Iron Lockboxes and Silver Keys, which brought Shadow Keys, which then brought Crimson Hammer and also initially brought the Accessory craze (which by itself, customization isn't bad) making OOO center much more on "getting revenue to keep the game going" than trying to stabilize/change the flawed CE economy system.

So my vote would go to "Accesories" with the options you give, but it is actually "Lockboxes" (Iron, then Mirrored) what I am targeting at.

If that was directed to me, I am NOT against Featured Auctions or Accesories, and as I said, I blame Lockboxes, which started the "snowball" that has us now with an inflated economy, poor content updates and a dependence of CE buy income (AND previously ONLY real money for Crimson Hammer, which still hasn't the announced CE exchange for non-Steam users) from OOO part to keep the game alive.

And your more temporary accesories idea is really good and what we need, more so, a system for vanity items like other games where they are only timed would be ideal, but then Accessories should have to be easy to be able to buy (and not in random boxes) and in high quantities.

We could also blame our situation to not a patch, but the Doctor Who game.

@the "CE promos means they're only focusing on money" idea:
Some people are compulsive buyers and spend money because there's somewhere to be spent. You know, those people who would buy something expensive in a facebook game just because it's expensive and they can afford it.

This is not likely to be true for the majority of players. For everyone else, content has to have VALUE to players in order for it to make money. This can be in saving time (the original deal - buy energy, progress faster! Can't play? Buy a heat amplifier!), content that people WANT to play (ex: OCH) or ways that people want to express themselves (accessories). Even now, people won't buy into something like a CE promo unless they're really desperate for energy or there's something good (of value) in it for them.

If people's values differ from the values the devs assign, then you end up with a less popular feature or a monetary failure. See: Shadow lairs. They're challenging and have really FUN CONTENT and level design - just what everyone's been asking for . . . but it's way too expensive for the value that people put into them. So you only have a handful of 'elite' players that will actually run them on more than a one-time basis.

To make money, they have to offer things that (potential) paying players actually want to buy. People don't pay money for something they don't want unless they NEED to.
Since this is a game, there's no 'need', so they have to focus on making things that people actually WANT to spend money on if they want profits.

This means they have to make players happy.

You want them to balance the CE economy? They'll have to make a promo that people value enough to make them really want to spend money, and from that, those players will sell their CE for crowns and push the CE prices down.

-----------
anyway, that rant aside,

I'd vote for Missions, actually. I think it's kind of cool and adds a bunch of polish to the game. But...

We lost the focus on the random stages, the gate manipulation, the joining of random parties in the middle of runs, danger rooms. On one hand, it's more convenient to have missions so you can go straight to the stages anyway. On the other hand, it removes the cooperation and player interaction, affecting gates in order to make the path to the boss stages more enjoyable (LOL remember having fiend before vana? Flame souls went up in price!), to make a gate full of Deconstruction zones because you think they're fun. I remember guilds used to affect the gates as they wanted. I don't even need to bring up Project uJelly.

Missions became the focus for both players and developers. Make predictions for the next content patches: What's more likely? Newer missions with static layouts, or brand new clockwork pieces/layouts?

People will flock to whatever mission brings the most money because that's what they value. It makes it so they can play as much as they want, make the gear they want.

Right now, Vanaduke is the cash cow mission.
In the future, it'll be whatever t3 boss mission they eventually come up with, because it'll probably bring the values of "fresh new content" AND "more profit".

Because you don't have to run through clockworks to get to those stages, there's a lot of content that people will see "once and never again".

Accesories didnt ruin the game what so ever imo. It just gave people more items to aim for. Mission systems has both pro's and con's to it but overall it didnt ruin the game.

Shadow Lairs was probably the worst patch ever. OCH basically created a wall between F2P and P2Pers. Everything else OOO did wrong (And they've done A LOT wrong) all add up together and contribute to the ruining itself.

And im pretty sure as long OOO are refusing to install an asian server, not many if any at all new asian players will come into the game. Even I have almost had enough of lag in his game.

The community. That is all.

Oh yeah, thought it might've been from 2011.

Yes it was

Taking a turn for the less serious side here...

Clearly you're all forgetting the update that was the worst!

The update which changed the Spur's attack pattern?

I mean, come on!

That is the most important one!

On a more serious note...

I'd have to say accessories. It seems they're used as a major scapegoat in this game, and often mislead players to get a neat looking (yet utterly useless) pretty as opposed to a useful weapon.

If you guys din't know already when spiral knights was first released this was the crafting prices
1* - 10 Ce ( same as now)
2* - 50ce ( also same as now)
3*- 100ce
4*- 200ce
5*- 400ce

to me that was the change to ruined the game and made it essentially a P2P game.

Honestly, the changes made then is what saved the game for the long-run, albeit relatively recent changes have snowballed into another decline. You could simply trade for most everything in under a week and never look back on the items/game again. Those changes were made just early enough to not screw over the entire playerbase at the time, and for the model of the game experience.

As for my thoughts on the thread question, these are my observations:
A start is the Supply Depot/Hall of Heroes. Together, along with how the game environment was working, they simplified and limited much too much; the trade economy went into a bit of a rut. Then in tandem with the accessibility and highly comparable rewards of our new Missions, so did the currency economy, as well as the Arcade basically losing the entirety of its appeal.

Missions are static and seperate, yet have gained a lot more importance; so much for an always-changing adventure.

/yes!!!
Sometimes, even whole FSC run isnt enough for a 100ce. this has gotten too far. if OOO cant do anything about the narket, then raise the overall cr outcome!!!!

yes, buts its becoming a problem... okay you only spend 50mist/ce but, you have to do it two times. two times the time. good for you, if you play this night and day, but I actually irl stuff things I have to do.

My answer:

People who don't understand how the CE market works, and whine instead of work. Really, I can get the average payouts per 100CE for each boss strata, and prove that you can still profit with CE at 8k.

Game isn't "ruined" nor ruined so what's the poll really about?

From what I recall, crafting costs were like this before that patch:
★☆☆☆☆: 10 E
★★☆☆☆: 50 E
★★★☆☆: 100 E
★★★★☆: 200 E
★★★★★: 300 E

Pretty sure that's how it was, but I'm going to go look for a reference anyway. If I am incorrect, feel free to correct me with provided evidence.

Edit:
I knew my memory couldn't be trusted. Well, all I could really find was a 2* item going for 50 E, so I went ahead and assumed 1* went for 10 E as well, and 3* 100 E. (I pretty much copied your list, hah...) I did find a 4* going at 200 E so that's correct, though I'm convinced 5* was 300 E, because I remember discussing this with a friend, stating it was nearly tripled, and from 400 E it would only be doubled.

2.0:
Paweu nailed it.

I am the only one regretting the patch which removed wolvers and zombies as a threat by forcing them to attack in a straight line ?

The may 17th patch was before I start playing, so I have no idea about this one, but the AI nerf is clearly the worst for me. Removed a lot of challenge.

Also, Shadow Lair. It's a shame. Great content you just can't play much because of prohibitive cost.

Warning: wall of text. I didn't think the post would get this long, but it turns out there's a lot to complain about.

I left the game mid last year a while after the May 17th update, and I'll just briefly restate why that's bad: it places an unacceptably large real money price on gear which you need for T3. If we assume that you use as much mist as possible for each crafting stage, you need 1100 CE to make most 5* items, 1000 CE for items with a 3* base like the sealed sword and 700 CE for the crest of almire and maybe some others, but they're very rare. Now let's assume that all CE was bought in the US and thus doesn't have VAT, and at the best rate of $50 for 20kce. That's $2.75, $2.50 or $1.75. That's an unavoidable cost (well technically you could run vana in your 2* gear until you have enough boss tokens to buy a set with them but let's be realistic) and before you say some nonsense about the CE market, all sunk CE represents real money even if it wasn't yours. The effect of this is that the community which already specialised in royal jelly and vanaduke runs further specialises because crafting 5* equipment for anything else (such as fighting fiends) is too expensive. Personally I was ready to begin crafting various 5*s just to play around with them before May 17 rolled around.

Now I've come back to the game for a little while to see what it's like and... hmm. Well, this isn't the first thing I noticed, but a lot of enemies have been ridiculously nerfed. Scorchers used to fire curved fire like red rovers, didn't they? Phantoms had gran fausts and I think they were more aggressive, menders were more revive happy, wolvers would change direction (they were still among the easiest enemies), oilers were extremely threatening because they were FAST, quivksilvers moved more quickly and for longer I think when charged... the list goes on I'm sure. Some of the new content seems tricky to me (candlestick keep in particular) but why has all the old (T3, I can't judge T1 and T2) content been dumbed down so much? Has all the real challenge moved to the shadow lairs, which are prohibitively expensive to run (what else needs to be said about them? The cost of a single shadow key is ridiculous.)

And, well, missions. That's what I first noticed on coming back of course and my first thought was that it was an interesting way to play the game, I appreciated that they were bite sized sessions rather than the long runs with escalating rewards (I'm sure most of you know how annoying it is to have to leave a run for real life reasons), but... as I proceeded through the missions I noticed something. There was never an open party and only once did someone join me (on the roarmulus twins mission, and the player was so terrible that he entered with less than 20 energy, died quickly on the first level and revived himself with energy in under a second so I had no chance to revive him, then died again straight after and returned to haven just as quickly). The reason for this should be obvious and should have been obvious before implementation: the content (and thus the player base) is spread too thinly.

How many ranked clockwork missions are there? 30? More? There were 4 open gates in the original design for a sound reason: so that finding or making a party is usually easy. Now that it's 4 gates plus many times as many missions and pvp arenas, is it any surprise that unless you have friends or guild members to run with (and how did you find them in the first place? Random parties) the game is solo instead of co-op. It was bad enough that solo play was encouraged by the drop system but now it's almost impossible not to solo. Why am I playing a multiplayer game if I can't find any other players? The daily missions might have helped with this except you can only do each once per day, so you're unlikely to get a party in them either.

Almost as bad, the ranked missions don't even seem to have any real purpose other than a stricter ladder of challenges and rewards. They're certainly not teaching players the game, as shown by the one player I mentioned.

Oh and there's crimson hammer I guess... what the hell? You get revenue for fresh content regardless in the form of more people coming back and continuing to play. And again this is a multiplayer game, what sense does it make to wall off content from a large part of the player base?

It's really disappointing to see the failures in game design have continued to degrade a game with such good core gameplay, and even that has got worse because of enemy AI nerfs.

The biggest thing that is hurting the game is lack of new 'high level' content. 6 months ago their should of been a T4 Arcade with about 10 new levels that was hard as hell with some great token rewards. Their is no point in grinding the CE market as unless you love costumes or uvs their's little end content to spend your $ on.

Is the game perfect? No. Is anything perfect? No. People who only seem to care about everything that's wrong with the game, that's what's ruining the game. For me at least.

Honestly? None.

There's no patch that ruined anything, only the lack of new content.

Just stop whining for once.