I chose a bad time to start upgrading.

Crap. The highest prices we've ever had were 7.1K, and that went down relatively quickly.

This makes me worry a little more though..

Cheers,

~W

^ lol, people are still going on about that update?

CE at 7000 is an even smaller problem than 5-star crafting cost at 800 energy.

That's not true.

While 800CE for a 5* item is certainly a lot more than it used to be, it's not as bad as CE prices potentially rising too high for anyone to make a profit running through the clockworks.

The former just means more grinding.

The latter means anyone who attempts to grind will lose money.

Well, might not be so bad for higher tier players, but I pity the T1 / T2 guys.

Hasn't it been 10k-8k before?

The cr<->CE exchange rate has not been that high since the game went public. The highest my crafting records show is about 7k on 2011-06-08, but I didn't need to keep perfect records, just accurate enough to make sure I was making a profit. I'm pretty sure it peaked at about 7.3k for short periods of time, not long enough to raise my prices. Note that this would be the bid price for CE, rather than the buy-immediate price which is usually 100-400cr higher.

CE at 7000 is an even smaller problem than 5-star crafting cost at 800 energy.

Raising the number of crowns needed in the 2011-5-17 release would have accomplished the same goal, but would not have caused the exchange rate to go up from ca 4.8kcr to 7kcr. As tazurin points out, 7kcr might not be bad for T3 players and T2 players that can farm the JK, but it makes life pretty hard for new players. A game just isn't as enjoyable when you have to play off of ME, and you don't get to be a T2 player without being a T1 player.

SK is a new game. The new-shiny wore off much quicker than it should have. This game should still be growing in popularity, not slowly shrinking. The people affected the most by the 5-17 release aren't here to complain about it anymore.

that's why u use only ME to do runs. ME is free. CE isn't.

ME being free means that OOO doesn't make any money off people who only use mist. That's bad for OOO. The high CE exchange rate doesn't just hurt new players, it hurts OOO too.

you think it's bad now? just wait till the weekeneds.

and it's greed, not the lack of brains driving up ce prices.

as I said in the other thread.

if i wanted the most gain in the long run,
I would use that $6 to actually create 2 new 'paid' accounts and get 200 ME extra a day to craft for UVs or what ever
rather than spend a lot of time grinding... for.. marginal profits?

give OOO a break, they do anything and people come online and bash them.
they do nothing, and people complain.

I personally would like to see more thank you threads..
there's way more 'SK is doomed' or 'What are you thinking OOO' threads..

everyone (myself included) just shifting blame here and there..
should just play the game and have some fun..

which is what a game is for? isn't it?

7K crowns/100 energy was normal before D-16 Jelly runs got nerfed and the kibosh was put on arena looping. (Either that or there was a lot of complaining about 7K cr/ce prices on the forums.) But then again, the reason these things got nerfed was because they were raising the CE prices.

I still don't want to see the elevator passes go. ):

And no one remembers when CE went over 8k?

That's never happened while the game has been in production, I hear it happened during beta. The current prices are as high as they have ever been since the release. The last peak happened right before OOO released the AH. The AH caused quite a few people to start selling their CE to get crowns to spend there and OOO also released a new CE bundle around then, which increased the supply of CE. Then, a week later, SK showed up on steam, with the horde of new players willing to buy CE to get crowns to get a leap into the meat of the game.

Honestly, I suspect that this peak is much like the last peak. Not enough new players, too many people who can turn a profit running gates and are trying to get their CE with crowns.

The CE prices rose ever since that update in May where for crafting costs for energy rose...

I'm fine with CE prices at whatever they are. We are FREE TO PLAY! It does not matter if we don't get as much play time as paying players. Look at other games, they claim to be free to play yet we only get like two or three levels in those games. In beta CE prices were at 10k, I held up just fine! It just meant playing everyday to spend my mist! Geez you guys takes this so hard! Just play everyday and spend your mist until you get enough crowns... You're lucky you even get the chance to play this game. Without us buying the energy, this game would have never lived! The game started with few staff soooooooooo... poop.

Remember, it was also a LOT easier to farm back then. 100 CE each 10 k wasn't a lot back then.

True, advancement slows even further the higher the exchange rate. But most f2p players are ok with 1-2 hours of fun everyday. No f2p players I know spends CE for elavator fees.

I'm completely F2P. I use CE for elevators all the time. I'm by no means rich, but I have more crowns than I know what to do with. I'm running out of ideas for new toys.

Also Prisega, I'm glad someone on this forum actually knows what the word inflation means. But, I doubt the free passes have put enough crowns into the system in like 2 and a half days to increase CE prices by almost 10 crowns each. I'd suspect it's more speculation of future inflation. Not denying that the passes could cause inflation (which is rarer than most people think), but I have a hard time believing that they've caused this much inflation this quickly.

#1. The ce prices are horridly high for F2P'ers
#2. Inflation i say!
#3. Curse you people who set such high prices for ce!
#4. Im screwed

Just wait for it, hopefully they'll create an update that lets crowns be a bit more useful. Or if by some chance, everyone has the same idea to not buy CE then the price will be forced to go down. If you sell CE at 5.8k you're just taking a loss unless you have enough on you to influence the market, which I highly doubt you do. We just have to be patient like we were before, when the prices were 7-8k. They dropped back to 5k then and they'll drop again now if we just wait. Think of now as a time to gather money so you can crazily spend on the cheaper CE.

I'd like to also testify that CE was never 8,000 crowns. The highest I had ever since before the crown exploit was 6,700 crowns. That was just before the Steam Launch. But yeah, the current price DOES feel prohibitively expensive to me.

My solution? I'm not buying CE with crowns right now. If something is out of your price range, don't buy it. I recently made quite a few crowns from selling some accessories on the AH. Having missed the window to purchase energy low and sell high, I'm just sitting on it.

i checked the price is now 7223 cr

I might just dig into my Christmas savings and finally buy that Battle Pack in a couple weeks. I know that's as far from supporting F2P as it gets, but I would rather give OOO a little money for developing future updates than spend my crowns on overpriced CE.

Meanwhile, all those crowns I'm making with the elevator pass are going into recipes, 5-star materials and accessories. If CE sellers don't want me to give them my crowns so badly, I'll just spend them on shiny new toys.

Personally, I think it's not that big a deal. I think that the energy price is going to go down again after a while. Worse case scenario, it hits 8k and the community over-reacts about it like they always do.
I also think that there should only be one official Crystal Energy price topic, or better yet, make posting a CE price topic a punishable offense, because I'm getting sick and tired of seeing a dozen threads all about this stupid, pointless argument. But hey, that's just my opinion. :D