Short Answer: No

Long(er) Answer: I would like them to cut ME Regen... maybe by 1 hour. BUT, cutting the regen-time all the way to 1hr. is way too much. I'm pretty sure that your suggestion will lead to the end of OOO and SK.

"On your business end--speeding up the ME Regen would keep more players playing... and more players playing would mean more players buying CE than usual"

This may be true... to an extent. People will DEFINITELY buy more CE if the ME Regen is faster but they will purchase it with crowns and not with real currency. Why does this matter? OOO needs to make money somehow. And they most certainly cannot do that if someone is constantly purchasing CE with crowns. Heck, if ME could fully regenerate in one hour, people may not even have to buy CE. They probably can make full tier runs and have a continuous flow of energy. They'd only buy some if they want to craft a weapon or something that requires more than 100 energy.

The problem is that this game isn't meant to be a hardcore game that you can play for HOURS. If you want to play a game like that, go play WoW or something like it. SK is meant to compete with facebook games and the like. OOO has worked hard on making this game a good F2P game. If you really think this is an enjoyable game, buy some CE so that you can play longer and, at the same time, support the company.

P.S. I am a player who doesn't pay for CE using real money. While I find this SK to be enjoyable, I am too cheap and lazy to actually bother to buy CE. But I am not complaining because I am getting what I deserve. If I really want to play longer, I will actually invest some money into playing SK.

I think 8-10 hours should be all that's needed for ME regen. No more, no less.

8-10 hours?

IF the goal is to say that free players can use one mist tank per day, then maybe 18-20 hours. Nothing less than 16.

Lets say someone plays from 7 pm to 9 pm one friday. Next day, on saturday, they want to play in the afternoon.

At 22 hours to recharge, you really cannot move your play time earlier in the day -- so you might only get 4-6 days of play in the week.
At 16 hours, you can expect to get 6-7 tanks in a week, but you might see some people get 8.

At 8-10 hours you'll see a lot of people get 8-10 tanks per week, and some will get more. Some people will be getting 14 tanks in a week.

The reason why 22 is nice is it means you can play once per day on a full tank, with 2 hours of wiggle room if you play late on day and want to play a little earlier the next.

As soon as you make ME charge faster than that, you're looking at playing multiple time per day. Optimal play in SK would mandate you be unemployed, and the game becomes unattractive to its core market of employed adults looking for a game they can play to the best of their abilities without falling behind due to having non-game responsibilities. This is an underserved market, and I'm pleased to see 3R targeting it. The OP's proposed changes (as well as Skype's) would revert this game into the typical sink-time-to-win RPG.

If you want more than an hour of play per day, you can sink cash into CE to do extra runs, but that's just a tax on the impatient. The purpose of CE is to allow access to high level crafting and slot upgrades while maintaining a once-per-day play schedule. If you find yourself with more than an hour of free time per night, you should seek out another game. You can easily fit SK into any other gaming schedule, thanks to its low per-day burden of play.

So no, there's no reason for ME to regenerate any faster than it is now. 22 hours for a full recharge seems just about perfect to me.

We're aware you have scads of free time for games, Skype, and that you can't afford to pay for CE. You should contact 3R, explain your situation, and see if they may be able to work something out with you that fits your unique situation. The things you've been posting make sense for you, but would ruin the game for everyone else.

The business model of 3R is pretty much that you get 1 hour of play free per day. You guys hopefully realize that it costs thousands of dollars per month to keep a server online, so giving you 30 hours per month FREE to play is a good thing (be lucky you get any). Playing more than that time has to be coordinated with the losses that 3R experiences from keeping the server open....that leads to several solutions:

1. Charge for extra energy, the current way 3R is doing it. Forcing you to purchase if you want the extra time (CE) at a specific rate (around 0.3 cents per CE, which yields roughly 30 cents per extra hour of play).
2. Give you extra time to play for free....but causing more focus on the "hardcore gamers" to be forced to pay even MORE money to substantiate the losses (given 80% casual gamer market and 20% hardcore, the price would increase to roughly $1.50 per extra hour of play....that's 5x more pricy)
3. Give you free play always...but charge for extra items. This skews toward elite players who want the "best equipment," which allows them to have the best of everything for the cost of real money (isn't it bad enough that the rich people already have everything in real life, do they have to have everything in the game too?). That gives too much of an unfair advantage to rich people.
4. Stop being free to play, and die completely because of losing 80%+ of the population.

Which do you think is a better plan? The more time you allow a player to play for free, the more money exponentially you have to charge the players for CE. I think 3R has done an excellent job in determining the best of both worlds, but none of you seem to be business-oriented enough to get it through your thick heads (bunch of whiny kids "wah wah, I want to play longer because I don't have a job and I have nothing to do with my time").

Dove, "Time Sinks" exist in all games, this is true. Unless the game ends instantly upon thinking of the answer to the puzzle, this is true. What sets Spiral Knights aside from the typical MMO is the fact that the Energy system prevents the player from substituting play time for skill. While Vanaduke cannot be defeated in your first week of playing, what is important is that the number of hours of play required to reach Vanaduke will vary very greatly among players, with high-skilled players being the ones to reach him fastest, something unusual in the MMO world.

Take, for example, your typical Korean grinder such as Maple Story. Killing foes presents very little threat to the player, and requires minimal skill to perform. You reach the skill cap extremely quickly, and at that point the rate at which you progress in the game is tied strictly to how long you play. The player who plays two hours per day will advance at twice the speed of a player who plays exactly one hour per day. The variance is extremely small. This is pure time-sink play, skill plays very nearly no part in this game.

In a game like World of Warcraft, the player has more options available. While killing individual foes doesn't vary much in time between the skilled and unskilled, the ability of the player to map out quest objectives does vary. An intelligent player may figure out how to kill only quest mobs or identify the most lucrative path to quest through an area, and achieve a higher rate of XP per hour than the player who simply kills everything in his path. You're moving away from a pure time sink, as the skill of the player begins to mitigate some of the hours required to play. However, the amount of time played still correlates very strongly to the rate of advancement.

Spiral Knights employs an energy system that greatly limits the per-day play available to the player. Without the energy system, a player who perishes in the clockworks can simply restart and run again - skill is unimportant. With the energy system, the player who perishes in the clockworks suffers a significant setback. Being skillful at the game, selecting the proper equipment and spending your crowns wisely results in advancing towards the endgame at a largely accelerated rate. Players who perform poorly may not even advance, as the ability to survive a full tier is required before you may move on to the next. The number of hours per day you spend logged into Spiral Knights is not the key determining factor in your rate of advancement - it's your ability to evade enemy attacks and not revive, your ability to identify the proper equipment sets to use for each stratum, and how wisely you spend the very limited money and materials you earn from each run. You can't just click the elevator a second time when you do something foolish.

I find it mind boggling you'd present Rogue as an example of a time-sink game, as Rogue is the exact opposite of such. A player who perishes in Rogue loses all progress and must start over. An intelligent player who learns the mechanics of the game can complete Rogue in less than one hour during their first sitting, as opposed to the average player who can play the game for hundreds of hours and never complete it. That is the shining example of a purely skill-based single player RPG.

Kingdom of Loathing is my shining example of skill-based play in a massively multiplayer game. It is no surprise at all that Kingdom of Loathing also employs an energy system, and it is that energy system that results in speedrun leaderboards populated by mathematicians and purveyors of the scientific method as opposed to the unemployed who spend weeks playing without sleep who top your World of Warcraft and Maplestory leaderboards. I came to Spiral Knights specifically because I discovered Spiral Knights employed a very similar system.

That is the element of Spiral Knights I want to preserve and expand, and that element is the anti-time-sink that is not present in your typical MMO. It is an element that exists moreso in Spiral Knights than other MMOs. Removing the energy system from Spiral Knights destroys that, and turns it into a game where your progress is tied most strongly to your ability to be at home at your computer instead of somewhere else, which is how I define a "Time Sink" game.

Sab - all games require skill. All games require time. I didn't imply either was untrue. Some games place more value on one of those metrics than the other, by making success correlate more strongly to one or the other.

Ability to learn is part of skill. So are reflexes. Your physical abilities plus your mental abilities equal your gaming skill. Social skills might also be a part, depending on the nature of the game. Learning curve is a representation of whether the challenges in the game ramp up smoothly, suddenly, or hardly at all. It has very nearly nothing to do with what I said before, except in the third case where the learning curve remains low. That's the Skill Cap, which represents when the player can get better but the game does not recognize it. That's my Maple Story example.

In your example player A and player B played the same number of hours, but one completed the task in fewer days, because he put in more time per day. He was done with the game while player B was still on level 20. That's how it's faster - the number of days is different. If player A and player B meet in game, any person who sees them will assume player A is the better player, but the reality is that he simply plays more. His skill level is either equal to B, or both players are stuck at the Skill Cap for that game.

In Spiral Knights, this situation doesn't arise. Both players play the same amount of hours and appear (correctly) to be the same level of skill, or at least both at the skill cap. But that's not the goal here.

Change your example to where Player A is terrible at the game, and Player B is the best at the game. Player A will take more hours to reach level 80, but his daycount will still be much, much lower than Player B. Player A incorrectly appears to be the better player. If the game contains PvP elements, he's likely to be the one who wins in a fight, too. That's why it's a "Time sink to win" game. The number of hours played is not a metric the game uses to evaluate the player.

This also means Player B will spend fewer hours playing the areas he has mastered. He will presumably move more quickly to areas appropriate to his level of skill, and he'll be happier for it.

I do not define "Casual" strictly by the number of hours played per day, but by the effort the player puts into the game. A player who plays one hour per day but takes the time to learn and memorize the mechanics, equip the right sets of gear for each situation, set lofty goals like beating Vanaduke with all 3* gear and top the leaderboards successfully hardly seems 'casual', does he? Of course, if the game contains very weak skill-based challenges the only possible difference between a casual and a hardcore player is the number of hours played per day, but that's a situation I hope that Spiral Knights will never have to weather.

I hope that clears up your confusion over the concept of skill based games versus time based games.

At least make it every 12 hrs <- Sounds fair to me.

PFFFF, I beat vanaduke in my first week, beat jelly king in first play day, first try , and got to core in first week.
though I admit you're right about core, it did take multiple hours. :c
anyway, yes time sink,
but I render your vanaduke and (partially>) JK points invalid.

/me feels like arguing with points of people today, sorry.

Instead of increasing the speed of mist energy regen, they should raise the cap from 100. As of right now it is impossible to get past Tier 2 content without someone buying crystal energy with real money. If this truly is a "Free to Play" game it's entire content should be accessible for free. To craft 4* or higher items you need more than 100 energy at a time. Unless someone spends money on the game there is no way to progress. People will still buy energy because it's convenient and there is already some in the game at the moment. But this was a huge oversight in my opinion.

Instead of increasing the speed of mist energy regen, they should raise the cap from 100. As of right now it is impossible to get past Tier 2 content without someone buying crystal energy with real money. If this truly is a "Free to Play" game it's entire content should be accessible for free. To craft 4* or higher items you need more than 100 energy at a time. Unless someone spends money on the game there is no way to progress. People will still buy energy because it's convenient and there is already some in the game at the moment. But this was a huge oversight in my opinion.

4000 Crowns=100CE

Buy it.

There is no reason to increase the cap.

@SirNiko I could of sworn you were insulting me there..not quite sure.

Why would you quit if they changed ME regen rate to be full after 16 hours instead of 22? Honestly 22 is just under 24 and that's ridiculous. It also discourages playing EVERYDAY, and why you would want to do this is beyond me, it's not very good for longevity.

There are only 24 hours in a day
8 of that is sleeping
8 of that is school/college/work
The rest of the time is w/e it is you people do after those.

Players buy CE and resell it and the devs insert it.

Someone sounds pissy.

@SirNiko
All your talk of skill and timesink and the like reminds me of music games. Simply because in a music game time = learning. Some people learn the techniques faster than others, and some prefer to try and perfect their timing more than others. Sorta makes same sorta sense here as you while you play the game you learn techniques and the like as well. Except this is an mmo, not a game where you move your feet to brightly coloured arrows to songs that are awesome. :v

Oh and lowering the ME rate would be nice. To 18 hours for full regen instead of 22. I wouldn't make it too low though.

The Devs do not insert CE into the market. All CE sold on the market was first purchased, with real world money, by players.

You really believe this don't you? So let's just say for example, that NO ONE is buying CE at some point in time in the future. How do you think we are going to get that CE? The market isn't going to go out of CE simply because no one is buying it, because the devs would inject some into the game to keep it going, otherwise the game would tank. They care about the non paying customers just as much as the paying ones. I also guarantee you, they have injected it into the game before.

The MAJORITY of CE comes from paying players, but you are a fool if you think the devs can't inject any into the game and if the devs can't do it the GM's most certainly can.

The Devs do not insert CE into the market. All CE sold on the market was first purchased, with real world money, by players.
If you have proof to the contrary, we'd like to see it.

Use your brain duh.

Obviously the devs aren't injecting a constant stream, but I'm willing to say they did it to jumpstart the pool or if the above scenario were to occur.

If "NO ONE is buying CE at some point in time in the future" the game will simply shut down. The developers will not insert CE onto the market because it can potentially eat into their profits by taking away the incentive for players to buy CE.

The developers allow you to play for free, but they gain nothing directly from free players and the game cannot live on freeloaders alone. Freeloaders help profits only by trading crowns for CE with paying players (thus encouraging paying players who want crowns to buy CE for cash) and then sinking that CE on elevators and crafting. There are no ads sold that turn your playtime into profits. Only CE sales drive the profitability of this game, so if there are no CE sales, there will be no game.

The injecting CE theory would explain what happended when the price fluctuated between 5000cr and 4300cr within an hour. Or it was just an organized attempt to play the system by players. (but why'd that result in the price permanently dropping by 500crowns value).

really I don't think they'd want to have CE price hit 6k eventually. Forcing people onto 1 hour a day unless they pay, no matter what, is a bit of a turn of for curious players who'd rather try the game 2-3 hours and are decent enough to purchase ce at 4k pricepoint. (and still progress).

Like this they get money from mediocre players who ress all the time and cant beat second half of t1, and can offer a pleasant experience to people who go to play an f2p mmo with expectations. Which when fulfilled result in paying customers too.

I really don't expect CE, a currency that's allways getting consumed, and only supplied to meet demands, to keep up with crowns which inflate in volume currently. At least naturally that is.

The Rose Regalia promotion is clearly intended to drive down CE prices. Players who have plenty of CE are likely to buy more CE to get the costume armor, and then since they don't need the CE it goes into the market. Increased supply without raising demand causes prices go down.

I'm not so sure about injecting crowns in the market, though. It'd allow players to buy the CE, but then the price of CE would simply go up to compensate. The price of CE is going to correlate to the number of crowns you can generate in the clockworks by using it. You'd then have to inject more CE regularly when inflation catches up. You'd wind up with out of control inflation like what happened in Zimbabwe several years back - everyone was a millionaire, but when bread is a million dollars it doesn't matter.

If the Devs are concerned that the CE market is dwindling, the most logical thing to do is to reduce the number of dollars required to buy CE, or to offer additional bonuses for buying CE. This makes CE more attractive and pushes players who are currently not buying CE to buy CE. And that's exactly what they did with the Rose Regalia.

There's no logical reason for them to ever inject CE in the economy for the purpose of jump-starting CE purchases. CE is a consumable, and would not function in the same way as stimulus money in the real world.

SirNiko > "I'm not so sure about injecting crowns in the market, though"

I never stated that's what they actually do....but rather if they do anything regarding "injection," then crowns would be the only thing -- not that I actually believe they do it.

TiVVV34 > "I dont see how a slowly upward moving process can lead to a quick drop. (explain)"

Because there are 2 curves in the picture...the price of CE on the per-crown market, and the price of CE by 3R on the $ market. As the cost of CE slowly rises in crowns that cannot be substantiated by any game mechanics (meaning the droprate averages never changed), then you eventually reach a point where people will be unable to afford it. When players are unable to afford the CE that are on the market when those sellers are constantly cutthroating each other, the price drops until they get eaten up. When the supply runs out (or close to it), the only option you have left is to purchase CE from 3R with $. Unless the game tanks, this process will happen rather quickly, causing a HUGE influx of CE supply. This rapidly drops the crown value.

Now that is the extreme end of the situation...this happens every day this game is running in small batches. As the prices increase to a point where people would rather pay $ than pay an extra 100 crowns per CE (maybe because they didn't get enough from their 100 ME run or something), they'll purchase from 3R and the crown price drops. I'm not saying this happens with every player, but it happens and is why the market looks like a rollercoaster.

>>> "Anyway, increasing crown payout to combat inflation of crown value?
The problem would rather escalate if that were to happen."

No no...I was stating an "if" situation on the conditions of "injecting" in the game. IF three-rings injected anything in order for nonpayers to keep playing, it would be crowns (and items like the ragalia set)...not CE. I know this would cause inflation, but the CE sellers wouldn't know right away about the injection, giving the buyers a slight moment where they can purchase the CE from the sellers before the price increases again. There is absolutely no point in 3R doing any of it, and that's why I'm stating "if they did."

>>> "And your analogy is quite farfetched as artificially stabilizing CE at 4k doesn't actually stop people from purchasing CE"

Never was designed to stop people from purchasing....having the prices (in good quantity) artificially stabilized would force arbiters out of the picture. For example, setting 1000 buy orders to 3959 and 1000 sell orders to 4040 leaves 0 crowns to profit from. Anyone who enters this gap would not be an arbiter because the risk would be far too great, so the only ones going in are the ones who either supply the market (coming into the circle) or demanding the market (going out of the circle). This means that there would be no more rollercoasters and the value of CE can be better guaranteed (allowing faster transactions). In the hands of a knowledgeable economist, they can raise/lower the prices slowly in expectation for upcoming events/items/etc. in the game.

One could then do the same thing but do 3955 and 4045, leaving a 9 crown gap. It would be slightly less stable, but the profit could be used to further tighten the market (adding increased blocks on both sides). And for even more fun, if that player wanted to, could offer a "savings account" for their crowns/CE, where it could accrue a variable % in return rate (call me crazy, I love money management). The bigger the gap, the bigger the instability in the market, and the bigger the risk -- just like real life.

If the CE market reaches 8k, or even 100k, it doesn't matter....3R will never put CE into the game for free (I'm almost 100% certain of that). What exactly are you not understanding?

As for my analogy, it makes quite a bit of sense. A typical bum will eat at a homeless shelter and use any money he gets for liquor. Those bums who are smarter will "save" their money so they can buy clothes/motel room/etc. and try and find a job so they aren't a bum anymore. If you buy a bum liquor, then you don't give him that chance...you just keep him being a bum. The same works in this situation, if you keep feeding CE into the game, then you keep the non-payers playing for free.

And no, buying CE is not what is meant by "injecting"....that's called capping, a different word altogether. Injection is solely on the idea that 3R puts sell orders on the CE market at a crown price they set. Why in the world would they do that? Crowns cost them nothing, it's a game mechanic, but CE is their profits. Each time 100 CE is put into the market, it costs 3R roughly 30 cents. You might be thinking "it's just a variable stored on their servers, changing the variable doesn't cost anything," but it does....all the costs of keeping the business open (employee salary, lights, computers, servers, air conditioning, etc. etc.) integrates into its profit source. That profit is the purchase of CE. Through alpha/beta testing, they have determined the average use of CE throughout the players time on the game versus the cost of running the business in order to come up with the cost the CE should be. So if they circumvent it by introducing CE into the game, then it will lower those profits, isn't this obvious?

Think of it like owning a pizza store, all you sell are 1 sized pizzas. To run the oven, pay employees, rent the building, etc. etc. you find that it costs you $10,000 per month. At first you will probably set your prices near other competitors, say $7 per pizza. After a month you determine that you've made less than that. You increase your price, but that only causes less purchases....so you look for alternatives, like reducing costs (maybe close the store earlier, reduce payroll limit, use less topings). After all the trial-and-error stuff, you have the price at $8 (along with all the reductions to account for it). You are still a business selling pizza...how much do you think a pizza is worth then?

The dough cost only $0.20
The sauce cost only $0.02
The cheese cost only $0.34

It's safe to say that the pizza is "worth" only $0.56 right? Wrong! It is worth $8 because that's how much you have tested it for. So when an employee wants a "crew pie" (a free pizza), how much money did the business just lose? $8, not $0.56.

So just because 3R can freely (cost $0.00) add CE into the game, doesn't mean it's actually free.

No, you have the analogy wrong. Giving liquor to a bum is analogous to 3R putting CE on the game's market. If 3R supplies the game with the ONLY product they are getting money from, than how are they going to make any money? If you give a bum liquor, how is that going to help him sober up, get nice clothes, get a job?

CE *is* money, at least to 3R, they are exactly the same thing. It's easy to think of a physical product as having value, where ownership can be sold for monetary value....but CE is such a product, so it should be easy enough to comprehend. I know that CE can be created out of thin air, and no ownership actually gets passed, but to 3R, it is what they are selling.

> "that's like saying each time an album gets pirated it's 1 less sale."

Slightly wrong....the analogy would be if there was a way for someone to create CE on their account and give it away freely, THEN it would be like pirating. This is not the same thing (but it costs 3R the same profit loss). I won't get into the whole record company crap, so let's just stick to only understanding this. Each time 100 CE is put into the game, it costs 3R about 30 cents, that's it.