Hey guys, just thought I would put in my insight on the current Spiral Knights economy and maybe a counter-measure or two for it. I'm no expert, but I have played plenty of games to know when something could potentially flop for the worse.
So the problems I am going to address are as follows:
1) Vendor prices
2) Auction House prices
3) Energy Sell/Buy rate
1) Vendor Prices
In many RPGs around vendors will reward you with some sort of currency. The problem, also as Daystar posted earlier in his post titled: Vendor prices have got to increase. "With so many materials in the game flooding people's inventories, the vendor price of them needs to go up to make them marginally worth something."
I agree completely with Daystar, because it's not that it will inflate the system more, we, as the community are already doing that no problem at all. What this will do is it will MODERATE the prices, for example let's say there is an arbitrary value to reflect the number of stars, or rarity of an item/weapon or armor.
1*: 100 crowns
2*: 300 crowns
3*: 500 crowns
4*: 800 crowns
5*: 1000 crowns
I just blindly made up the numbers but think about it, what if numbers like these were true, that means that everyone would at LEAST get those amounts for the hundreds of gel cores and shards they are carrying to make them wealthy enough to at least travel to the clockworks instead of waiting on mist energy. And also for end game content it would allow everyone to sell those reaper ribs and 4-5* items instead of sighing when a cheap item drops. That way the auction house would be less congested and it would allow players to more freely trade at a reasonable price depending on rarity and also the path of which they take for their armor and weapon selections. So you can dispose of all the extra inventory.
2) Auction House Prices
Linking to the above paragraph, I believe that with vendor price variation will come a more effective use of the auction house system. The problem is for price, the AH is law. What I mean by that is there is no other counter to what the AH says, if people are posting Iron Gears for 100 well they are going to be 100 to everyone, whether it is a private trade or public auction. One of the problems and solutions like in most games with a player based bazaar is overcut/undercut methodology of who can either sell the fastest or sell the most. When I use to play final fantasy XI, they had a system where you could only have a certain amount of auctions present, to moderate the intake of the system from the community. And with less presence there is less undercutting and overcutting because people don't want to pay the extra currency to re-up their auction. Now I know that every game is different and it may not work in this application, but honestly having 20's to 30's of pages to filter through for 1* and 2* items makes it way too congested. Some may argue that it will diversify the price and help moderate, but I would ask, well is it working yet? Because I am only seeing it get worse.
3) Energy Sell/Buy Price
Energy, like all forms of currency in many or most MMO's whether it is Spiral Knights' crowns or cash dollars is a supply and demand as we know. The problem right now seems to be two pronged, first being that it takes crowns to make crowns in this game you have to spend for a tier 1-3 run 60ish CE plus or minus resurrections involved and arenas or chests and secondly is that people coming in new have such a small presence that it is way too difficult to even get on the right foot. But the problem is that the yield for the crowns and materials gained from these runs for even just a simple tier 1 or 2 run will only give a cash-out of around 5k-8k with current market value. So Crystal Energy prices increase, that means that the yield of our hard work goes down for each dungeon. Again I believe with certain measures, maybe not my suggestions, the price may trend to a more affordable price. CE, even in the early stages is basically our air supply, so when the cost of breathing gets to unreasonable, how would this game attract new players? They would be walking into a financial crisis the second they start. For players, the most we can do at this point is just be patient with energy purchase and not overcut or undercut, because when people "need energy now" that's when the market makes a huge spike, like peak hours or weekends. For developers, if price variation starts taking place, hopefully even with just vendor prices then the CE should follow suit, but the only countermeasure I can think of would be to make an individual wait time per player to how often they can post for energy. It only takes two people to stagger a price up into who knows where.
Thanks for your time, let me know what you think.
I pretty much agree. Once the energy situation reaches 6.5k I'll probably play a lot less, if at all. The prices of energy keeps going up, but the cost of materials keeps going DOWN. The reason being is that people want to save their money for energy and spend as little as possible on materials. A fixed economy would help alleviate these issues. Energy at 5k is nice. 5.5k very doable. 6k, slightly prohibitive, but not a big deal. Above that and I'm going to care very little. I see people saying it all the time IN GAME.
Three Rings could even reset prices of energy after it reaches a certain number. I started during the Steam introduction and energy was nicely cheap, but I was too new to understand how cheap it was. I did notice that the system was doomed to fail though. In order to quest, I need to spend energy. In order to get energy I need to buy it with real money or buy it with in game money. If someone new joins when energy prices are 7k, good luck getting them to spend the cash. Most likely their exact response will be, "this is dumb". The whole idea of paying to play in a game that's supposed to be "freemium" rubs me the wrong way.
Three Rings needs to find more ways to increase their revenue stream while keeping the game accessible for the long haul. Something with the energy system / economy needs to be done. I fully understand that hosting the servers cost money, less freeloaders who play means less bandwidth costs. However if there's nothing to entice the freeloaders to pony up some dough, you're doing something wrong. Like I said earlier, paying to play doesn't cut it.