I'm not sure if anyone saw my previous topic about this issue here: http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/63774
It is clear that pretty much everyone is qqing about the energy prices except the people who buy CE from OOO and then sell it on the market.
My second very easy solution is this:
OOO is the government of the game, right? And the players who manipulate the economy are a bit like corporations, while the common F2P is small business who is trying to get by. What's the first thing that comes to mind in that situation? If you have the time, read this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law Have you ever thought to yourself "This isn't fair, OOO should do something to restrict players from making the CE prices too high!"
In the late 1800's and early 1900's there was a lot of monopolizing going on, where people would come together to form "trusts" where everyone agreed to come together and control prices for the benefit of trust members. A good example of this in Spiral Knights can be found in this thread here: http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/57171
Note that the OP referred to 8,700 crowns as being a "high price" for 100 CE. Today most people would jump right on it if they saw that offer.
The 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act was a law passed in the United States that basically prevented almost all market manipulation. If it worked for the entire country, why can't it work for Spiral Knights as well? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Act
It basically states that it is illegal to get together and manipulate market prices. Thus, if anyone saw other players doing any sort of scheming in this manner, a simple report could get them banned. Of course, the Spiral Knights market is not nearly complex as the entire US economy, nor will a rule that simple solve the problem. However, I can't say exactly how to solve this problem in a way that would make (almost) everyone happy. It is up to OOO as the Spiral Knights government to come up with an efficient rule to prevent CE prices from rising. Remember, it's their game.
Has anyone ever heard of the "invisible hand?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand It is a theory that all things related to economics always stabilize themselves automatically. It's hard to give an example, but let's just say that I'm Henry Ford and I have hundreds of thousands of factory workers. If I let them work underpaid, they get less money. That's less money that goes into the economy. If the economy has less money to spend, that's fewer people buying cars. The invisible hand will smack me in the face and my company will go under. But what Henry Ford actually did was pay his workers generously, and this was part of what made his company so much more succesful. Not only were his workers happier, (and thus felt better about working hard for him) but they could also sometimes afford their own cars, and put money back in Ford's pocket! This is one example of how the invisible hand works. tl;dr it's basically karma.
However, it doesn't seem as though Spiral Knights has an invisible hand. CE prices can keep rising with nothing to check them. I see two futures:
1. Somehow, the prices are stabilized, either by a converted community effort, or by a new system from OOO
2. Nobody does anything to stop this. The prices keep rising until people can no longer afford CE on a regular basis. Many F2P players will simply quit the game altogether. This is already starting to happen. (Act fast, OOO, before you lose your whole playerbase!) Some of the them will resort to buying CE via irl monies. A very small population will continue to purchase CE. With less people buying, sellers will have to keep raising CE prices even more to compensate. Once they get around 20-30k crowns for 100 CE, I suspect at least 95% of the F2P community will have ragequit. With nobody left to sell CE to, the rich players will ragequit in frustration that they can't get easy crowns anymore. Eventually, the only players left will be a tiny F2P population and a few people who don't care about money. With the community so small, people will get bored of the game and leave. Finally, a few hundred people will realize that there is no point in having CE prices so high and they will fall back down to normal prices. Some people will realize this and rejoin the game. However, by the time the game starts to get going again, it has been so long that the game is outdated and seems old compared to CoD 10, Halo Online, TF3, Final Fantasy C, and France France Revolution (if you've got the beat and want to kill the elite!). Then OOO will abandon the game and it will become 100% F2P on Steam with everything unlocked. Several years later, it will become akin to old MS DOS games, where people whip it out for fun as a "classic" but nobody actually plays it for entertainment.
So, OOO.. You choose.
sure, now lets see if we can get everyone on the forums ( which i doubt) into this community effort (plus, a load of players havent ever heard of the SK forums yet). this will require LOADS of mobilization.