Hi, I'm new to Spiral Knights.
I just joined a couple days ago, and I've already purchased some CE in light of the game limiting everything you can do daily because of energy.
Which is pretty much how Pockie Ninja operated. I bring up Pockie Ninja because that was one of the games I was playing before I found Spiral Knights and I noticed a lot of the same mechanics shared in the business model between the two games.

They both have an IRL currency that you can pay to obtain with real cash, or you can obtain it through hardwork in the game itself.

They both limit your actions per day through the means of an "energy bar/movement bar" but you can increase this by spending money on the game for CE, and using CE to increase your energy. Or, if you've played for a while and can grind hard enough ( or manipulate Auction House markets ) for more crowns that allow you to pay for more energy and still turn a profit.

What I do want to make suggestions about, pretty much relates to CE and energy costs in the game :

1. Tier 1 Dungeons do not allow you to accumulate enough crowns to pay for the CE to get energy to do more runs. Which most likely directly influences purchases of CE, and I presume that is the plan. However, it's off-putting to be forced into buying CE, or waiting an entire day for another half hour worth the gameplay. So I would like to suggest a 20% decrease in energy costs for Tier 1 Dungeon's. Even then, they're still not going to make any big profit off of the runs, but they can choose to sink their crowns back into energy to keep having fun and playing throughout the day instead of merely finding another source of entertainment elsewhere for the next 24 hours. It'll still encourage spending money on CE, but not cornering players into feeling as though they're required to do so to enjoy the game. You can increase token costs on items to accommodate a new model for players doing more dungeons daily.

2. A ) I know the unbinding/variant NPC's are new as they were just implemented. But, I would like you to reconsider the unbinding costs first. In my opinion this NPC will not be used by anyone, ever. Why? Because the costs are so extraordinarily high on CE, that you would be spending money just to spend money. It would be more cost-effective to just keep the item you want to unbind and save up to buy another item altogether. It's 600 CE to unbind a 3-star item. That's roughly 36k crowns. You might want to look at the prices of 3-star items in the Auction House and compare that to how much return they'll receive on paying out that 36k to unbind it. Mine was 19k crowns, and I'd like SEGA to rationalize my spending of 36k to unbind that item and sell back for a loss of 17k crowns instead of keeping the item at a 2k loss.

B ) Variant prices are pretty high as well. Now, I don't want to address the 2/3 UV mods as they should be very expensive because they should only be used for end-game content to get the best of the best. But what I would like to talk about is the standard single UV costs. I do believe that these, like unbinding, should scale with star-ratings on items so they are more cost effective ways of helping players on all levels of the game. I haven't used it yet, but I do believe it randomly generates UV's for your item. And at 15k a pop, I can't think of many, if any, items that would be worth spending that many crowns on to get a single UV. Players could use this 10 times and still not get a worthy UV to increase the price enough to be cost effective, especially now that we have 2/3 UV's instead of only one, making a single UV modded item pretty much a relic.

3. If you need another source of revenue, make an item mall with aesthetic costumes and pets. Pets don't have to do anything but look good and maybe have some quirky emotes they do to attract attention. Make a third currency that is only obtained from spending real money and can't be traded with for crowns just for the item mall. A lot of companies use this idea, because it works. People will pay for things that give them nothing more than a spiffier looking character. People love to stand around looking sexy in front of their peers.

Edit : Would it be very difficult to put a Preview function in the Auction House as well? Don't know if that'd be harder than standard NPC vendors.

Anyway, there's my two cents.
I love the game, I'm just at odds with not being able to play it very much each day because of this business model.

Thanks to all who took the time to read through the wall of text.
I'd appreciate any constructive criticism for mending any rash points I've made from what I've seen so far.