It's easy to see that the cost of CE in Crowns is increasing, and it's easy to see why it would tend to continue to increase. One thing that's troubling is that as more people play the game and access deeper tiers, the value of Crowns drops precipitously as more crowns enter the economy without leaving.

To deal with that problem, most games use some form of economic sink to prevent inflation. Spiral Knights has that in the form of Mineral Bounties, but unfortunately, the incentives for manipulating strata simply aren't worthwhile yet. A good sink would stabilize the Crown-CE exchange rate. Having a stable Crown-CE exchange probably won't dramatically effect the real-money income for Three Rings, but it does make the game economy dramatically more enjoyable and likely will reduce the number of new players discouraged by real-money transactions when CE is expensive-but-reasonable in Crowns.

To that end, I've got a few suggestions to make mineral bounties more appealing:

-- First, implement Guild Items. These would be crafted items, manufactured with 4-5 Star materials, existing tokens, or potentially guild tokens (identical to standard tokens but pool into a communal guild arsenal and have different names). The goal is to require a broad swath of items that are only obtainable from a specific tier (depending on quality of the item being crafted) so that there's a strong incentive for guilds as a whole to invest in manipulating strata themes. Guild items might be, for example, a guild flag, guild name color changes, private guild gateways, private shops, private alchemy machines with a discount, and upgrades to the guild hall.

-- Implement top-tier DROP items that require a specific theme to spawn. Again, the goal is to encourage wealthy players to manipulate strata, both because it's fun and because it's an excellent Crown-sink. Presumably there's plans for more bosses like the Royal Jelly, so I'm sure this suggestion is already under consideration.

-- Implement what I'm calling "Strata-Words," similar to Diablo 2 Runewords. The idea here is that if you can make a gate open with specific chains of strata themes, odds increase for bosses, unique monsters, and special levels. For example, say you make Beast->Fiend->Undead->Construct a "strata-word" and players manage to complete it. As a result, for a limited period of time, there is a strong chance that one of the levels is replaced by a specific bonus level with a boss or unique monster.

I'm guessing that a lot of these suggestions are already being bounced around, developed, or at least considered, but I wanted to get them out there because Spiral Knights is uniquely dependent on it's economy. It's quite possibly the best freemium game I've ever played, and it would be a shame to see runaway inflation be a problem. Thanks for reading!