I can average about 5-5.5k doing non-jelly runs on tier 2, assuming I don't die more than once. The problem isn't that I can't afford to do tier 2 runs, the problem is that getting past tier 2 looks like an increasingly daunting task. When your net profit for 45-90 minutes of effort is 1/15th of a recipe (not factoring in the CE cost of MAKING the recipe), and you're going to need four of the things to pass the tier...

Alternately, you could make 7k off a jelly run, but who wants to do that for the rest of their lives?

I spent 1k on 100 energy

re listed the 100 energy for 4k

Considering my investment tripled its still a gain. I am also one of the rare people who feel it necessary to pay for a game so i have enough CE to craft a second set of 5* gear, and play the game as much as i want until i get bored and give away my CE.

I also dont want people to confuse my stance, i encourage people to stop wasting their money and only put up offers for 3500 per 100 energy and refuse to put any other amount in there. DONT JUST CLICK THE BUTTON TO BUY WHAT ITS AT. go to last tab type in 3500 on the left box and list however may requests you can. it wont be instant but if 50% of people did that the prices would drop.

I prefer a populated community that constantly has new players, especially when/if pvp comes out.

Bmorgan303:

"Greed seems to be the driving factor amongst people selling energy."

Uh... And?

The point to spending actual money on energy is to get in-game value. The more in-game value, the more reason to buy it.

There isn't any other reason to for me to use actual money on energy. I don't do it to be community-spirited, or to renew the economy for everyone, or anything high-minded. If I thought that it actually would be community-spirited or awesome in some wider sense, I might well do it that way. But I don't. I spend cash it to get stuff in the game, including playing time. I'd like to get as much value for my money as possible; you'd like to get as much value for your *time* as possible.

To solve this, we have a market. And, in this market, there are comparatively less people like me than you, meaning I get more of what I want than you do. If anything, from a pure business line, it's good for Three Rings - they spend a little less server time on people that are opposed to giving them money, and their paying players feel like big fat cats.

Now, I *do* think that it would be really good if Three Rings extended out play in general, in some fashion, both for free and for pay. I think it'd also hook in more players, and get more people on the spending side over the long haul, which is good for Three Rings, too!

But snarking at the people who are actually paying for the servers seems a bit of a backward approach.

Here's how I usually spend my energy/crowns every day. Take my 100 Mist Energy and do a T2 run solo. Then sell the mats that I get from that run, usually netting me a good amount of money if I got lucky with material drops. Then, depending on what I need for the day, I'll either buy a recipe and quit for the day, or buy some crystal energy and craft something. If I have any Mist Energy left over, I'll usually do another half a tier, then call it a day.

I realize that people want to play for longer time periods, and I can see these inflating Crystal Energy prices being a problem for those people. But for me personally, and I would assume anyone who has a play style similar to mine, it's not really a big deal. I'm in all 3* gear after less than a week of play, and considering that 5* is as high as I can go, I feel like that's a short time investment.

The only "problem" with the game as of now, in my opinion, is the lack of an Auction House. I feel like it'd be easier for "free" players to earn the crowns they need to purchase Crystal Energy if they had a better means of determining the market value of materials and a better avenue to sell them.

still nope

More Diablo. im sure youre familiar with it.

argument removed due to stupidity

Its daunting for a newbie to log on and see extremely crazy prices. Not so much the relative value of crowns, but if you logged on to Spiral Knights on day one and saw 100CE going for 10,000 crowns as a newbie what would you think? Especially when in your wallet, you have 100 crowns.

Doesn't really convey anything good for new players, especially those who don't know how to farm. Although, on that note it doesn't really affect the veterans.

bmorgan303;

Why would they change the billing of the game?

It's entirely accurate - you can play this game, for free, every day. You can do everything in the game, without a dime down. There's a limit to that offer, as with almost any commercial offer, but the offer itself is real. Content isn't limited with a cutoff of "subscriber-only content", it's just limited with time-in-the-clockworks per day.

That isn't going to become obsolete.

Your ability to earn bonus time with skilled play may be getting the squeeze, that's true! And that's mildly unfortunate, from my own perspective; I *like* the idea that you can get that to some extent. But that was never part of the promise Three Rings made, and it profits them not one bit to support it especially heavily - any support that they give to such playstyles would be an act of almost purest charity, made under threats of endless complaining from people who, for the most part, aren't even their actual customers.

No one has a problem with you disagreeing. What people contest are those that say everyone on the other side of the fence are greedy douches and that Three Rings is falsely advertising the game. Add in several expletives and you get the general summary of this thread.

how the hell do i erase these dumb ass posts i made earlier?

bmorgan303;

For non-playing players, I strongly suspect that SK will slowly become a casual game - play it for an hour or two a day on mist, keep your winnings to buy crystal energy and such, and take a few months for each tier of gear. That's not a bad free game, and I very strongly suspect that's the free experience that Three Rings intended to deliver, and for the most part, *does* deliver to casual players.

You and those like you, able to grind up crowns for energy for added time? I believe that you're an anomaly. Not only that, but I believe you are effectively an *Elite* anomaly. Plenty of forum and wiki time, sure, because you're dedicated. I don't think that the playstyle you're trying to defend was ever actually intended to be there at all.

I'm in the thread, frankly, because from where I am, Three Rings is giving all the free players a gift, each and every day, purely because it's meant to make you happy, incite you into inviting new people to come a try it out, and maybe, just maybe, put down a few bucks (if you can).

But the response they're getting, in this thread, is that many of their most skilled players are instead grousing about how that gift just isn't big enough, or that the non-elites are too greedy with their actual cash. And that kind of stuns me, and makes me want to speak up and go "Uh, guys, what?"

"I don't think that the playstyle you're trying to defend was ever actually intended to be there at all."

I don't think this is true. There is another MMO out there that has a mechanic a lot like this. EVE is P2P, it has a monthly fee; but you can buy game time and import it into the game as an actual tradable item. The in-game currency can be used to purchase game time. If you are dedicated to the game in some way that allows you to make enough money, you can play for free forever. However, someone is paying for your time - just not you. They are paying for you to play the game and make money for them, essentially.

That is exactly what happens in SK. If you are good enough, then you can make enough money on diving to subsidize the cost of your play. Someone else is still paying for your play, but because you are good enough, they are willing to pay your costs to play for them in return for a certain amount of your returns.

This only works if I can sell you CE for a rate comparable to what I might make on my own. There can be a little premium attached - I am paying for your effort as well - but if I can turn my own CE into CR at a rate far beyond what I can get for it on the open market, I will never sell it. Why would I?

In other words, if you're not good enough to turn a decent profit on a run done with CE you bought with crowns, I don't care. It's not my problem. It's not my responsibility to pay you to play the game worse than I can.

"This game is designed to be played casually. But you can't play unless you drop a good chunk of cash (and with every passing day that chunk of necessary cash gets larger), or grind just to be able to play more. Eventually us paying players will stop paying. "

You contradict yourself in the same paragraph.

If the game is designed to be played casually, then why do you need CE at all? What definition of "casual" are you using that people would need to play more than 2 hours a day? Only non-casual players need CE. Casual players dive once a day if that and probably don't even burn off their ME.

Also, that "chunk of necessary cash" does not ever get larger. If you want to play more, you pay the same amount of cash today that you paid two weeks ago. In fact, you're even more wrong in that if you are talking about paying cash to buy items, the rising price of CE means you pay less cash to do so. Since "rising price" only refers to the number of crowns you receive for CE, which, in case you didn't know, goes to the person that sold the CE.

"Who of you will drop hundreds of dollars on this game? Because eventually you will have to, since Crowns are going to be worthless, and all transactions will be in CE, and just like crowns are going up, CE will skyrocket at a totally bullcrap pace. And people who are willing to drop major cash will run the show, while everyone else tries to catch up."
CE will skyrocket... how? In regards to what? CE always costs $.003 per CE. It will never change.

"Many of you need a reality check. Prancing around with all of your bloated bravado and in maybe a month or two, you'll get bored and leave. You'll leave behind you're rhetoric and however much money you eagerly dropped to get ahead within weeks, only to find out you missed 90% of the game and reached the dead-end-lack-of-an-actual-end-game; which is all that's waiting for you."
So if there's no endgame, and it's so repetitive, why is it so important to you to play the game so much?

"Try to argue or pretend to reason if you want. Unless we or Three Rings forces a change I am right, regardless as to who likes it or feels like agreeing."
So... you're right because you say so? Even though your arguments have no basis in fact and are actually just brimming over with wrong?

Protip: if you ever find yourself needing to assert the correctness of your argument with words such as "I'm right regardless of who likes it" or "Even if no one agrees with me I'm right", your argument might have some flaws.

"If only they gave us enough energy every day to play the game casually."

No you don't understand, casual players want to play the game for 8 hours a day and they just CAN'T.

That isn't contradicting myself at all.

You're arguing semantics over what "casual play" defines. Whereas I'm obviously, by the context of my post, referring to casual play as roughly 0-5 hours. Which is the normal play time for any other game, and significantly lower than the casual play time for other MMOs.

The chunk of money will grow larger because CE is the real currency in the game. Crowns eventually become useless and there will be more and more CE floating around which will inflate the prices. The exact same thing that is happening to crowns right now will happen to CE when more and more people reach the end of the game. Instead of paying 3KCE for a philo feather it may jump to 8KCE.

You seemed to have missed the point where I said I was a paying customer.

I think you need to learn to read what people are saying to you, and then take the time to understand what they mean. Because by now I would call you a liar if you said your ass isn't jealous about the crap that's coming out of your mouth.

>One more thing, this game may be casually designed in mind but guess what; the current core gameplay mechanics don't appeal to the casual game market, they appeal to the hardcore gamers. That is why everyone is bitching so much.

No, the game appeals to YOU. YOU are bitching.

>You're arguing semantics over what "casual play" defines. Whereas I'm obviously, by the context of my post, referring to casual play as roughly 0-5 hours. Which is the normal play time for any other game, and significantly lower than the casual play time for other MMOs.

"You're arguing semantics of the definition of this term. Now that I've dismissed your argument as 'semantics' I will argue semantics. I'm obviously using my own definition for 'casual' instead of what most people would use. I define 'casual' as a number that includes how much I would like to play this game for free. Also, I am high as a kite."

>Crowns eventually become useless and there will be more and more CE floating around which will inflate the prices.

Inflate what prices? CE has real money value. It doesn't matter how much CE is floating around, because it always costs the same amount of money. 1 CE is always worth $.003. It's worth $.003 if there is 100 CE in the world or 1 million. Diving down a level always costs 10 CE. Recipes always cost the same. Alchemy prices are always the same.

A well reasoned argument. "Shove it up your ass" is bulletproof.

::::sigh::::

Puts it into perspective doesn't it?

I've seen everything in the game and I haven't paid anything. Does that put it into any kind of perspective?

>Someone dropped 70 USD on this and hasn't (literally) finished the game yet? That's impressively horrifying.

In F2P games this is how it happens. There are a huge number of free players, a smaller number of players that pay some small amount (under $10-20), and then a very small chunk of players that pay huge amounts of money. That is how the business model works. Some people really just want to have the nice stuff in the game and pay a lot of money so that they can have that without wasting hours of their lives.

I think I remember reading the stats for Farmville where their top paying players are in the range of thousands of dollars.

>Puts it in perspective doesn't it?

Yeah, it makes your "contribution" to the game even more worthless.

You aren't even trying to make arguments anymore. Perhaps that's because you are objectively wrong.

>YOU don't count because you got in right when it first started, I said this applies to NEWBIES, people who have joined up in the last 2 weeks and the future.

I got in when it first started. You know, when you couldn't basically buy an entire set of T2 gear for the proceeds from a single T1 run. When you couldn't spend two bucks and get 30K CR. Yeah, newbies are going to have it so hard in the future when people are practically giving away T2 gear because they're just UV hunting and have 50 magic cloaks.

>I am not a newbie either, I have established a good source of energy but probably not as much as yourself.

Obviously you haven't established a good source of energy or you wouldn't be so butthurt about this.

>I have also already stated those that got in right away when it first started, have an EXTREME advantage over someone that just joined today and has to deal with the ridiculous rising prices.

People that have been playing an MMO longer have an advantage over people just starting out. News at 11.

>In that case, I move that anyone with a new unique ID gets discounted energy prices for the first week of their play. Luckily Three Rings can actually track computer IDs and accounts so it's actually viable.

Great idea. Makes perfect sense that I should have to pay more money for the same thing as someone else. 3O should totally charge people less when they're starting out. You know, when they would be most likely to want to spend money on the game. They should also just light money on fire.

CE should always cost the same amount of real money no matter who you are. It doesn't make any sense that my money should be worth less to 3O because I've been playing longer.

>This Anisoperth person just doesn't get it. Ignorant like the rest of them..

If I "just don't get it" and I'm so "ignorant" then please make a reasonable argument that actually makes sense. You can't, so you've resorted to agreeing with anyone who seems to share your point of view, and calling everyone who doesn't stupid or ignorant. Have you noticed that no one has ever changed their point of view to your side in this argument? I've seen at least a few people say "Oh, I get it now, I see why it makes sense to work that way", but I've not seen anyone go "You know what? You're right. Energy costs way too much. I'll start selling my energy for less now."

>OH look at that, you just got in at the beginning to, so guess what you don't count either. Us people that got in at the beginning have it WAY easier then the people who say, join today.

Telling people they "don't count": an excellent way to win people over to your side.

And you're still wrong. 2* materials were incredibly expensive when the game launched, and buying CR with CE was less effective, so you got less money and it went a shorter distance. I had to run t1 for two days AND pay money to get my t2 gear. Now you could probably pay 75 cents and be in t2, if you can't do that with just the starting ME + tank. Once people start trying for UVs on 2* gear the market will be flooded and you'll probably have people just outright giving them away.

Also I have no idea how you keep misspelling my name when it's right there next to my post.