Spiral Knights - Increase Shadow Lair Profit

Increase Shadow Lair Profit

5 replies [Last post]

Tue, 01/10/2012 - 08:24

Kalaina-Elderfall

I suggest the following things to make Shadow Lairs more profitable (i.e. worth running for any reason other than crafting Shadow Lair gear):

1) Remove heat drops from them entirely. The vast majority of the people running a Shadow Lair aren't going to be using the effort to heat gear. Replace these drops with crowns.
2) Double the crown earnings. Replacing heat with crowns may accomplish this already, but crown drops will probably need to be further increased anyway.
3) Increase the chance of gear drops from treasure boxes significantly (to average 1 drop per run).

The reason Shadow Lairs aren't worth doing on a regular basis is because you have to do Shadow Lairs in order to get the reward from them (or pay an exorbitant 4k CE unbind fee on shadow gear). And the crown earnings are meh. There's really no incentive to do them. Increase the earnings so that they're at least on par with FSC and perhaps slightly better and people will be more inclined to do them on a regular basis (and buy more keys).

Tue, 01/10/2012 - 09:02

Blue-Phaze

+1 I haven't been to the

+1
I haven't been to the Shadow Lairs yet, but from what I read on these forums, this might solve the problem in a simple way.

Tue, 01/10/2012 - 09:11

Kalaina-Elderfall

I want to add that I do like

I want to add that I do like idea of Shadow Keys as a high-risk high-reward feature for endgame play. I don't think Shadow Lairs should be free like a lot of people want. But the thing that's lacking is the high-reward aspect of it. I'm willing to run them purely for entertainment value, but the amount of energy I spend on revs on what I feel is a half-decent run (70 energy for three revs) pretty much directly counteracts the amount of crowns earned, and then the "rare material" I get at the end pretty much directly counteracts my portion of the cost of the key, leaving me with no gains and no losses over the course of the run. It's a lot of fun, but eh.

If you win a Shadow Lair without reviving too much, you should be rewarded accordingly. High-risk, high-reward endgame, is there anything wrong with that?

Tue, 01/10/2012 - 09:20

Asukalan

Yea, just what OOO will do

Yea, just what OOO will do WITH LOVE. Force more ppl to pay for CE and use shadow keys to do SL with new prizes.

This would drag out attention from LACK OF ACTUAL NEW CONTENT.

NO, im against, since this will make OOO even more lazy.

Tue, 01/10/2012 - 19:06

Antistone

Cause and Effect

It occurs to me that the shadow lair crafting materials selling for just enough to cover your expenses is probably not a coincidence. Those materials can only be used by players that are capable of finishing a shadow lair themselves, and most of the recipes aren't enormously popular, so I imagine most of the buyers are just trying to save themselves the expense of an extra shadow lair run.

Thus, if you could make a profit running a shadow lair, I'd guess that players would grind them until the market price of those materials dropped enough that it was no longer profitable. In order for shadow lairs to be profitable long-term, they'd probably need to pay for the shadow keys and energy costs purely from common drops, without taking the shadow materials into account (or at least not valuing them much more than boss rewards or other 5* materials).

And really, I'm not sure shadow lairs should be profitable. Right now, they give a unique reward, so players have a reason to do them a little bit and then stop. If farming them gave better returns than other areas, then a lot of players would be farming them non-stop, which would detract from their specialness and increase the wealth disparity between top-end players and others. (In fact, if the endgame players start earning more crowns/energy, it's quite plausible it will drive CE prices up and make it even harder for anyone else to earn a profit running the clockworks on CE.)

I'd actually like to see crown payouts across different levels made more equal, not more disparate. It's really fairly boring and frustrating that FSC is the only worthwhile destination in tier 3 because everything else gives dramatically smaller payouts. We aren't fully utilizing the content that we already have, because there's no incentive to visit a lot of it.

Of course, I've been blowing that trumpet for months without effect.

Tue, 01/10/2012 - 21:42

Kalaina-Elderfall

I'm not advocating for Shadow

I'm not advocating for Shadow Lairs being far and away more profitable than FSC to the point where nobody runs FSC. Shadow Lairs are tough, and after learning the ropes on them they're still tough. You can't PUG them and you can't go in with less than four knights, so it's logistically pretty difficult to set up a Shadow Lair run because there just aren't many players that you'd feel comfortable running them with (I often underestimate many of my friends). I don't think people would be able to farm them nonstop (or even want to).

But on the rare occasion that you do have a great team of four that can run through the Shadow Lairs without spending a ton of CE on reviving, what do you do? You organize an FSC party or run something else for fun. At least regular Clockworking earns you some money (with elevator pass and/or an arena or two), whereas the Shadow Lairs just don't, really.

But you should make some money off them if you don't revive at all. It should at least be comparable to FSC, since it takes longer, is higher-risk, requires party logistics, and is just nails-to-the-wall harder than anything else in the game. But I earn a lot more crowns on an FSC run, revives or not. If anything, FSC is too profitable.

Maybe this is just because I'm a gunner and have absolutely nothing to gain from Shadow Lairs at all other than entertainment (and a lot to lose), but it really is a huge disappointment and the risk is just too high for me to really ever want to run them.

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Increase Shadow Lair Profit