Energy is fine. The exchange is not too unstable and it doesn't prevent extended play. Stop making threads about energy.

It is a legitimate concern. If not now, then soon.

Just ask what someone who has full 5* gear has to spend their crowns on.

Other than the VERY small crown cost to combine 2* gear in hopes of a nice UV (which will then be upgraded to 5* gear), which is easily replaced by selling the item to other players, these people have NOTHING to spend on. So what else would they do but buy CE that they don't need right now and drive up the prices for everyone? And as they accumulate far more CE than they can ever use, there is no incentive for them (the 5* devoted player, the ones who DID pay real money for CE at one point in time) to spend money on more CE, they already have too much, and get more every day!

As long as those players keep on playing, they will keep on naturally driving up the price on CE until it is at the level that they cannot buy it faster than people are spending RL $$ for it (So either we need less of the 5* geared players, or we need a LOT more of the 1* players with pocketbooks to burn).

Another potential solution of course is a cap on how much CE you can have saved on your knight at a time. This prevents people from hoarding it, and reduces the rate at which CE is purchased in game.

But yes, the ideal longterm solution is to find a way to ensure that crowns are consumed as quickly as CE is consumed.

im going to stop playing if energy continues to be this hard to purchase

You know, as players this kind of thread is a huge issue, but sometimes I wonder:

What do the devs think?
How is this affecting them?

If the price for energy in crowns is increasing, then won't more people just buy CE in real money? Maybe to the devs it seems like a blessing? Maybe they think the playerbase is going to start dropping really soon and then no one will buy anything and they're super concerned and trying to solve the problem.

Just a note, I don't know what the devs are thinking, nor am I trying to make them out as greedy bastards. I am VERY grateful for the game and the chance to voice my opinion as a player on the forums and contribute to the wiki. Thank you, OOO! Anyways,

Hey devs, if you've read any of the forum threads on energy, could you please respond and give us your point of view? How are things looking on your end? Do they need fixing? If so, what solutions are you considering? Can we help in any way?

Throw us a line! What's up, yo?
=p

As the CE exchange price goes up, more people will buy CE and OOO will make more money - up to a point. At some point, though, while more people may buy, those who buy will generally buy less because those who buy CE to sell for crowns will not need to sell as much CE to get the crowns they want.

For a simplistic scenario (very simplistic, only illustrates a point and the real mechanics and numbers are more complex): Let's say 25% of players are willing to spend some money on a video game, and of those 1/5th (5% of total players, let's call them CE sellers) are willing to spend cash for crowns to buy gear so they don't have to spend as much time in the dungeons.

When 100 CE costs 6000 crowns, a 2* recipe costs about 100 CE (accounting for crowns sunk in the exchange), so to reach tier 2, a CE seller would sell about 500 CE. If 100 CE only cost 3000 crowns, that seller would need to sell 1000 CE, so OOO would make twice as much money from that player, so it seems that lower CE exchange rates are good for OOO.

However, when CE is at 3000, maybe only half of the players who would generally be willing to pay actually pay because the others can earn enough to play as much as they want for free. So instead of 25% paying, only 12.5% pay. OOO has lost paying customers because it is too easy to freeload, but because the would-be-payers are playing as much as they'd like to anyway, OOO probably makes about the same amount as if energy costs were high enough to make all potential payers pay.

At a certain point though, energy prices are so high that all potential payers have paid, and the reduced CE selling needed to obtain crowns means that CE sellers need to sell less and there aren't more people buying to offset their reduced selling. At that point, and I don't know where that point is, OOO would lose money compared to what they would make with a lower exchange rate.

There is a sweet spot for an exchange system like this in which you maximize sales of energy. I don't know what that spot is and I'm not sure OOO will know until the game has been running for a while so they can gather more data. I would guess that the sweet spot puts the price of energy somewhere just below what the average player would make on 8-10 dungeon levels. That's the point at which players can play forever, but won't accumulate enough to stockpile energy and drive prices up.

Why do you assume the price of CE should be at a point where T1 and T2 players can do as many runs per night as they like? I don't believe this is intended or desired by the developers.

The CE system seems explicitly designed to promote short sessions of play over a long time instead of long sessions over a short time. This can be circumvented by buying CE with cold, hard cash.

The primary reason I play Spiral Knights is because of the current CE system. I would surely lose interest if they went with a system that allowed infinite, continuous play. I like being competitive without having to quit my job. If anything, I wish it was impossible to use over 100 energy in a day so that I could play at my all-out best in less than an hour and have time to move on to other tasks.

There are plenty of games on the market that offer unlimited play time for free. Why don't you just play one of those instead?