keep making accusations of greed, ignorance and carelessness. Whether it's true or not doesn't change the fact that players feel like they're being robbed. They feel that way for real reasons that they keep insisting on, and "briefly feeling heard" is just about the only reprieve they can get. Even that is wearing thin, now. This is why they want communication. This is why we want dialogue. This is why I agree with users like Nethorse.

Try not to believe that I'm blind to the realities of the bed of thorns that's been unrolled under you, too - if you find yourself in the unpleasant position of having to upset big wallets by making a change that leaves them feeling robbed because you want to devalue boxes for affordability and diminish the centrality of gambling in the game to make it healthier to engage with, then this problem doesn't go away. With any hope, though, it does get quieter, and hopefully the inrush of players delighted to finally have more access to the fairground you built for them offsets that slightly.

@Cronus specifically: I do remember the posts you made here. Glad to know you play games too, glad that there are plans. Genuinely. I don't want to be a thorn in you guys' side, but it's worth putting it large: When talking about "the players that the reward system is designed for," we can check the current active playercount through a number of approximate means. Most of us are veterans. The game's short enough that a new player doesn't stay new for long. When new changes feel like a fresh steak falling into a piranha tank of players desperate for new content, the fastest of us at the deepest levels of engagement with the game are going to figure out what the juiciest bits are to sink our teeth into because it's the only thing in here worth chewing on.

I really do hope that your ability to speak of the game's intake of new players is the start of a positive trend, but the numbers we have access to as players don't paint an especially reassuring picture. SteamDB doesn't give information about those using the non-steam install, but I struggle to believe it could be significantly larger in proportion. In fact, a certain application that's an open secret does confirm that nonsteam users account for, generously, 20% of the installbase. For most of us, these changes... feel a little bit personal, sometimes. I'm not going to say "spiteful," but someone else might. I'm not convinced I'd want to try to stop them.

It boils down to this:

Not everyone wants to invest the hope that I will; that this is just a clumsy first step to patching a problem on the way to a better and more maintainable Spiral Knights, and to be absolutely clear - I'm not speaking for them, and they shouldn't pretend to be hopeful when they're not. As a matter of fact I hope they keep telling you what they think, because that's kind of what the forums are for. There are a lot of reasons why people aren't happy with this change. The reason that they got so prickly about it here, I think, is that this time, we finally got a single pivotal thing to point at and say "See? You're just gonna take it away again. It was good, you promised it'd be good, and now it's gone again. Typical."

And... that sucks. It sucks to see it happen and it sucks to say it and feel like its really true.

It's a myth these weren't a crown sink. I alone sunk between 1.7 - 2.5m. Gear costs, crystal costs, heat amp costs, and AH fees add up. And judging by how much UV rolling at punch I see after this update (almost none) it was very likely a larger sink than punch.

I don't understand your point. You want me to use UV tickets on elemental blasters? Why is that better than selling low star boxes to players?

If you meant heating 3* gear, keep in mind that is much more expensive and takes much more time than 0*. Surely you know this. You have to heat 5 full items to level 10 to get 1 forge box on average. You are better off just running vana, which is what everyone is complaining about here. 0* gear grinding was finally a fun alternative to vana and the boxes had multiple uses beyond profit.

I'm not interested in a meta-conversation about UV demand or pricing in this game.

I also think we may have been misled. Cronus's post said there were no other changes to these boxes than them becoming bound. I have heard from multiple sources they are not dropping silver tickets now.

Yes some people are using the tickets to roll, but the turnaround time it takes to sell this gear is a lot longer than it was for boxes. Plus it means people are only rolling specific FSC gear to sell, instead of rolling on any gear. Also I don't like going through 30 tickets without a good UV, it feels like a huge waste of my time if I am unlucky. And finally I really liked using these boxes for giveaways.

I think an easy solution to the whole Crack Box-farming ordeal would be to make the drop-rate depend entirely on the raw amount of crystals that are being fed into the gear forge. That way:

• It's actually the LATEGAME gear that would be farmed more actively.
• It would also make it more rewarding to commit to one piece of gear at a time, and aim for higher levels rather than pop upgrades from levels 1 to 3 on each item. The level 10 reward would feel more impactful than just a clean item profile with a number 10 on it.

Doing this would also eliminate the reason to lock low-level Forge Prize Boxes behind being bound to the player, since the attention for them would drift away, lowering the supply AND demand.

Credit for the idea goes to another Discord user/friend of mine whom I don't remember, but if you recognise yourself, tag yourself.