I have to say I am conflicted about how little grinding there is in this game. On the one hand in one hours time I have made a ton of profit and feel like I made really good use of my time but on the other hand I can no longer go out and do more. I would say right now one hour of gameplay using mist energy in this game is comparable to around 3 hours in any other MMORPG, which makes the game feel a lot less grindy. At the same time though, after my hour is done I will need to wait until tomorrow to play again. The question I have to ask myself then is: are the two extra hours of effort I have to devote in any other game for the same result worth being able to play the game all day? I feel any answer I come up with will be disagreeable to at least half of the population of this game, but I am curious as to how everyone else feels about this. So please, I encourage everyone to discuss in the replies how they feel about the grind or lack of grind in this game.
This game has no grind
spending that extra 2 hours doing something more meaningful (meet up with your friends to play a good game of soccer) to your life than wasting it on grinding a game.
This game has no grinding?
Lies.
It sure does.
But this game makes grinding not look like grinding.
Which is awesome.
selling mats and choosing your gates careful yields plenty of crowns to buy more CE, play and still advance for free.
just buy CE from your crones, you can grind then for much more time of a day.
sell mats, they give alot of money, however u better go solo to get more mats
You kinda grind for crowns so yeah (I know, you can buy it with paid/crystal energy, but where is the fun? Also, "CE = Crafting only" to me). But it's exactly what post #3 [Ten_Tacles] said:
This game have grind, but I can't see it. And THIS is awesome.
There is grind when you take the fact that we can't buy/sell/trade tokens into account (needing to fight the Jelly King 7 TIMES to get ONE Sealed Sword which is bound to you the moment you pick it up. That weapon better be EPIC when you finally take it to 5-Star!).
7 times is nothing. After you get your token weapons you don't have a reason to do him ever again.
No grind? Buddy, I think you've been hitting the ol' sleep vials a little to hard.
It's a whole lot better than cutting trees or some other ridiculous petty task 5 hours in order to advance.
Most of the replies don't seem to want to answer my question. :( Well maybe they are answering it in their own way when they tell me it is possible to grind in this game. Yes, I am aware that you can make more crowns dungeoning on CE than it costs to purchase the CE and that if you wanted to you can grind all day. What I am saying is that this game does something a lot of games don't, that is it gives players the option to not grind, to use their time more efficiently through the use of mist energy; essentially allowing players to gain more rewards for less time spent in the game.
Xiax - every player will have to grind at some point. (If you're not making five-star items yet, I can understand how you may not have hit this.) The patch long ago that bound all equipped items forever has ensured that.
That said, it's true that grinding is far from what you might get in another game where you pay monthly and spend hours upon hours every single day just to get one level. (Or weeks, or months, etc.) Personally, I love that fact about SK, because it feels like I can accomplish something worthwhile without having to invest a week of my life into it.
So, as to how I feel about it... I enjoy it, and really appreciate it. : )
well if u take materials and apparantly tokens too into account, the energy cost is really minor, so the "more rewards" id compare to a crappy 20-50% bonus item of a different game or something..for example the 20% heat amplifier here :D!
lets say that u get materials and tokens worth 100CE with spending 100CE(which is realistic)
the clockworks alone should get u around as many crowns as u need for 100 CE and on top of that u have ur mats worth 100CE(or more)
lets say u play on mist
u spend 0 and come out with 200+
the profit is 200+
now lets say u grind(using 100 ME only is not considered grinding by me, so ill be assuming u want to spend longer time playing, also grinding is mostly done while soloing, so ull hav all mats needed)
u spend 100 and come out with 400+
the profit is 300+
u spend 200 and come out with 600+
the profit is 400+
u spend 300 and come out with 800+
the profit is 500+
as u can see, the 200+ CE profit gets smaller and smaller with the amount of time ur grinding
im pretty sure these 2 things from u caused us forum posters to show u ways to make money:
"but on the other hand I can no longer go out and do more." yes u can
"At the same time though, after my hour is done I will need to wait until tomorrow to play again." no u wont
u didnt mention any examples for grinding, just the term. yet, i dont know what u personally understand under grinding
i dont quite understand this last part..also u mentioned most people dont seem to want to answer ur question. well this question is 1st off all directed to urself and other than that ur asking about a different game, but ur predicting ur possible answers to be disagreeable to players of THIS game(the only thing i disagree to is grinding not being worth it, yes its obvious u get more profit from just playing on mist, fun has top priority, thats why im playing a GAME, its not my opinion, its obvious, im not sure what kinda opinion i could give on that). maybe add a little more details:
"The question I have to ask myself then is: are the two extra hours of effort I have to devote in any other game for the same result worth being able to play the game all day? I feel any answer I come up with will be disagreeable to at least half of the population of this game, but I am curious as to how everyone else feels about this."
but anyway the issue isnt the grinding part, it is to know how to convert ur items into energy properly without making too small profit, once that is done, u can go do ur boring or fun repetitive grinding
in the end ur talking about reward per time spent ingame, yes we are also aware, that the game gives us free mist energy
well its a very very big controversy, because of that unique energy system, i suggest u google some old forum posts about that, if u wana see opinions
just some opinions here, right from the google 1st result for spiral knights grinding mist energy
http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/8491
or u could edit the OP to get rid of the parts, that dont make sense and/or distract all the persons, u want answers from, might as well re-formulate the question simple and easy "What do you guys think about grinding being less rewarding than merely playing an hour on Mist Energy everyday"(if thats what ur asking that is)
since u seem to read thoroughly through the replies, im sure ull read through this 1 as well
and if thers any unanswered question(where is it..?), thats all of my juice i doubt i could add anything else to this topic, simply because ur OP calls something white, thats black and u predict half of the population of this game to disagree to it being white..well yea thers no win in this kind of a game lol
BiggestLoser, i have no idea what you were saying about profit (or much else for that matter) getting smaller as you dungeoned on CE. last i checked, Jellly King runs barely ever varied in crown drops, always around 5k a full run, whether i was dungeoning for a day or an hour.
also, he wasnt saying he was playing the game for profit, he was saying he was limited in playing the game for fun, because of the mist cap.
(lol @ "unique energy system" - load of ____.. other games have been using it for ages, and you dont even need to log off facebook to see that)
What I mean by grinding is repeating the same levels over and over again for marginal gains. Yes you can play this game all day by buying CE with crowns, but it will never be as profitable as the run you do with your mist energy. Comparatively speaking other games employ a reward model similar to players running on CE in this game, in that players repeat the same activities for marginal gains. Other games don't even give players the option to play very profitably. I know there are exceptions, like the fatigue system in new Korean mmos and that battle point system in Atlantica Online. But even those systems are implemented in ways that are nowhere near as rewarding as the mist energy system in SK. By golly you really feel like you accomplished something when you run on mist and it is a very unique and gratifying feeling made possible only because you know how much the run would have cost you if you used CE.
If you didn't see the point of my spiel that's because there was none I just wanted to point out a different view on the game. I've read a lot of players complaining about how much grinding there is in this game but there really doesn't have to be any grinding if you don't want to grind.
The game actually has a gigantic grind. The difference is that there are a couple different ways through which you can skip some or all of the grinding. You can either buy CE with real life money, or you can get lucky with a crafting UV which you can sell for enough CE to get all the gear required.
Once you get all your 5 star gear, you enter the real grind for the hardcore min/maxer; you either craft massive amounts of gear hoping to get the correct maximum UV or you grind massive amounts of CE so you can buy gear with the correct maximum UV.
Or you can buy 2 dollars worth of ce on 10 different accounts and have 1000 mist energy to craft with everyday. And Metaphysic, it still stands that you only have to grind if you want to, you can spend the one hour for really great profits without grinding for 10 hours on top of that for marginal profits.
Only using mist energy every day means a very very long time before you manage to get to T3 and 5 star equipment. It's still a grind, just one that you stretch out over 3+ months.
Your reasoning that it isn't a grind because you only play an hour a day doesn't make any logical sense. By that reasoning, you can take the grindiest Korean MMO in the world and say it's not a grind if you only play an hour a day.
Your one hour has the same result as 3 hours of gameplay in another MMO.
dood "Your one hour has the same result as 3 hours of gameplay in another MMO" means nothing. im fairly sure if i spend one hour playing SK and spent an hour playing FFXIV, it would still be one hour. and even if you do get lucky with 3 hallfruns of jelly king on mist energy, 12k crowns isnt gonna get you much... - so much for the accomplishment factor
You are taking that 12k crowns out of context, sure that by itself is not much but imagine if you could gain that much crowns in an hour of grinding. If you play 10 hours a day you can reach end game in less than a week. The fact is grinding does not yield nearly so much crowns for the time you spent, so yeah I feel more accomplished with my one hour of mist play than several hours of grinding.
Mist energy is roughly equivalent to the "rested" experience boost that many MMOs give players for the time they aren't playing the game. It's not a new concept.
If you don't feel like you're grinding, that's great and the developer accomplished their mission of hiding the grind from the player. Most MMOs try to do this through questing so the player doesn't focus entirely on their experience bar.
Spiral Knights doesn't have an experience bar, which tricks you into thinking that there is no grind; it still exists, only now its tied to your gear. You grind for your gear, and it's a pretty sizable grind if you intend to enter tier 3 and get a set of 5 star gear. As I stated before, the main difference between SK and other MMOs is that you can spend real money to skip some or all of the grind.
first off, anyone who thinks this game has any type of grind at all needs to wake up, play an old school dungeon crawler like one of the old final fantasy games and realize just how casual this game is...
now, my problem with this game is the fact that someone casually spending an hour or 2 doing runs in a pug every day can progress just as quickly as someone who does their research, theorycrafts builds and strategies and tries to min/max every bit of this game. the problem is that this game limits you on how much u can play it without paying more money. sure you can extend that limit with money, but ultimately, u are limited in what u can do in the game no matter what anyone says.
what this game needs, in my opinion, is to get add a colosseum type thing thats much harder but u can keep doing it all day and gives some type of reward (CR or tokens). this game needs something for people to do after the 1 or 2 hours of spending their 100 energy is done with.
Xiax, 12k crowns was based on a "perfect" jelly crown run, join at basil, leave before boss. 30 energy, so 3runs total. in a good team, itd take you about an hour, but youd rarely get a good team. good teams either lock their rooms, or are full up. so youre stuck with newbies or people with poor weapons. so thats 2hours total for 12k.
this conversation was about mist. using the above, you cant dungeon 10hours on mist, only 2hours max really, still netting only 12k max, and if you werent going to buy CE with it, it would be a llong time before you could get anything good with it (5* weapons being 800energy, expensive materialls, and the 4* weapon to begin with... one hour a day of "accomplishment" is going to take a looooong time before you actually get anywhere. you need to grind, or youlll lose interest in the game. i did mist runs only in cbt. it took me 2 weeks to get a silversix. talk about fun. ugh.
Larkhill, your post is unthought out. i have CE.. i can dungeon on CE. if i have 100ce more than the "free" player, i can dungeon twice as long as him, ergo, i can progress 2x as fast as him. not only that, but the free player will not be able to upgrade his weapons or armor to 3* or 4* unless he buys CE via crowns or cash.. which if he doesnt, hes stuck.
so to actually play this f2p game more than an hour or 2 a day, i need to spend money on energy. now thats fine. spending mony on a video game isnt the end of the world, but the problem is, you're still stuck with only being able to play the game a certain number of times. you're just stuck at a far later time than the free player is. if u pay and get 7500 CE, you have 7500 CE of playtime/crafting and when that used u, and it will be used up fairly quickly, ur back to being stuck unless u pay more money for more CE and get stuck later on again. as a free player, im simply stuck every day when i use up my 100 ME whereas u get stuck every few weeks or so when u use up your CE.
so either play this game for an hour or 2 every day and deal with it till they fix the system, or pay a decent amt of money every few weeks... awesome choices...
i stand by my point. this game has NO grinds at all. at least not in the conventional sense that other mmorpg games have. this is one of the MOST CASUAL mmorpg's ive ever seen to be made/become successful in any way at all.
@larkhill:
You can buy CE with crowns. *GASP*
Larkhill, I haven't spent anything on spiral knights, yet I've gone 8+ hours a day before. During that time, I ran JK runs nonstop. Since there isn't any deviation at all during boss stratas, I would consider that grinding.
Also; let's say you want trinkets, due to your 4+ weapon 5 star set that no longer needs to be upgraded, or can wait. You can either grind dungeons for 100 tokens each for minimal gains on crown-bought CE, or you could use money-bought CE, or you could hope to get love puppy appearances, which are rare, and if you want true love pendants, that will take extremely long. All of that is achieved easiest through grinding; you can't buy tokens or love puppy appearances (and even if you had connections that allowed you to get love puppy drops as soon as they saw one, true love pendants are still exceedingly rare)
The grind in game is completely optional. There are two extremes to this game, never buying CE and often buying CE, with grey areas in the middle. If you never buy CE, you have to farm up enough crowns to buy your items, matts (assuming you dont get them from drops), recipes, and pay crafting fees. Then once you get to higher levels (3*+) you have to farm up enough crowns to get CE (not extremely easy considering the price of CE right now). This path has a ton of grind as you need to make constant arena runs in order to make enough cash to pay for all of this.
Or you could buy large amounts of CE. This path has little to no grinding. If youre in desperate need of crowns, you can sell CE for a good chunk of crowns, meaning you wont have to farm up crowns to buy items. Because you have CE, you dont have to worry about crafting, and wont need to farm up crowns to buy CE as you bought it with real money. You wouldnt have to worry about how many crowns you have, how much CE you have, etc., but it wouldnt make the game inherently "fun".
Now before somebody takes that out of context as me saying grind=fun, i will clarify. When you have no CE, you are forced to go into the Clockworks and get crowns and the like and actually play the game. However, with a load of CE, you can be 20 minutes into the game and have full 5* gear, thereby skipping most of the game's content. TR skipped most of the grinding by forgoing a real level system, instead you level up gear which is optional, unlike games like Phantasy Star Online which had a tedious grind to level up after around level 100, how people got to level 200 is beyond me.
So does the game have grind? Yes, but to varying degrees. You can either have no CE and a lot of grind, some CE and less grind, or a ton of CE and no grind.
This game has no grinding?
Lies.
It sure does.
But this game makes grinding not look like grinding.
Which is awesome.
~~~
Best post on these forums to date.
Hey buddy, there's grinding now, go get a pet and spend 80 hours in a row trying to feed it, almost as realistic as a real child.
Or, y'know, you could NOT bump a thread from 2011. Just a thought.
Wait... the game has changed since 2011?
Hang on, you what? Something changed? Holy pair of Brute Cores, what have I missed?!
Actually, I have yet to log in for the latest update due to still being on holiday, so there's that to look forward to on Monday...or Tuesday as it'll be when I finally get to step inside my house again.
And on a certain other forum I frequent, necroing/bumping old threads is considered a good thing, so yeah
Dunt lisin to em. Hes words ar ful of propaganda und conzpiracez.
There was grinding before the free elevators. You could run vana on ce or mist from a well with profit leftover.
Naw, this is totes still relevant. Sort of.
Nearo burning Rome
If only the elevator fee was less than 10 Energy, then we would be able to explore more each day......