the supply depot eventually offers 5* items. averages about 3500ce each.

Krogmo Coin boosters are actually quite nice. They aren't terribly expensive and they save a ton of time with binging PvP for tokens.

People should have to make their items.

Yeah!

I guess you save time with the 5*'s, but the CE you waste is improportional.

...No kidding. Why even say this? THE HUGE COST OF BUYING THE ITEM IS INCENTIVE ENOUGH! The ONLY thing they could do to make it even BETTER would increase UV chances when crafting. The only thing you save when buying from the depot is time.

OOO has always and probably will always make a profit via player impatience. If you're buying from the supply depo, then you probably have too much CE. If you have too much CE, then you probably used some $$. Thus, it gives them a way to profit off of player impatience without heavily rewarding rich players.

If you play PvP in this game for a profit, you're doing it wrong.

The depot seems more of a cash grab for Three Rings than the means to encourage gameplay. Sure, people will think if they pull a few dollars out of their a- pocket they can save time, but in the long run all it does is reward people who pay their way into higher tiers while everyone else is left in the dust. How does the depot affect you if you never buy the prebuilt equipment?

The trinket and weapon upgrades have been there for a while, but those can apply to anyone willing to use some energy to temporarily unlock an extra slot to equip something. The heat amplifier and Krogmo booster items do not necessarily rub the economy the wrong way, seeing as heat does not have any monetary effect by itself and Krogmo tokens are used to obtain items which are untradable unless you pay to unbind them. The keys are a little risky, pushing the line more towards energy dependency, though the Shadow Lair key is supposed to be expensive; the box/crate ones, however, are very obviously yet another theft from TF2 and/or many many games with a similar cosmetic function. TF2 comes to mind easily with the similar key-crate system. The main difference is in TF2 crates have various kinds of crates, some having more desired contents than others, while the boxes in Spiral Knights only have two variants: iron and mirror, though I question why a box is made of mirrors. What do they keep in there, lasers? Is it supposed to make fun of how self absorbed the people who usually want these are?

Equipment in the depot is definitely a lure for less experienced players to throw money at the game. This leads to less experienced players venturing beyond their ability, then complaining about everything being too difficult and being countered by the community. The less experienced player feels frustrated and is likely to quit the game with the same impatience which led them to buy prebuilt equipment to begin with. This cycle is constant as the depot has a constant supply of equipment to sell to new players willing to dump their wallets out. New player starts, they see what they think is a good deal, they buy it, they try to use it in a difficult area for them, they get beaten horribly, they whine about the game being too hard, community lashes out at them, they quit and the money is wasted, another new player takes their place; this is a vicious cycle. What did they learn from that? Why would they want to come back to this game again, besides that they spent money on it? How does this keep players to enjoy the game? Three Rings has rewarded newcomers while ignoring veterans several times, what stops them from completely ignoring us when they can take advantage of kids with money? We could try to keep them away from the game, but since irresponsible people are as numerous as they are stubborn there is little hope for that.

This sucks.

When heat amplifiers were released, people made a stink about them and the devs said they're not for everyone.

Energy? That is for everyone. You can't go wrong buying energy.
Trinket/Weapon slots? CE sink for mid-high level players. They're desired items that need to be refilled.

You have to understand that, especially for the super-expensive items, time is the real currency. If you have a job, one hour worth of your paycheck can get you like 2-3 nights worth of energy doing vana runs. If you buy an elevator pass, you can play as much as you want and enjoy the contents of the Arcade or whatever you want to do. When we had the no-elevator-cost weekend, I jumped into the middle of so many arcade runs and missions, and it was great fun.

Heat Amplifiers? This is for people whose jobs keep them so busy they cannot spend the time to really get down and play to heat up their items. If they're busy enough from work to not have a lot of playtime to heat up all their items but like playing the game, they can afford to spend some money on it. You buy the time so you don't have to spend so much of it to heat up your items.

Supply Depot? Saves you the time to search for recipes, craft, heat, craft, heat... etc.

Krogmo Coin boosters? For people who simply don't want to spend so much time grinding for kcoins. As a funny sidenote, I once calculated that I could make over 120k profit (that is, making up the CE cost) if I played BN for 20 hours with 6kcoin boosters. On my first experiment, I had gotten to the point where I was going to make 90k profit when something came up IRL and I quit playing for half a year :P*

*Those are numbers from back when calibrators were 50kcoins and sold for 12-15k, and BN was so popular that you could easily find a FFA game.

Supply Depot is for people that want to jump straight to the 5* version of an item instead of getting the recipes and crafting through the line. Yes, it costs 3,500 energy, which is actually LESS then what would go poof if you bought a vanilla one off somebody and they had to unbind it. It drains off a little CE, but not nearly as much as you are thinking due to it very rarely getting used, and still not as much as the unbind to get an item from another player.

Krogmo Coin Boosters and Heat Amps are another couple items that are very rarely used. I have never known anybody to actually purchase a Heat Amp, the ones that I've seen used have all come from the Explorer's Pack back when it was on sale for $3. I don't even see noobs buying them, and that says something.

Krogmo Coin Boosters on the other hand rarely get bought but when they do it is almost always for 1 of 2 reasons. Either the person hates PvP to an extreme (due to just not liking it, living in Australia and having enough latency they can't compete, etc) and just wants to get the coins they want as fast as possible, or they're devoting most of the day to PvPing and are going to get the booster to get even more goods out of it. The only time I have seen a lot of Coin Boosters being used was when PvP was newly released and from people buying the Battle Pack.

In short you're kind of making a big deal out of nothing. The CE drained off by these things is rather small, probably less then new people buying CE and then blowing a chunk of it on energy revives.

~Gwen

Just a reminder that you can't buy 5*s from the depot until you reach the T3 missions.

Krogmo Coin Boosters are ones I've used once before and I'm glad I did, because I'm really not a big fan of the PvP modes but I wanted to finish my Plague Needle. It was either spend 600 energy on a couple of boosters and the energy for crafting or spend 5000+ energy convincing someone with the recipes to make, unbind and sell to me, where 4000 of that energy would vanish from the game. One of these options was a better choice than the other.

Admittedly though, I've never thought about buying heat amps or prebuilt equipment from the supply depot. I don't even think newbies will be that tempted to buy them from the depot. 800 ce for the cheapest heat amp at a point where the player probably isn't even that concerned with heat levels and will undoubtedly see 800 ce is ridiculously expensive (which, for its effect, it kinda is).

As for the items, it's not until you reach the point of crafting four star equipment that you need levelled equipment. So it's not as if you'd actually save any time buying prebuilt items from the depot for anything before 4 star and by the time 4 star items even appear in the depot I'd imagine players would have a better understanding on the game.

In fact, premade 2* (and maybe 3*) should be worth less than just crafting them because they won't get UVs.

Yeah, Orangeo, you didn't really understand what he was saying there.

While I think it would be nice if the items in the Supply Depot were available with crowns rather than CE, it's not really a very big drain on the economy, and new players aren't being scammed by it.

Besides, the usables are all pretty useful in my opinion.

These arguments are silly. The OP is acting like new players have no free will or something. It's not like the supply depot is forcing you to buy their junk... If a new player is willing to bust out their wallet at the first open window they see and start blindly using real money to buy stuff that they have no idea what it is or how it works, then they have much larger problems than anything spiral knights can put them through, just sayin...

I agree in general that some of the items in the depot are simply not worth it... at least for me. The key words are "for me". That is about as far as my jurisdiction goes. It is none of my business what other players are doing with their money or crowns.

I find it annoying how players of various games whine about the company that makes the game. This game is F2P, so I'm pretty sure you have nothing to complain about. Three Rings is obviously doing a great job, since we're all here playing their game and talking about it, etc.

OP makes a good point. The target audience of items such as heat amps, supply depot weapons, k boosters, etc. is obviously new players that aren't familiar with the mild amount of budgeting required to "make it" in the game. If these things were made into crown sinks, it would benefit the game greatly (Moar growth+development). Unfortunately, OOO wants money in the short run as opposed to a better game in the long run.

I personally think that this is kind of a vestigial feature from a time when energy was common and the game was growing rapidly near release- it made sense for OOO to bring the price of energy up a bit then, and to provide incentive to people to buy energy via the cash shop. Now however, such features have finally all checked out (prices reached where they needed to be for stability, and kept going due to the unbalance)… what OOO should have done and can still do, is put growth before direct profits as often as possible.

I think you're fussing over small things too much. I'll admit, what you say about the Supply Depo draining CE is somewhat true... its only a small part of the economy.

The vast majority of the CE market is held up by people who spend about $50 a week, and then sell it all for crowns (probably to Punch Roll or something). Complaining about the Supply Depo being the cause of the high CE price is like complaining about how there is a fly on your dinner of rotten meat and spoiled fruits.

EDIT** Also, by the looks of it, you know perfectly well the purpose of the Supply Depo. Which begs the question, what did you intend to get out of this thread?

+1 for them is say.
-1 for removing them. If i am going to play, i choose to be gaining extra heat.