The only compromise i see that's beneficial for both players and OOO is to sell the Shadow Keys in a vendor with the price of 750 CE? Why? Because the shadow lair is intended for 5* players, and getting 750 CE at that level is way too simple.

dont get me wrong when i say this but u are looking at this at a very stupid persons point of view
when the spiral knights game launched energy war 4400 the craft was 500 and items were unbound after crafting
right before you could get a TF2 hat for SK they changed it raised it hoping more players would come and they thought it was fair cause they were new thew knew no better
if you ask the older players that they are quite fed up with SK devs doing this to them (or atleast the ones ive known) that they liked sk till steamers came in with alot of money and shoved it in SKs face and made it greed consumed game that every thing now relies on whom has the biggest waistable paycheck so they and only they get access to new in-game content cause that all OOO wants is money and they are willing to tease the hard working class (F2P players) with goodies then give it to the wealthy class (P2P players)
so they dont want every thing cheaper they want every thing obtainable w/o spending half their paycheck to OOO

"dont get me wrong when i say this but u are looking at this at a very stupid persons point of view"

Well, I don't think I've gotten you wrong; you're very clearly saying that my viewpoint is stupid. ;)

"if you ask the older players that they are quite fed up with SK devs doing this to them (or atleast the ones ive known) that they liked sk till steamers came in with alot of money and shoved it in SKs face"

When Steam came to Spiral Knights, I'd already been playing SK for nearly two months. The influx of Steam players did not ruin my enjoyment in any way. I know only a few people who spend a lot of money on SK, but for what it's worth none of them use Steam.

"so they dont want every thing cheaper they want every thing obtainable w/o spending half their paycheck to OOO"

So...they don't want everything to be cheaper, but they want it to cost less? Are you sure I'm the stupid one here?

yes you did manage to get me wrong what i was saying dont take offence to this which apperently you did i never called you stupid i said that what you said was stupid and they dont have to make something cost less to make it obtainable for instance

1. iron boxes are plain openable w/o need of over priced key
2. shadow lairs that dont cost 100k~ to get into

ohh and the stupid ones?
kryptix & Ccrusader
why?
cause they lickin the gritof OOO hiked up gurnads

Hmm. Help me understand something here:

"they dont have to make something cost less to make it obtainable for instance [...] iron boxes are plain openable w/o need of over priced key"

Making it openable without a key makes it cost less. I'm not quite sure how it could be otherwise. Please explain.

There are other examples, but let's leave it there. My point is that most people arguing for "fair" treatment don't even attempt to justify where they set "fair". The truth is that they just want everything cheaper than it is now.

The standard way for determining prices is to let the market decide. You collect preliminary data on demand, set a preliminary price, collect data on sales, and adjust accordingly. This is exactly what Three Rings is doing. Simply vote with your time and money; they'll get the message.

There's actually quite a few posts of people justifying where the line is drawn for a "fair" price.

It's not as though Three Rings has made something completely new and innovative, there is a wealth of data already in existance of what a "fair" price is for the type of service they are providing. Current estimates have the cost of finding a Shadow Key at around $75, which will get you and three buddies around one to two hours of playing the new content, not including costs of using lifts, rezzing, and crafting the gear that is the ultimate goal of the Shadow Lairs. For that $75, you and three buddies could also play any subscription based MMO for an entire month. Or in the case of other F2P games, like Dungeons and Dragons Online for example, you and three buddies can each buy an adventure pack, for the same price, and have permanent access to that content, with some change leftover for getting anything else that strikes your fancy.

Those of us railing against Three Rings for the cost of playing this update aren't doing so without just cause. The cost associated with the new Shadow Lairs is so high that the only people buying into it are people Three Rings has so business selling to. So I look at Three Rings with the same contempt I would someone setting up a bar next to an AA meeting, or peddling drugs in front of a rehab clinic.

And totally didn't realize I did yet another wall of text...

~Gwen

@Gwen: Another thing people aren't realizing is that its less damaging to start high, and then lower the price to equilibrium. Case in point.... even with the keys costing 750CE, we STILL ended up with a metric butt ton of cheap accessories clogging up the AH without buyers. Had the keys been cheaper, the saturation would be even higher, and some accessories becoming almost worthless. By then raising the price to slow the flood would be far too late to prevent the damage, and would take weeks, or even months for the supplies to dwindle back into projected amounts. Not to mention the backlash involved. Remember the mod cal uproar, and how OOO was ruining PvP even more? You forgot about it, didn't you...

The same thing with shadow keys and shadow armors. The levels themselves don't give any other type of reward... that should be a clear sign of the intended goal of the whole project. If the levels were too easily accessible, anyone with the proper clearance could just grind the area until they obtain what they want. The cost of entry and high difficulty scale almost forces players to gather a group of highly practiced, highly adaptive friends to reach the goal at the end of the run. As people gain experience in the areas, the runs themselves become much more manageable, and eventually it won't be considered much more difficult then Firestorm runs... just a smaller margin of error.

Part of the problem is that despite the supposed "universal protest" of the shadow keys, people are still going after them in full force. This is bad for the argument against it, since apparently the cost of entry isn't high enough to keep people from trying anyway. I also heard that the first guys that got the armor were strong proponents against the high cost of getting the shadow keys. If that isn't hypocrisy, I'm not sure what it.

I was talking silver in general. Since no one has a clear idea of how rare shadow keys are, a lot of the prices are speculation on the odds.

At this point, there are basically three groups of players: paying for Shadow Lairs, outraged at Shadow Lairs, and don't care about Shadow Lairs.

Starlinvf, I also wonder how big the paying group is, relative to the outraged group. Certainly the latter is louder, but that's not data. As far as Silver Key to Shadow Key rate, the thread on that suggests that Shadow Keys show up in maybe 2% of Lockboxes. So you expect to require 50 attempts, or 750 * 50 = 37500 energy. Even if we're off by a factor of 5 on the success rate, we're talking about pretty astounding amounts to spend on a single expedition.

Tantarian, I suspect that Three Rings has thought about how to keep players playing. It's unlikely that they would spend four years making this game, only to deliberately run it into the ground six months after launch.

Tantarian, you are not alone in your views. I've heard them expressed dozens of times on these forums. Here's why I'm not convinced that you're right.

You and I and these other players play Spiral Knights, and read the release notes, and talk to people in Haven, and chatter away on the forums. We think that we have the pulse of the community. But there's no way we can really be sure. Maybe there really is a big class of players out there who can and do shell out huge money each time a new feature is added. Or maybe there's a small class, who shells out in the first week of a new feature, and not after that. We don't know. You and I just don't have detailed, statistically valid information about the playing and spending on SK.

On the other hand, Three Rings undoubtedly does have detailed, statistically valid information about the playing and spending on SK. And TR is motivated to keep this game running. And the people at TR are not just money-grubbing; they probably really care about this game. And they think about it many hours per day, and they've read books on game design, marketing, social psychology, etc. And their investors are looking over their shoulders.

Three Rings isn't perfect, but I suspect that these huge, weird updates are being calculated very carefully, using data that only TR has.