I have been playing Spiral Knights for the last month or so, and have about 11 days worth of playtime clocked on my account (short or long, you decide). I found the game enjoyable and I even have a starter pack on my account. I have found the recent major updates like PvP and the Gremlin NPCs to be valuable additions to the game, and I applaud and thank the developers and support staff for their efforts in making a unique and fun game.

I do however, have some opinions and suggestions that I think will improve the game experience, and it is a pretty lengthy message so I would like to thank the reader in advance for taking the time to read it fully.

This issue has come up very often, and that is lag. Many have proposed solutions to solve this issue, and I have thought of one as well.

I live in Singapore, and thus I have a natural latency due to the distance between my location and the USA based servers of the game. As much as I have enjoyed the game, never has there been a moment that passed while playing that I have not noticed this latency. I have learnt to adapt a little bit to it, like blocking seconds before the monsters attack animation. In several situations though, it can be very frustrating even while doing my best to work around it. While this issue is certainly not the fault of the developers, I have a suggestion that I hope can reduce this latency issue to a certain extent. I understand that such distance latencies are the player's fault and I also understand that it can never be resolved fully (short of moving to the USA).

My suggestions are as follows:

#1

The game shows each player their current latency in numerical digits, instead of being represented by bars at the top right hand corner of the screen.

With this numerical latency data, the game/server knows how much latency each player has, and using that data, the server sends out a notification before a monster attacks that is equal to the latency of the player to counteract or compensate for his latency. For example, if a player has 300ms of latency, then 300ms before a monster attacks, it will maybe flash red, warning the player that the monster is about to strike.

I understand that this may or may not be a monumental task as I admit, I have no knowledge of game programming. If it is too difficult to implement on the entire game (I can see certain difficulties in using this system on ranged attack monsters), then perhaps on stage obstacles like spikes/traps where the timings and locations are more predictable and consistent. It would still be a tremendous help to be able to know perfectly when it is safe to cross traps.

If that fails as well, then I hope you can look into ideas already mentioned before like making obstacles or blocking client sided, thus taking network latency out of the equation.

I do not know how many non-US players are playing this game, nor the exact number of people that are suffering from this distance lag (everyone suffers from it so im referring to those badly affected by it), but I would think it is a sizable amount and perhaps this system could benefit these players such as myself.

#2
Include tabs into the Auction House, allowing one to view multiple pages of the AH without having to retype searches. Perhaps even allow the player to save or "pin" such tabs so that every time he/she loads the AH, the searches are displayed automatically.

#3
The ability to remap the keys for picking items and reviving dead allies. The attack/pickup/revive keys are on the same (action) button. This has often led to some frustrations when fighting near a pickable item such as a key, or a fallen ally.

#4
A chat window for trades between 2 players, allowing them to converse with each other directly instead of having to talk in the normal chat bar

#5
Improved chat system, via chat mode selection. Currently you have to keep typing /g for guild, /tell and subsequently R to reply, /trade before each message to send it to the respective chat mode. This is personally, a very tedious process. Taking a leaf out of MapleStory, while that game has some convtroversial game designs, I think they nailed the chat system perfectly. You can select to be in guild chat mode, Whisper (tell) mode, Friends only mode, etc. Such a system only requires you to select the mode once beforehand, and allows you to type freely in that mode continuously. This takes out the accidental typing to wrong recipient problems heavily in my opinion. (Especially so when pressing R to reply to 2 different people PMing you at the same time)

Another part of the chat system that I think can be improved is the scrolling of the chat box. Currently you can only scroll up a click at a time on the arrow, holding mouse does not work and there is a lack of a scroll bar, making backtracing of chat logs extremely difficult and tedious.

Again, I thank you for your time in reading this message, and my apologies if the above ideas have been suggested before.