NOTE: I am NOT an Econ major, nor do I wander around playing MMOs all the time. I Just wanted to give concise considerations as to how this game might be improved. (It's surprising how much you can learn about online communities by reading a little TV Tropes, though...)

As a disclaimer, I have paid for the $20 starter pack for myself and for my girlfriend, and may pay for another $10 at my discretion depending on how long it takes me to get from my 4* gear to my first set of 5* gear. I got a couple 4* gear pieces before paying, before the major crafting update.

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PREMISE: Spiral Knights is a game. It is an awesome game. It is a game first and a business second...or so I hope. The devteams produce works of love and share them with us as a form of livelihood. Everything that we experience should be part of their intended vision. Where it falls short of that, changes must be made. Additionally, people who enjoy the game should pay for it--in an amount justifiable for the entertainment value of the game ($10? $20? $50? Somewhere in this range for nearly all people). This is not FarmVille crack, nor is it WoW profoundly complex experience.

But, reading about the complaints in changes made to the game over the last month...I see that the vision must have fallen a bit already. So, this humble knight's suggestions:

1) Balance the CE costs for things based on how much the median person is paying for the game right now--not how much you want them to pay for the game. Then balance crown and energy currencies so that an equal amount of each is being gained/removed from Cradle at any given time.

- Why? Looking at a lesser-known game like MapleStory, which shills its heart and soul out to hook folks into spending cash while apparently offering some 'paid' benefits for free by lottery or challenges...I see that people really do leave the game out of frustration with the economy. The haves have, and the have-nots either put up with their lot or go home. Many, many means of enhancing equipment or other game experiences have been introduced that entirely benefit paid players (that is, the ones who determine in-game currency market values for things) but leave unpaid players futilely attempting to make the mark with their own--a feeling of inadequacy. This bitterness drives some to pay who wouldn't otherwise, but it caused me to reconsider what I was doing with my life and walk away. Long story short: the only way you can really increase the revenue per capita without alienating people or changing demographics is by improving the game!

(In order to 'balance the CE costs,' one must consider the expectations of a person over a day of play and over a lifetime of play. I would expect, as a guess, that the median person has the time and resources to play about 2 tier runs a day; perpetual players may get to 5 or more depending on time availability. Nearly any person's lifetime goals would involve getting the 'Stellar Set' achievement and being able to equip more than two good weapons at a time.)

The two-currency system has been tried and true in MMOs for a long time (including in M$), and it usually leads to these have/have-not situations simply because the buyer of the one currency gets to set the market for the other currency, despite the equalizing intention of the two-currency system. The trade rate between the two is always a VERY VERY hot topic. It is currently unstable because of obvious externalities. People spend energy far faster than they spend crowns, even if they buy lots of CE with cash and go crazy with it.

For example, consider Mr. Small-Real-Life-Wallet-But-I-Have-Every-Recipe-I-Want-Already. (I am only about 15 recipes away from being this person!) He could earn 10000 crowns on a somewhat nice run through the Clockworks, expending 200 energy in the process. He could easily have spent 200 energy crafting a 3* item with materials he had laying around, and only spend 1000 crowns. That is, he would have to use 2000 CE worth of energy ($4-5 worth) to remove those 10000 crowns from the game via crafting. Assuming this guy intends to do that regularly as an optimal use of his resources...that's 2200 CE ($5) that must be spent for every single somewhat nice 10000-crown run in order for crowns->CE rate not to inflate ad infinitum or for CE sellers not to be taking a significant hit to stay competitive with energy-hungry perpetual-playing masses. This is unrealistic for the average player! The 2% crown tax only matters enough to significantly separate the buying and selling rates; it does not remove nearly enough crowns from the game. The same goes for the Auction House because a significant portion of the population of Cradle will never need to go there for anything during normal play.

- How? The leftist solution would be to raise the crown tax to a very high amount like 20% (so anyone would have to work hard or trade a lot to get lots of crowns outside of player's luck). A rightist solution would be to make the crowns spent to craft almost equal the amount of crowns the spender would be expected to earn after expending that recipe's amount in CE, on average (so that Dusker Cap would cost, say, 9000 crowns to craft along with 200 CE). The logic there is that crowns become valuable to both free and paying individuals, and crowns don't merely end up quickly in excess (read: responsible for crown devaluation) for diligent paid players. An alternative would be to cause crowns to be spent on other constant ventures--like, for example, converting collected heat into weapon power. (That particular example would still put people satisfied with their equips in too favorable a situation!) Perhaps basic functions like Auction House searches and regular trades should cost crowns...

2) Material costs for crafting should go up considerably, especially for 1* to 3* materials.

- Why? People are not crafting things quickly enough and materials flood the market. Consider that I might find 200 materials (more if I solo sometimes) before having enough energy via Royal Jelly crownfarming + CE buying to craft a Dusker Cap from scratch--though that Cap requires far fewer materials to make. This only gets more absurd with premium equipment.
- Alternative: Make materials drop less often; increase NPC rate for materials; allow materials to be scrapped for small amounts of mist energy

3) Make all or most paths provide a nearly equal amount of tokens and materials

- Why? As noted, lots and lots of people do constant Royal Jelly runs to earn crowns (not for the boss tokens) for financing things that have nothing to do with the Royal Jelly experience. It's boring. Putting up with such tedium to get me better equips that I wouldn't want to use elsewhere is silly. With crown->CE rates at posting time favoring doing such runs exclusively as the sole means of perpetual play (unless you're an exceptional T3 player--such people are inordinately well-represented in these forums), an arbitrary hardship is brought on free- or low-paying individuals. Probably the easiest way of doing this would be to make slimes pay out a bit less.
- Alternative: Have more of the slimes in the RJ levels be of the worthless-respawning type; increase the number of monsters in the lowest-paying paths
- Other Considerations: A run's crown and heat output should be a function of the challenge and time length of a given level unless desired otherwise (i.e. Graveyard and Vault). Perhaps boss run lead-ins should be worth slightly more even if their patterns should be memorized...as long as there's some initial challenge factor there. However, RJ is just too much of a cash cow and and I'm pretty sure it affects CE crown values more than any other level.

4) Boss token equipment should have random UV chance, even if it is above/below 10%.

- Why? Not being able to get UV on a Vog Cub Fang should be reason enough to consider the issue. Also, boss runs would be interesting for all people after getting the equip sets once. As it is, you're looking at 200 CE to have one UV chance on a Snarbolax win (after 3-4 runs), or 400 CE on the Royal Jelly wins (after 6-7 runs for Sealed Sword/Antigua). Very few people would bother. Also, very few people would get the Brute Jelly set that way for the same reason nobody buys equipment from the regular store--even though the individual worked very hard for those tokens. As it stands, getting the equipment once requires a reasonable amount of effort, but intentionally getting UVs on the same equipment borders on the ridiculous. Since you can't trade it anyway...may as well make the UV hunt viable!
- Alternative: See #7

5) Replace the fee + percentage Auction House crown drain with a progressive-percentage setup, perhaps with an exception for 0* and 1* materials.

- Why? Buying and selling of low-star materials on the AH is pretty silly at this point; the sellers should be paying next to nothing rather than a third or a half of what they get out of the sale. Likewise, the sellers of fine rarities or huge quantities can better afford the crown loss and get to set the AH base values for things anyway (thus drawing buyers and avoiding an exodus to direct sale). This isn't eBay; there is no meaningful amount of overhead in conducting the auction. Cap the number of auctions per account if database capacity is the issue, and prohibit circumvention of the rule via multis.

6) Keep the high-star equips at least mostly inaccessible to newcomers.

- Why? I don't think I need to explain the importance of keeping the game content from being purely buyable.

- How? The high-cost unbinding process would allow people with recipes to turn some profits, but only richies would bother buying equips that way anyhow. Perhaps unbinding should be perilous as well as costly so that people are not tempted to do it en masse and devalue them. What if, for example, doing it with a 4* or 5* equip could randomly cause one to forget that recipe or another random recipe? Then sold equips would be both valuable and rare due to a lack of people willing to attempt such a lottery in unbinding. Or maybe unbinding has a chance of destroying the item instead?

7) Make UVs "Ultra Valuable" in a way that crafting-only items could be.

- Why? I suspect that Three Rings already knows about this issue but hasn't sufficiently covered the difference between random improvements in found items and random improvements in crafted items.

People don't value 80% of UVs for anything in the Auction House, even though the crafters are often eating a ton of cost in creating them. Isn't it sad that, in making 4 UV items with about $4 worth of CE plus other resources, I reluctantly keep one and give two away and NPC the fourth? Sure, the UVs aren't supposed to be major game-changers in most instances; but people don't value what they can't hope to attain regularly on their own. Only "bulk crafters" are gonna get good UVs most of the time--this rules out pretty much all the free players--and the average person has no deep interest in a 6.5% boost in damage or protection that 2/3 of UVs give.

- How? There are two major routes you could go with this: Favoring UVs for paid players and making UVs randomly (rarely) attainable for anyone.

The current route already favors the paid players in making UVs, but it doesn't do a thing for them trying to sell the UVs they get. Should they be selling them? I would think so. (So where do boss token UV equips fall into this? It depends on whether you truly intend boss token equips to be 100% bound.) At this point, for what half of people would want to pay for the game, making UVs for even one 2* equip most often results in a product of personal pride and nothing more (after eating quite a lot of cost). This means that either UVs are not good enough or they're not common enough. Change one or both.

In a reimagining of the game, I thought that maybe Unique Variants could be acquired rarely in the course of regular play with equipment that a person is currently using. MapleStory has the 'scroll' system--maybe this would be inspiration. My initial thought: after completing a tier successfully, you talk with a fellow on the next tier who evaluates all the heat that you acquired in that tier and attempts to fashion a 'mystical energy' or whatever that can be applied to the equipment that you used on that tier. You can choose to apply a mystical energy modification but it can never be undone. Higher tiers would produce more chances at mystical energy because you get more heat in these runs; but the chance of getting a Low or Ultra modification remains fixed throughout the world. That is my alternative solution. (It allows anyone to get 'UVs' but there's still a lot of chance and effort involved...) As a side benefit, it would make acquiring heat worthwhile for those not leveling up any equipment.

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Made a couple edits because I was dead tired last night around the time I was trying to finish this up. Added question #7 and put the biggest consideration on my mind at the top. Say what you will, masses! Make other suggestions and correct my many obvious logical flaws.