I sell materials at about 10% less than the Auction House, with Short timers to keep the overhead for failed auctions low. I buy CE at five or ten crowns below the lowest offer to buy I see in the trade menu, which gets picked up about 90% of the time; otherwise, I just buy at whatever the going rate is. I do this before I start a run so that the transactions resolve while I'm down in the Clockworks. There's no waiting to speak of. I might add two or three minutes to my Spiral Knights day with this method, and gain/save somewhere between 500 to 1500 crowns, depending on what I brought in.

I have a hideous, snotty flu variant, and am keeping myself away from my work/classmates in the interest of public health. I'm not mentally impaired in any way, and am fully capable of gauging how much extra time I'm playing, thank you very much.

As for new players quitting, the following is a lovely little research paper for download...
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.163.6347&rep=re...
... that talks about EVE Online, that notes (among other things) that a huge number of players only play a handful of times, ever (see section 4, and figs. 7 and 8). MMO retention rates are pretty dismal everywhere, Spiral Knights included. It's completely reasonable that some newbies won't ever become veterans, for whatever reason, including not liking one of the game's core mechanics. For the rest, if they are so bothered by limited Mist that they want to avoid it, it's entirely reasonable for them to look on the Internet, as this is an online game, or (God forbid) ask an older player how to make better money. This is how I and probably most of you started: I liked the game, wanted to play more, found out how, and had the patience to get there.

Ok, you guys, I just have to know. Why are you all getting so defensive about a game mechanic that wouldn't hurt anyone? Are you afraid if people can play more they won't buy your stuff in the AH? Are you getting angry because YOU had to sell stuff to keep your CE up? I can't see any logical reason to stop a free-play mechanic from being introduced and yet there are a bunch of whiners in this thread telling people to MAN UP AND SELL THINGS ALL DAY. What gives? Did I miss the extra clause somewhere in the TOS agreement that states that if players can play longer, everyone gets banned?

We don't want further limitations. All we're asking for is to be able to do something other than stand around at the AH all day while our mist regens. How hard is this to understand?

Herp derp people. Herp derp. It's like no one is reading anything and either yelling at everyone or coming up with complex money-making schemes for OOO.

Free-play mode: Use no mist, but you receive no money/items from Clockworks runs. The End! You can still have fun playing with your friends, but you can't advance. OOO still gets paid, Uncle Moneybags can still sell his CE for eleventy-billion crowns and everyone else can STILL stand around the AH all day. Nothing changes. Except for the fact that when your friend decides he wants to go kill Vanaduke, you don't have to say, "Can't do it. Have to wait 22 hours. :("

and how is this free clockworks you guys thought of suppose to operate? free revives and be able to play alongside with other players?

honest question - who do you think actually buy CEs? sympathetic individuals wanting to contribute to the cause, or players who don't want to be "limited" by daily mist constraints?

john1111, yes, in fact I have. Revives for free-play mode would cost the player a small amount of crowns. Surely everyone has a few hundred crowns floating around. 50 crowns for the first revive, doubling after for each. 100 for the second, 200 for the third, 400 for the fourth, etc.

Why people buy CE is irrelevant since there are no material/money pickups for a free-play mode player. People will still buy CE to extend their play time for real runs.

Why do you want to make this negative and look down on people who want to enjoy the game with their friends instead of having to sync their mist regen times? I'm not gonna ask everyone to go out and buy a watch and synchronize with me. It's stupid.

EDIT: Rawr's idea for dealing with revives is also a good idea, but if it's in a training hall, and only freeplay players can use the Clockworks levels there, you may as well make revives unlimited. This would make for some fun achievements too like "Downward Spiral: Die 99 times in Clockworks Training."

looking down? paying to skip the wait is OOO business model, not a simple game mechanic to punish new players.

by the way, people paying for ce to sell for crowns is why everyone else gets the play for free.

imo, there's already a good balance between those who don't want to wait 22 hrs and buy ce to either play or to sell, and those that CAN wait and do runs off mist and purchase ce.

Just for future reference, TYPING IN ALL CAPS DOESN'T MEAN ANYONE WILL CARE WHAT YOU SAY.

See I can deal with a free to play thing that doesn't pay you. One thing is, is that this needs to be very limited with the content, as to keep people from staying in it all day. Earlier it was suggested this but it pay you, which I disagree with but if it would come with no pay, then yes it is something worth implementing.

Now if you want to suggest this, please post a suggestion. And, do not put please devs read in the title.

I am saying, post something like what you are suggesting in the suggestion part of the forums.

I took out the devs read thing a bit ago, had it there when i first made this thread because i was mad about how the updates they are focusing on are crown sinks.

This sort of contradicts everything you have been saying in here. I know you want something free to play all day, but if they add in more crown sinks into the game it lowers the price of CE, which will make it obviously easier to play all day. And instead of playing some clockwork all day and not making any crowns you could play the actual clockworks and make crowns to advance. Crown sinks is a better way to solve your problem.

...free clockworks takes away server resources from the people that using Mist or CE to run the real clockworks? Thus also costing OOO money.

Don't you think of the company that makes and maintains this cool game?

It's Spiral Knights' business model. The contract is OOO gives you 100 Mist per 22 hours, spend it however you will. If you want more Energy, you will have to work for it in-game, or pay for it. It's patience vs money. Even if you don't pay, your presence forms part of the community, and helps drive the sales of Crystals.

It's how OOO earns the money to pay salaries, server costs and make a profit.

Allow people to play all day long if they want to leads to much increased server load. Then OOO will have to purchase more servers from their provider. Where do you think that money come from?

To continue playing there's already Blast Network. The high cost of the BN items and low Crown cost to enter makes it clear it is intended by OOO to be a crown sink that people play a lot. Low crown cost and more game play to lure people in, high token cost to make sure you have to spend a lot of time in it.

I'm a freeloader myself, never paid a dime for this game. But I respect the stated contract. OOO is fine with it, and I'm fine with it.

Fern, everything takes away "server resources," including game updates that no one pays for directly and the guy standing next to you idling while browsing ArsTechnica. |:

The "server resources" argument is an argument I've seen made by every player defending every pay-to-play model on a free-to-play game I've ever played. Not once have I ever seen a dev for one of these games say: We're having trouble with server loads. You guys don't know what affects server load and what doesn't or even how much the servers can handle because you're not the ones running the servers. The argument is not valid.

@code, i think ive been confused from the start of this thread about a lot of the things i have been hearing about CE prices, like the price of CE supposedly went down when all of the steam players left, making it go from 7k before steam to 3k then back to 6.5k after they left?

So anyway, how does there being less crown because we are spending more crown and having less make CE go down? we will be buying CE a small amount less (due to person that bought a 1 variant ticket and has none left to spend on CE, etc etc) making it go down because there is less competition?

When the steam players joined the price dropped, mainly because a good amount of steam players are also paying players. More CE in the market=lower prices. If there is more crown sinks in the game, the price drops. Because people will have less crowns, and less crowns to spend on CE, which lowers the amount of CE needed, which lowers the price. When the amount of crown sinks is somewhat compatible with the amount CE is needed, the price will eventually stay the same. OOO runs this system in their game Puzzle Pirates, and the price is normally always the same. The difference is that on that game, the crown sinks are far larger. Granted, there is some larger differences in the market in that game because the economy in PP is far more complex than the economy in this game.

And oh uh Green, I have seen servers that you actually had to wait in line to log onto before in the system OOO employs.

I don't think this game has reached a position where the number of players is that massive. If OOO needs more money for their servers, they should consider doing what 90% of free-to-play games do and sell cosmetic items alongside the CE in limited runs.

Seeing as server resource usage has been brought up as an issue with the free clockworks idea, a workaround to that issue:

Because players accessing this free mode effectively cannot update any of their inventory/money/heat data on the server, free play doesn't need to be hosted on the server. Have the game client run the game; use peer to peer connections for free multiplayer. The only connection that needs to be kept is to the server's communication system - mail, chat, announcements, etc - and perhaps a check every so often to confirm the player isn't hacking (not that hacking in a mode that can't affect your server data in any way would really be a problem).

This would reduce the free clockworks to using about as much server resources as idling in Haven, though OOO would need some time to hammer out p2p netcode if they were to make it multiplayer.

As a potential issue, however: SK has a fairly limited amount of content. I started on steam release, and on mist alone I've pretty much seen the entirety of the clockworks. The one map I think I haven't seen is Dark City: Stygian Steeds.

If you make gameplay unlimited, people playing to enjoy the game will reach that point much faster, and OOO aren't releasing new content fast enough to keep them interested past that. Most of my steam friends have ended up quitting the game due to lack of content; one hasn't logged on since he got dauntless delver and another quit after vanaduke started to feel easy.

If you add free play, you'll find the players that play the game for fun will quit soon after they reach T3 - perhaps even earlier. They'll quit when they get bored. Right now, a lot of them probably quit before they reach T3 - a fair number quit before they reach T2.

On the other hand, you have the players that want to reach the endgame - they simply won't bother with free runs after they've done a few, because it's not getting them any closer to their goals. For them, free mode is useless until they have their endgame gear, and then they'll probably wait for new content to use it on after that, rather than play free mode.

Besides all that, I wouldn't use this suggested free mode myself. The one mist run a day takes anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half, and by the end of it I just don't feel like doing another run - even during times when playing on CE is affordable (which right now, outside of T3 runs with no deaths, it usually isn't, or isn't profitable enough to convince me to bother)

Ultimately, I think the best option would be to find a way to balance out removing the elevator costs, for example offering a cr fee if players can't afford to pay using mist - such that running the clockworks on mist energy stays the most profitable, but the price per floor is fixed somewhere players can afford if they don't want to use energy. Something like, if a player can't afford the energy, the elevator would cost 100 * strata. The price of CE would probably settle somewhere a little higher than where it is now, but even T1 players would be able to work towards it as much as they need to. Revival would still cost energy, of course. Basically, removing the use of CE from elevators without entirely destroying the CE market, but not removing CE from anything else. It could be balanced out with removing mist energy from crafting, or more specifically from crafting anything that needs more than 100 energy, which would balance out the reduced amount of CE spent on elevators with an average increased CE spent on crafting

...somebody will probably find something to argue with in that idea, but whatever.

Convincing anyone to say "free elevators are a great idea" is like telling an obese person they can lose 50 pounds in a month.

They will never agree, they will always disbelieve it, and they will always work against it, because god forbid we would have to sacrifice a little bit more time and effort to get there.

So to narrow it down for you there is two people

"Obese" Players- "Oh god, I don't want to work harder, its fine as it is /cry"
And
"Fit" Players "I would love to grind out all day long and have fun doing it yeah! lets do this! /runs-in-place"

So next time someone posts about the elevator Idea, just think are they "Fit" or "Obese"

I LOLed a lot seeing how true this is, enjoy :D