So you are saying Free-to-play means what it does, because we allow it to be so (I assume by supporting these kind of games or not demanding change). This would also imply that we agree with your idea of what 'Free-to-play' should mean.

Honestly, in my perspective, you are just arguing semantics. As it's been said, Free-to-play game models range all over the place, and many don't even allow non-paying players to even experience the full content. I have no problem with this, and I don't feel like Spiral Knights is committing fraud or advertising their game falsely. If you don't agree with how free-to-play is defined, so be it. However, the industry has a standard and will continue to run with it.

You can create an account for free, you can log in at any time without having to pay, and you can play (and access the full game content) without paying - paying will just allow to you play longer or at any time you may want. To me, this is free-to-play, and I feel the current definition of free-to-play is NOT wrong.

Applause for the first, second, and fourth post above this one (counting from bottom up)

You people are still at it? Let the troll thread die already.

nah, isn't the troll thread the one about raising CE prices?

I shall consume. Consume... consume everything...

I ran through T1 earlier today and came out with enough to turn a profit before the value of materials is considered. No energy-resses though. Also, a brand-new player is going to be starting off with almost 100ME, plus their mist tank.

Having said that, I do kind of wish that it operated on more of an arcade game system where going from level to level is cheap/free, but dying and upgrades are more expensive [well- I don't wish that, but the compensation has to kick in somewhere].

@NegimaSonic

That's the same with any definition. People create language and meanings and associate whatever they want with it. Whatever is the most popular one rules over all. The very words you're reading right now that you understand was also decided by a large number of "you people". Take up further issues with our ancestors.

....it's like you plucked the words directly from my brain. I've been really struggling not to reply to GodofSkype any more, because his entire position seems to be "I don't like that there are nuances to what words and terms mean, and I don't like that you're not liking it either." But you cleared up my most prominent frustrations with him very nicely. Well done.

@GodofSkype1

This game, a free-to-play-but-not-free-for-absolutely-every-little-thing MMO, is what it is. There are many games like it, many with far more restrictions than Spiral Knights in terms of what exactly the "free content" is. Even they, the games that never allow you out of the starter area and never allow you to venture past level 10 .... even they are allowed to brand themselves as "free-to-play," because they freaking ARE. The vast majority of players knows exactly what a free-to-play MMO is (as understood by the mast majority of online gamers), and Spiral Knights falls into that description like a glove, whether you like the fact that the term means what it does (as is understood by .... well, humanity at large) or whether you wish it meant something else.

End of story. Now, the semantics argument that meant nothing and went nowhere is under the rug, you really only have a few things you can do with your inexplicable rage:

1) Pay up.

2) Quit.

3) Continue to play for free as long and as much as you are able.

All three are viable options, and nobody would fault you for opting in for any one of them. The course of action YOU'VE taken (that is to say, shrieking like a banshee about how much you hate the word "free" not technically meaning that you're also welcome to head into Three Rings HQ and exit with all the furniture and computers you can lay your hands on) helps nobody, least of all you.

If I were you, I'd just take option #3. Many people have.

*bows to dukelexon and Leviathan*

Shani, I'd recommend just using Mist for a couple of days until you can access T2. I can't stand in random instanced Haven N without being assaulted by numerous offers to sell wolver gear and cutters for roughly what you made in that T1 run.

Edit: Also, might I add, I'm selling cutters, wolver caps, and haze bombs for 2500 crowns.

At this rate we are going to start LOSING money when buying energy. The price of energy has skyrocketed to 4000+ now. There should be some kind of cap as to how high the price can go. I don't want to have to pay more that 3500 of my crowns for a puny 100 CE. The lest they could do is make the replenish rate something like 1 CE per 5 mins, and make the cap 250 CE instead of 100. Another thing they could do if have mini games or something to help replenish the CE.

At a rate of 4000 crowns for 100CE. A paying player is getting less then 15k crowns per dollar. That is a dollar for a 4* recipe, 3$ for a 5* recipe. That doesn't sound like a very good deal.

Energy now costs 4K+.

wakawaka

@KalmaAmlak

There is one problem with your analogy. Crowns (unlike other currency) do not stay in circulation after they have been spent. This means that the system is not only continuously "creating new money" it is also continuously destroying it.

There are currently plenty of crown sink in the game, mostly in the form of recipe costs, but for the incredibly wealthy there is also gate boosting.

Last week it had a variance of 300 cr from 3100 to 3400 over the course of an hour. It also went back down.

This is over about 48 hours of steady increase. More, if you factor in the fact that it started at around 3.6k this weekend, with fluctuations in the direction of 3.7k (repeatedly pushed back down by some seller or group of sellers).

Pretty sure people stopped selling CE for less than 4k before I went to bed last night, which drove the price up 100 in ~30 minutes. I checked this morning to see if it was a momentary thing that would relax once supply increased, only to find that the top sell prices were at 4200. Silly me.

What it looked like to me last night was energy prices rising because sellers set a price and weren't going to budge on it. Since players still want CE, they'll keep raising their buy prices to try to get the best deal possible while still being under the lowest sell price.

I think there was a period of 20-30 minutes where literally no deals were being made, though, which caused buy price offers to spike by 20-30 crowns.

Overall, the higher the price goes, the higher the price will go. It's a seller's market, because people want CE (either to craft or to grind) and the easiest way for them to get CE is to burn crowns. The sellers are holding most of the cards here, at least until the price becomes unreasonable and people stop being willing to shell out crowns for CE.

if the cost hits roughly what you can make from a T2 run, getting out of T2 without buying your way out is going to get pretty damn hard.
(Yes, I'm aware that I'm a dirty freeloader and thereby should just be grateful and stfu or take out my wallet.)

I think I was expecting slower inflation, though. Having it increase by ~5% in half a day is a bit staggering.

wow... just.. wow

There are not enough crown sinks in this game, so the crown to CE exchange rate will keep rising, my guess is to around 15k-25k per 100CE.

Feynt, you have over looked something in your analysis. There is *ALWAYS* a use for energy, even at the top levels, you need them for gates. So, when people have a few sets of 5* outfits, they really won't have much use for crowns (or materials), other than to pay for energy to run gates. As long as these high-end players make one crown more during a run than they pay for energy, they won't care how high the energy prices go.

Actually, similar things happen at even the T2 level of players. Better equipment is nice, but all the equipment is meaningless if you don't have energy to run gates. If a T2 player makes even a few more crowns on one of their runs than the cost of their energy, well, they will probably stop buying more equipement and just stay at that level until they get tired of the game.

Actually, for many players, the price of energy can come close to being double what you can get on a single run. They will use their free 100CE/day to do one run, then use the crowns they earned yesterday, plus the run today to buy another 100CE, and then they are done for the day. They wouldn't need more CE that day anyway.

Yes, there will be a few more people who choose to pay for CE with RL money rather than crowns, but everything I've read from all the different F2P games, the vast majority of players will never buy with RL, and a small percentage will pay for most of the game. It is unlikely that even 50k crowns per 100CE will change that balance any.

Material costs will continue to drop since people will be doing more and more runs just to get crowns. There are no where near as many material sinks as there are materials collected from each run, and as the crown to CE exchange rate goes up, more people will be trying to sell materials.

The economic balance of this game is really out of whack and depends greatly on a lot more new players coming into the game, than people playing the game long term. People retiring is the only really significant cause of crowns/material sinks.

There needs to be a lot of crown/material sinks for things that are useful, but not critical. Some ideas include: Reviving could have a large crown sink attached. The crown cost of transmuting could be raised a lot. The low end materials in high end items could be raised a lot. Nice equipment could be bought through a vendor (or even crafted) that has no CE sinks, but game could have the equipment dust after a certain number of days and/or levels. Extra weapon/token slots could be bought with a few hour timespan using lots of crowns. The gate construction boosts would work by lowering the payouts for all other minerals rather than raising the payouts for one (making it a crown sink rather than a crown transfer). Have a vendor that sells tokens for crowns and/or a (large) number of materials. Sell health tablets that you can carry around that cost a lot of crowns/materials (even expensive ones would be bought for "insurance" and people would use them more than they admit.) There are lots of other things that OOO could do, but the point is that there needs to be long term reasons why people would want to buy crowns with CE.

unfortunately WRS all those suggest would only make the problem worse once the T2 babies made it to T3 or strive to get to that point...

Wow! 4.2k for 100CE already? Maybe it is a "sign" for me to stop playing this game and find something better to do after my mist energy is all gone. =(

It's at about 4.5 now. Jelly king is starting to offer very marginal profits, pure crown gain-wise

Might I suggest something? Everyone seems to think that unless you buy energy with real money then you have no control over its worth. I personally think 3000 is fair price for energy, so if very few people bid over that then we may have a chance to stabilize the price. If enough people bid 3000 crowns and only 3000 then we may be able to set 3000 as the norm.

I think its worth a shot so if you feel like pitching in then don't buy energy for any other price then 3000 crowns. In may take a little bit for people to start selling at that price, so hold strong and don't give in before they do.

The thing is, the higher the price gets, the higher people will set it. Repeat until people stop playing for a week because getting 200 energy to craft an item is a bloody marathon.