Change your Height and Eyes!
With the new knight creation interface's release, we will also be releasing a means for existing players to change their knight's height and eyes through the use of special items.
...
Really starting to look like robots or cyborgs here.

Changing height and eyes will cost two thousand CE.

also does this mean we'll be going back to the rescue camp?

EDIT: Also I call dibs on overly caffeinated dot eyes.
Or the pill eyes.

An attack on the rescue camp? Bloody hell Nick, I'm going to have to wear a tin foil hat to keep you from stealing any more ideas I get with your mind beam.

If anything, this is going to force me to move up my schedule to release, whether the art is ready or not.

Height lol, that's new to me in an mmo for characters that look identical. Nick must be a brony tho because I love bronies! I knew I used to stalk him for a reason!

The great Mr.Popovich: "Ever since the Game Boy was released I’ve been fascinated with the concept of a world you could carry around in your pocket. Handheld rpgs really work for me on that level. I ride a train to work every day and it has been great fun exploring every nook of the world Level 5 created."

If SK ever goes portable for like iPad or so on, oh you knooowww I'd so get an iPad myself just to play Spiral Knights on the go. (also just noticed the name of the website was nickpopovich.com lol) ☺☻☺

Nick's like the big brother we'd always wanted when we were little.

New player stuff, new player stuff, cosmetic stuff (probably CE), and balance. Well hopefully there will be some new stuff for slingers, [rage]LIKE A @#$% PIERCING ANTIGUA LINE OR SHADOW LAIR SET[/rage].

Oh well, I still have to work on the shadow lairs and my gears sets in the meantime. Thanks for the update Nick!

EDIT - @Above's #1
Exactly...

I just hope that height means height, and not just scaling.

Thank you, Nick, for the confirmation. I'd love to see some more customization options. :) I'm looking forward to this update!

Why can't my knight be chubby? :C I would dress him like Santa for this December and give all the good little noobs and nooblets nothing. :D

Get SK on tablet somehow. Adapt or extinct.

Mayb it's a new gun! A rocket launcher that does epic damage & does Area of Effect! You can shoot it every 5 seconds tho, one shot at a time. Goes with the rocket hammer lol.

The part where it says that existing players have to use "special items" to change height and eyes kinda irks me. If they're adding something like that and we never had the option before, shouldn't we get to change that stuff at least once before (possibly) having to pay for it? Feels sort of like an insurance company to me where the new customers get all the promos and deals whereas the older, more loyal customers miss out. I realize it's only one thing (and a cosmetic change at that) and that everybody gets the actual promos, but it just seems principally wrong to me. Excited about all the other stuff, though! Just hope the height and eyes aren't going to be 50k like the personal colors.

it better not, or else...someone could get....PUNCHED!

Well, if the boss will relate to some future content as Nick stated, I am all for this "new rescue camp boss" and fine with a rescue camp revamp, but that's just me.

is that it will be a large crown sink (50-25k) for eyes and height; Some sort of 'potion' to do it, and that existing players may get a free sample through the mail.

I like we get a nice 'April Development Summary'.

1.new villain?am i the only one hoping that it'll be some kind of demented creature that stalks and kidnaps little recruits and performs many horrible experiments on them???

2.as for the "special" items that we'll be able to use to change our height and eyes,please give all currently existing knights who've never had that option be able to have the chance to use those features for free just once before making it available only by crown or ce (preferably crown) payment.PLEASE????(because id love to be a giant)

3.new item balances?YES!new items?i feel that this video expresses how i feel about this well enough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ALsvU50wQ

can you just...not nerf mai flourish? D:

I have a feeling height is totally going to be unrelated to width just because of the problems you would encounter such as hitboxes. Just the size of your legs and such is what I am predicting.

Why Nerf Hammers? Don't "Fix" what isn't Broken.

Before I start criticizing this and hating on this, thank you for making the game. I appreciate all of the effort (especially the fact that you read/liked Ironskull's idea about knight customization!), and Ian is my hero.

The new rescue camp mission:
From what I've noticed, spiral knights has a retention problem. It doesn't have enough new content to hold older players, and newer players are turned off by the energy system rather quickly. The idea that they must buy energy makes the game seem rather pay to win. They leave before the give it a chance. The developers need new players to NOT quit because of this, so that the population of players will rise. From what I can tell, the developers are trying to make more content aimed at them. First with the early missions and free UV'd gear, and now with.. more missions.

This is wonderful, and I admire them for trying, but from what I can tell, this is rather ineffective for a couple reasons. The new players that aren't staying leave mostly because of the negative looking energy system which doesn't even pay for itself in tier 1. The second reason being that newer player's being retained is an almost all or miss type of thing- Of all of the people I invited to earn a steam knight mask almost twice over, only 3-4 of them stayed for a month or two. Of those 3-4, all left, and only 1 bought energy. Of course, I wanted to know why they all left as they were my friends after all. Of the 3-4 that stayed, one didn't like the controls and it gave him wrist strain, and the others left because their friends didn't play. Of the other 20-30 knights that left, almost all said that they didn't like the energy system.

Its kind of a catch-22. If the game is to be successful. It NEEDS, and I mean ABSOLUTELY MUST do something about the energy system. I'm not saying that it must be removed, or that it must be changed too dramatically, but there are several main things wrong with it, and I'll list them with bullet points so that my post will look legit.
-It prevents players from playing indefinitely in tier one. Getting rid of this would REALLY help newer players, and would make the game feel a lot more honest.
-It creates pay to win situations everywhere. Got CE? You can revive instantly! This is in every arcade in the world except the biggest and best one in the world- the internet. And that's where we're competing.
-It is necessary for the game to run. Not a single piece of gear can be made without energy, nor does a single feature of the game exclude it entirely. It is in our faces, like an advertisement.

Now for the other part of this, with more legit bullet points-
-OOO needs money to run... and if they don't get it, no more content at all.
-CE gets them enough money off of a much smaller player base, and keeps the game "F2P".
-Players whom bought CE wouldn't be happy if its demand/usefulness was reduced. They'd be lost if a change was made, resulting in an immediate loss in paying customers rather than an immediate loss in free players.
-Change is risky. Big time.

All in all, I don't see it getting changed any time soon. But think of the potential!

Incredible amounts of customization!
This sounds great, except as one of my favorite forum goers once said- "JIM-DALE IS NO BLIND MAN IN THIS HALL OF MIRRORS!"

And another quote:
"existing players to change their knight's height and eyes through the use of special items. "-Nick

Thats right. Existing players will need a special item. Now, there are two ways I can see this going over-
-Existing players are shipped a bound item that lets them choose their height/weight/gender/everything.
and
-Existing players must buy the items themselves, or face the consequences of forever being as they made themselves.

I'm not certain at all what to expect, except that it may very well be the second one. And that would make quite a few people angry. And I don't know how many more OOO can afford to lose. Other than that, +1

More items!
I'm going to predict the following with another legit looking listing:
-5* for winmillion, and more changes for that.
-Iron slug will get a buff, probably to its damage and/or charge attack.
-Blast bombs other than nitronome will cease to be worthless. Or will be less worthless.
-Ionized salt bomb will have its charge time reduced and will be made shadow. Or will have some kind of change made.
-Sudaruska MIGHT receive another buff, to its damage, so that it does equal damage to GF/DA. Triglav may follow.

We have secret stuff too that we're developing, like pillow forts for the office!
I'm hoping that this will end up being guild hall updates, and more enemies. Please more enemies. Even if they are just teensy gremlins that live in dog houses. Those and the battle pods made my week! And then seeing the awesome gremlins made me sad again... they saved all the good stuff for one pay to play mission. More monsters, especially beasts, that are findable in random levels, and missions, etc. That'd make me a very happy Fehzor.

Btw, if this is too long just don't read it. No tl;dr for you!

They did put the extra rescue camp rewards in AH at a decent price
They did give the azure crests tot hsoe that bugged out and got 2 vanguards
They do make elevators cost half if they make an unexpected restart
They did came when a zombie dropped mats outside of map in FSC and paid me :P

Yes, they also made mistakes, but they are not 100% evil. There is hope.

Yeah, they're only 99% evil, not 100% at all. But they're freaking awesome, I'd say! The anniversary bug that made the players get stuck made me laugh hard.

I'm wondering how badly height changes will mutilate our armour; stretching along one axis never looks pretty. If it's not just height altering but scale instead, that's just gonna throw off player hitboxes. LD will be even more bewildering if that comes to pass. Either option leads to disaster. Should be hilarious.

I echo others want for these new aesthetic changes to have a one-off freebie for current users. When colour changing was implemented, everyone chose their colour once already; at the character creation screen. As such, at least making everyone pay right off the bat made plenty of sense. This, however, will not have ever been available to the current base. There was no decision on our part to our current eye/height configuration; it was just the only thing available at the time. Forcing us to pay now would be a bit dickish. I suspect you're reworking the creation interface in anticipation of this and will do away with colour changing modules. Rather, you'll allow us to open this new menu, make our changes, then pay on confirmation depending on what all we changed. All we'd need then is some kind of existing player boolean switch to make freebies possible.

Eh, I'll create an alt to play through the new tutorial. I assume it's not gonna be released to older users after all. As long as we're not missing out on any swag, I see no reason why others could not do what I'm gonna.

Dunno what balances are in store. New items are interesting though. I'd immediately assume a boss is coming out to herald them, but I'm pretty sure you'd have mentioned that if it were so. Kinda wonder if a pure shadow sword is in the works however. We got our pierce and elemental bases covered after all.

It's not spamming. It's his signature. If you don't like it then sorry? It in no way violates the ToS, so there is nothing you can do about it, so just ignore it. That's just how he signs all his posts, just like No-Thanks always puts zelda in the subject line. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean they can't do it.