People could always just offer crafting services, and ask for small energy tips.

Might as well help people get items while you sit around doing nothing.

Sure, people may complain about the daily 100 energy now, but as they play, they can purchase more energy with crowns. As they go deeper in the Clockworks, they may be able to acquire enough money to keep purchasing more frequently. The only counter-production of that is that with the energy market being user-ran, the price for crystal energy will keep rising and rising where it will be nearly impossible to buy energy with Crowns and, instead, must use Dollars/Pounds/et cetera.

If the 100NRG per day is supposed to help lower addicts, the designers were wrong. Addicts would keep playing, buying energy when possible.

The funny thing about posts of that nature, the ones that insist that energy regeneration be sped up, is the seemingly total and utter innocence about the fact that the game is INTENDED to be limited, because the game needs to eventually make a real-life profit for those who funded and created it.

For someone to say "Well, you have nothing to do after energy runs out, so WTF?" ..... hahaha, it's just a golden moment of naivete, haha. You're not SUPPOSED to have anything to do! That moment when you run out of energy, that's supposed to be your decision point. Quit for now, come back tomorrow? Pay a huge chunk of your hard-earned crowns? Or open the wallet?

You're meant to have some incentive to lay down a couple bucks, or you're supposed to be clever enough to play the crystal energy market to the point that it becomes interesting for the paying customers to make a hefty crown profit, and it becomes possible for you to play perpetually without any investment of real-world dollars.

Perpetual play was not intended for the casual free player in this particular MMO. As with the vast majority of free MMOs, the "free" option comes with limitations. In this particular game, the amount of time you can effectively play for free per day is the limit. In other games, it's the areas you can visit. In still others, it's the level you can obtain. In yet others, a "free" label could mean something as simple as a simple trial area. There are a solid few that let you experience quite a bit of the game totally for free, and simply have a for-pay item shop .... yet they are in the minority, and their business models almost universally evolve to a point where it becomes nigh on impossible to truly progress to the game's highest tiers without paying something.

In Spiral Knights, you can actually see every last bit of content as a free player; just not as quickly as you might have otherwise.