Valve's economic experiment with Team Fortress 2 could be considered a massive success, and as we have seen, OOO often takes much from that, starting first with the crate drop system and second with the idea of rapid fire promotions... and now, we have even more obvious evidence of this with the newest promotion regarding "buy a different game; get a promotion in spiral knights"; see- http://i48.tinypic.com/kasrh2.png

One might see this as a bad thing, that OOO is essentially stealing valve's ideology and attempting to 'ride the coat tails' to success, although we must remind ourselves that valve is opening new gateways, and setting new norms in an industry- they knew what they were getting into, and they chose to let companies like OOO into it due to their intuitive policies; they aren't trying to monopolize, they're trying to invent, to bring about change to the industry, for better or for worse.

And why is it worse? Because of it's negative effect on the artistic style of the game. Valve's attempts to integrate have been proven this; one cannot say that a lime green "magistrate's mullet" fits into the original artistic style of the game. When you force a new artistic perspective onto a game, it becomes even harder to justify. That being said, it is still possible to do so- take for example their newest paint sets- which are team coloured using hues already found in the game. An even better example would be the space aged series of weapons- their first attempts were seen as shoddy, but their more recent ones were created to both the theme of the game and to the theme of the space aged universe they were intended for.

I believe that if Spiral Knights is to follow suit with such promotions, they should learn from this. If pulled off correctly, there will be room for this system to flourish, if not, then OOO will have tarnished the precedent established by valve. They (the art team) certainly seem to be trying to uphold this notion, as is evidenced in their latest work, which I can heartily approve of. Even so, I am somewhat scared of the idea that they might falter on this principle, as we have seen in the hunter update. Though again, the 'surge update' was far nicer, so it might also be said that they have corrected themselves to some degree.(new!) Another example of 'OOO gone right' is in the rarity of the crate drops. In TF2, crates are almost unlimited in number. They're everywhere, and they're worth nothing- in Spiral Knights, you can get a good 2-5K from your crate. Of course, the major defect here is that in order to receive crates in Spiral Knights you must be opening them, or at least thats how it seems to me. The last time I got a crate was 2ish days after the update came out. It might be that I'm just not noticing when I get crates, but even then- I've seen people receive huge numbers of crates after opening them. Kind of a good thing, but kind of a scary+greedy thing.

So what do you think? Should OOO fall in line with valve? Do you have some variation of the number sixty nine in your crowns <69? Is it right for OOO to do this? And more importantly, do you think that OOO will succeed?