Hey everyone :D. Fairly long-term player here, I started just before missions were introduced, so I've been thoroughly enjoying Spiral Knights for over a year now (though I'm still only a Knight Elite, as I've spent my money on various other ventures like building a range of loadouts, learning all the recipes up to 3 stars, starting my own personal guild and furnishing it, and helping newbies I meet). I'm a huge fan of the game and sometimes find myself imagining things I think would be neat to see, and I decided when I hit a couple of major personal milestones, 10k minerals deposited and 10k prestige earned, I'd finally collect and share them. Then we had a big interface change, so I decided to wait a bit since I imagine the awesome folks at OOO had their hands pretty full, but now seems as good a time as any with most of the teething issues seemingly worked out.

Since this game is very popular there are a ton of ideas being submitted all the time, and OOO obviously have their own plans that keep them quite busy on a day to day basis developing and implementing them. The idea behind my suggestions is that, while there's still the discussion of whether or not they are good and balanced, if any of them were approved they would be quick and simple to implement into the coding. A lot of them are to do with energy, but are connected with some other feature, plus I have some others too, and will try to section them up appropriately.

Minerals
I want to paint an accurate picture without using a rude tone, so I'll put this as best I can: some knights don't care about minerals. I run with a whole lot of people as I frequently join random games, and as early as the last 12 hours I have had knights - good knights, Vanguards - who will go so far as to spend the time to write a proper English sentence telling me they don't really care about minerals rather than just walking over and picking one up when I point out they haven't. And who can strongly blame them? I care about minerals, I got 10k of them after all, and I know they are vital to gate construction, but to the individual knight that honestly doesn't matter. The sheer popularity of the game means that trying to influence the outcome of gate formation is almost outright impossible for all but the most top-level players. Most of the top-level players are grinding Firestorm Citadel into atomic paste, and don't even use gates. I'm not saying the feature should be dropped or anything, but as part of the lore minerals are supposed to matter, and the sheer gaming experience does not match up with that at all, with them being one of the most insignificant features to the point players will literally walk past 1 and 2-size minerals.

I have 2 suggestions to address this. First of all, I read the entire release note history of Spiral Knights on the wiki out of curiosity over time (and boy do you have some gems in there, duplicating Royal Jellies? Holy moly). From what I gathered, minerals were once worth up to 5 crowns, and I say once as while I can't see the code, mathematically and modesty aside I think I can qualify as an authority when I say this never happens. Let's just do the numbers for a second - I've deposited over 10,000 minerals. Up until I hit the 2,500 achievement, I would deposit them virtually after every run, and every time I did I would check all 4 inactive gates for the best prices. This means every time I visit the arcade to deposit minerals I see literally 100 values for them (4 gates, 24 stratums, with 4 locked by boss stratums, 20 stratums x 5 minerals = 100), so I have literally seen thousands of offers for minerals and not once have I seen a 5. I don't know if the code is still meant to produce them but it isn't, and as a first step I would change this and give minerals a tad more worth. I even came up with my own algorithm for setting values, and all. You start with a default value of 3 crowns a mineral, then IF that mineral is either the rarest (least deposited) mineral type in its stratum, OR the lowest deposited amount of its colour across all of the stratums in the gate, +1 to its value. If both these conditions are met, +2, taking it up to 5. Likewise, the most abundant mineral will suffer -1 in the same way, or -2 for meeting both conditions. This would eliminate 0-value results, and I understand wanting to encourage balance, but I think honestly minerals are minimal in impact enough without literally getting nothing for them sometimes. I've sold cake tokens for 1 crown each before.

Of course you have your own no doubt much more advanced algorithm and you could just +1 to the output of that, or do something else, but I plead for a minor buff to it in any case. It isn't much, which means it's hardly gonna throw the balance of the game out, but it would make people care a bit more.

My other suggestion is the one I'm really proud of. Now, I like mist tanks, and the sad fact is aside from the few one-time ones you get for progressing through the rank missions, mist tanks scarcely seem to exist to most knights. Even the mini-tanks worth 15 energy seem immensely rare in PVP, I'm not a huge player of it but I've earned about 300 Krogmo coins and won a bomb helm I wasn't even after, never seen a mini mist tank in there. So here is my suggestion, as related to minerals. For every 1,000 minerals deposited by a knight, have Spiral HQ mail them a mist tank the same way as done for rank progression. There must be code somewhere counting minerals deposited, since it's used for the Steam achievements, and I realise energy is an essential part of the game - OOO in large makes its money off this game through CE sales and can't over-saturate the availability of mist. But requiring 1,000 minerals for just 100 mist would I feel strike an excellent balance of incentive to individual knights to not too large an impact on how much of the stuff is going around overall. Even in a completely optimal set of runs, with 4 players each taking a maximum-size mineral to the gate, you're looking at 32 minerals per a floor, meaning you'd have to spend 320 mist to earn 100 back, but obviously those conditions don't actually happen basically ever for anyone. In reality, the overwhelming majority of runs consist of 2-3 knights bringing 4-8 minerals to the end of every floor, so being generous, it'd take about 160 runs, or 1,600 mist, to earn 100 extra, about a 6% boost in mist availability, which considering the overwhelming use of CE is on crafting for 3-5 star items, where mist tanks would be of little use, I really don't think would unbalance the energy economy at all. It would make sense in the lore as well: if minerals are so essential and a knight is being diligent in bringing tons of them back, wouldn't you provide them the odd bit of help to go and get even more for the spiral order? From the individual player's point of view, it should be a tangible enough incentive to make people care a lot more - "For every 10 minerals I gather, I get a free mist point", that's a small but appreciable benefit most will care about. If 100 for 1,000 is too much you can reduce it to mini mist tanks instead, but I think right now minerals are a very neglected element of the SK experience despite the supposed significance they hold in the lore, and trivial bits of crowns, the odd prestige mission and gate construction no one knight can really influence isn't doing them justice.

Prestige
Prestige is pretty cool, I'm going to start by saying that. The simple fun of accumulating a personal little score, and the spice and variety of the cycling daily missions alone make it worth having, I got 10k of the stuff so I'm hardly complaining. But I think there is some untapped potential and I imagine OOO have their own future plans for it, but I'm gonna go and toss mine into the hat as well.

First of all, on a minor note, I think it would be pretty neat if daily prestige missions, the actual mission ones revolving around monster families, gave you "spark" tokens on completion as well as prestige. You could possibly award 1 on tier 1, 2 for 2 and 3 for 3, while relating it to stratums for danger missions, or maybe only have danger missions award them instead. I've never completed a danger mission (I'd like to have my first, hopefully, victory with certain friends, and getting them online together is hard), so I have to admit ignorance on claims I've heard of special rewards won under certain conditions at the end of danger missions, but unless that's true there really isn't a fitting sense of reward behind beating such a radically more difficult challenge than the regular prestiges. Twice the prestige score doesn't really mean much, since reaching any milestones in prestige is a long-term effort no matter what, and nobody looks at a knight logo for the top prestige level and goes "Whoa, you must be awesome at danger missions". They simply assume they grinded prestige stuff in general for a long time, which they did no matter what. Again, I understand game balance and simply piling more stuff on isn't a good idea, but I think a small extra pat on the back to set apart danger missions, or just a general pepping up of prestige missions you go into the clockworks for, would be nice, and given the family-theming of them, spark tokens seem both balanced and appropriate, so there's an idea.

My next idea is probably my biggest one of all. It's the one I expect to have the most automatic "No, we can't do that" dismissal from anyone with OOO I may be so lucky to have reading this, but hear me out. Right now prestige does, essentially nothing. My suggestion is that prestige affects mist recovery.

Wait come back. Here's the idea: right now mist recovers at a universal rate, which I understand to be 800 seconds per a point. If that's not the case, then I submit an attached suggestion to tweak it to 800 seconds per a point for neatness (my only other guess would be 792 or something non-integer), but anyway, let me start from the lore side of things. The entire principle of equipment in Spiral Knights, which is everything, since there are no character levels or the like (a detail I love), is that there isn't enough for everyone to have the best stuff without earning it. Otherwise we'd have apprentices running around in azure guardian armour with leviathans and valiances, because why not? It's Spiral Order equipment. The why is that the order has limited resources, obviously, and it takes more valuable to produce higher-performance equipment. There is another piece of equipment that every single knight has, but we don't think about it as equipment, which is our mist tank, and by extension the systems that gather mist from the energy in the air around us to replenish it. Wouldn't it make sense, much like the way we're given cobalt gear for proving ourselves by passing tests on the way to facing the Snarbolax, or my example of mist tanks for minerals above, that knights who have proven themselves a valuable and valiant asset to the order could have advanced optimisations made to their mist tanks with rare materials and technologies and so forth, improving their efficiency and rate of gathering energy from the air? From a lore perspective it makes sense, maybe it takes as much effort to slightly optimise 1 mist system by 1 level as it does to produce 10 stock ones, so only the most soundl-proven knights are worthy of such an investment. The balance obviously lies in the numbers.

Now I based my idea of this on the charge time reduction bonus weapons get as they're heated up. According to the wiki, each level of the CTR gives a roughly 1/16th reduction to the charge time (related cheeky suggestion: if it isn't exactly 1/16th, make it, it's so tidy!). My first thought was to have each level of prestige correspond to 1 level of the ability/UV, which would at maximum prestige earn you about 50 mist extra day. Now, part of me says that for anyone so Hellbent determined to play Spiral Knights enough to acquire that much prestige, giving them an extra half again much mist a day will not really harm the energy economy because they clearly play buckets-loads anyway. However, I understand if it seems like too much and I don't have any kind of as advanced a planning and forecasting operation going on as a professional company, so let me put forward a more moderate proposal too. In this version, each prestige level takes 2.5%, or 20 seconds per point, off the mist charge time. This is done so that at maximum prestige, you would be enjoying a 12.5% charging time reduction, which is 2/16ths or the same as CTR medium, the amount of bonus you get from maxed-heated weapons. A fully-prestiged knight would enjoy about 15 extra points of mist a day, and I think that would be minor enough, especially for players who have already put so much time into this game and are clearly devoted, to not upset economy balance, while I think I speak for a lot of people when I say the appeal of even a slight increase in mist charging time would be a huge incentive to play, obviously particularly to do prestige missions, and the raised levels of participation could easily pay for itself in terms of more knights spending more time on the game and some of them buying CE to do it. I wouldn't put it past people to spend CE in the short-term to increase their mist-charging abilities sooner down the line, heck I'd be tempted to do it and I'm purely FTP.

I realise that's a pretty huge suggestion, but I liked it so much and feel it has such earnest potential, I had to share it. Plus if it did get the go ahead, I'd imagine a check to the knight's prestige rank when recharging mist would be easy enough to implement.

On a final note, the prestige milestones seem a little random to me. 5k, 10k, 15k even I get, and 25k sure, but why 45k for the final stop? Really this is more of a question than a suggestion, I can't figure any remote significance to that as the final prestige checkpoint. If you changed it to 40k, you would at least be following the Fibonacci sequence x 5 (1, 2, 3, 5, 8/5, 10, 5, 25, 40), or 50k would be a nice rounder number. In the awesome outcome the above is implemented, maybe you could increase the requirements to balance it off. 5k, 15k, 30k, 50k and 75k would be cool IMO, but enough of that.

Guild Halls
These are a couple of minor ones, but ideas I had nonetheless. Firstly, unless I mucked up the calculations, or the wiki data I used was inaccurate, the weekly upkeep of a fully expanded guild hall with all the wings and the command centre and 4th floor joining part and such, is 364,000 crowns. For a game where spirals and circles are so fundamental and thematic, the number 360 seems such an appropriate value, so I would suggest trimming down the total weekly upkeep to 360,000. This is literally about a 1% reduction so it's hardly going to upset any balances, and I would suggest taking it off of the 2 4th floor expansions, reducing them to 46,250 upkeep (and price) each, as that would affect only very invested guilds and 48,250 is not too much of a round number to upset (unlike the 75,000 for the 5th floor). I say this as someone who never has nor ever intends to be in a guild that maintains remotely that high a floor, I just think it would be neat, basically.

My other suggestion is for a piece of furniture. Quite simply, there are these panels in lockdown that spawn snowballs, which you can pick up and throw at your opponents to slow them down. I think these would be a really awesome and insanely popular and enjoyed piece of furniture to add to the guild hall range, and you already have code for knights carrying, throwing and being hit by snowballs in a non-combat area, since you've handed them out as usables. You could either make them a Christmas event item, for thematic reasons, or just add them to the existing selection, or maybe have them be available for a while as a debut since Christmas is a long way away, and then add them to the stock along with presents and trees and such. However you do it, I am willing to bet there are a lot of guilds out there who would put their backs into getting at least a couple of these things into their halls to lob snow at each other and visitors. The snowball would only be held and couldn't be taken outside of the guild hall, so they wouldn't invalidate having the snowball usable either. Like, buy CE put their back into it, wink-wink. Seriously though, how awesome would that be, and how easy to implement?

Shops
This is gonna be a pretty bold statement, but I earnestly think the bazaar NPC shops need a rebalance. The greatest offender is 1 star items, and I and absolutely everyone I have ever seen ever literally, I cannot stress this enough, warns people not to buy them if it comes up, and anyone who does just feels ripped off. I doubt any such malicious intention is in play, but given the way rank missions introduce you to the shops shortly after reaching Haven, to crafting later on and not to the auction house at all, plus the fact 1 star items are the most likely equipment players newly arriving in Haven are going to get as 0 star is beneath their best existing gear, and 2 star has a demanding price, at 3k per item all of this in practice combines to misguide and prey upon the naivety of new players, and it's just not good really. 3,000 crowns is extortion for a 1 star item, I understand the game is designed to encourage the use of crafting heavily, but as things stand it would actually be an improvement to remove the option to buy 1 star items, as the only people who use it are newbies who regret it as soon as they know better. As an experiment imagine I want to make a 1 star item: I start with nothing but crowns, no mist, no mats, nothing. First I need to buy the recipe, which is 250 crowns, Vatel might not have it but the only way I could get it then is asking players, who would direct me to the AH, where I could get the actual item directly for a lot less than 1k. So 250 crowns for the recipe, I learn it, then I need 10ce, which let's say I get charged high surplus and acquire at 1,000 crowns for 10. Then I need the mats, and again I'd probably end up at the AH for that, but let's assume a player manages again to take advantage of my newness and I pay 100 crowns per mat, there's 5 so that would be 500 crowns. So we're up to 1,750 crowns, and now I craft the actual thing, so that's another 200, for 1,950 crowns in total. Even if I manage to buy the recipe from a player who rips me off and charges 500 crowns for it, that's still 2,200 in total, not even quite 75% of the bazaar 1 star price.

I don't think it's the only thing that could tweaked, but if nothing else please fix this unintentionally-endorsed scam. I would propose changing the 1 star to 1,500k, which as I've demonstrated would need a pretty out there scenario to become cheaper than crafting, and honestly if you're absolutely trying to avoid it being better under any circumstances whatsoever, why even have the shops sell you things? They could just buy unwanted equipment from you and that's all. I actually have a proposed new pricing system for all the (non-trinket) equipment levels, which I'll give now.

0 star: 250 crowns.
1 star: 1,500 crowns.
2 star: 7,500 crowns.
3 star: 30,000 crowns.
4 star: 90,000 crowns.
5 star: 180,000 crowns.

Now, from the top, why is 0 star actually more expensive? Well because to be honest, 0 star items are the only type in the game where they probably get more of them sold in sum total than bought. Even 1 star items at least have PVP applications, 0 star items basically exist as newbie toys to be sold as soon as players get a grasp of the game's selection, and I help a lot of new players, they do this without prompting, trust me. As an aside, even if this isn't followed, could you please bring the selling value of 0 star items in line with all the rest and make it 10% of the buying price/15 crowns? For a new player, raking in maybe 100 crowns selling their redundant gear instead of maybe half a dozen crowns would be a helpful difference, and it doesn't really make any sense for it to be different. Anyway, 250 crowns would mean 25 crowns selling value which would help new players get a leg up a bit more. 1 star at 1,500 is an actually sane price that still makes crafting the better option, while 2 star's price is fine enough, IMHO. 3 star, 4 and 5 take minor dips. Honestly while I think 3 star would benefit from this, as, to crunch numbers quickly, 4k recipe + 10k recipe + 250ce/20k of ce + 400 craft + 1k craft = 35.4k, and there's the mats to consider, but again unless you're trying to craft a 3 star item with a 2 star prerequisite, have 0 mist and know and own neither recipe (and I even inflated ce to 8k per 100 in that formula), there's just no point. 30k would at least make it marginally practical that it could maybe sometimes be useful. As for 4 and 5 stars, I know they only exist as extrapolations of the selling prices of those items, so in this case we'd see the values go down, chiefly 5 star values. Considering the simply demented extent to which Vanaduke's dungeon is grinded by not only top players, but half of everyone who has defeated the Roarmulus Twins and can find someone at Champion or Vanguard to give them a lift into FSC, plus the fact you can farm 7k out of the floors before the boss, and if you defeat him another 3k in terms of the selling value of the boss's tokens, plus what his floor contains, well I honestly think that toning down that last part a bit at least might be a move in the right direction. I won't like though, I'm a fan of patterns and this set of prices starts at 0 stars and leaps up by x6, x5, x4, x3, x2 respectively, and I think that's cool. Potentially not best for the balance of the game, true, but at the very least, I really think 1 star items need looking at for their NPC pricing, as it's nothing short of a con right now.

Equipment
Just a few small notes, nothing too major so I'll get right to it. First of all, the shadowtech is shown as having slightly less power than the prismatech, a trend I know continues in the mk2 and I assume the whole family - it's displayed with the same value as the elemental tech variants that deal a status in return. In practice though the guns seem to do identical damage, which I think they should since damage types are equal, doing shadow damage isn't a "bonus" like status infliction is. So could you bump up its bar to display that properly.

Similarly, the Kilowatt Pulsar and Heavy Pulsar display as having the same attack power, as do the Radiant and Gigawatt Pulsar, and I don't have the 5 star recipes but I wouldn't be surprised if it continues there. I don't actually own a Heavy Pulsar either, but I own and love a Kilowatt, it's an awesome weapon. That said, either this is a display mistake like above, in which case it should probably be fixed, or the two lines of pulsars do the same damage despite the watt line having a good chance of causing moderate shock - it's in effect getting a status on top of its already considerable power "for free", since elemental damage instead of normal is a lateral, equivalent difference, not a disadvantage. If anything I'd claim it's an advantage, since it's quite easy to predict what you'll be up against and elemental has advantage against 2 families of enemies, is equally effective against 2 more and for the last 2 you can simply not use/bring it. I say this as an avid kilowatt user, but I think the gun needs a liiittle bit of a nerf, similar to the statustech alchemers when compared to the prismatech, simply for the sake of direct competitive balance. The weapon is already almost questionably highly-powered as is.

Next, it's pretty universally known and agreed by anyone far enough in the game that the Cautery Sword is useless. I found one in a box once, and that was more amusing than anything else. I had to find a new player with 1 star gear to donate it to so it might lead a briefly useful existence. Now, I'm not sure about this, but evidence supports it, and I've heard the cautery sword was sorta intended as an anti-Royal Jelly Palace sword. I assume it heralds from before the time of jellies being vulnerable to shadow damage. Now, there's one obvious solution to this, which is to make the cautery sword also do half shadow damage, have it be an anti-slime, otherwise slightly weaker nightblade. But if that doesn't appeal, why not give it a poison status? Now, in the real world, cauterising is often done with fire, freezing, or electricity ironically, but the idea of the action is to prevent, to stop and close a wound, so in SK's logic poison would fit that bill by preventing healing/regeneration, and a 3 star option for poison on a sword could be a valid option for taking on the Royal Jelly with, in exchange for its path ending there. Tier 2 lockdown balance would need to be considered as well, but it's an idea at the least.

I think that's all I had, for now at least that doesn't seem too out-there to present. I'm probably gonna think of something else later today, and be like "I forgot to mention that, d'oh", but oh well XD. So yes, long-time player, first-time forumer, wts tl;dr Ultra. I had fun writing this, I hope it's fun to read :).