now motivate me to keep playing this game.

so drugs can be extracted from huge caves of drug? you know, the crystal caves of the strangers.

@ above lol

im so poor on SK that when i buy CE i take it as a reward for my hard work

Sir, we request you please surrender the pipe and lighter... now. We also request you proceed to grab the nearest glass of water, and pass it over here so i can save the building when i burn my computer to prevent brain-loss

Before i do grab the zippo and aerosol can, i must go mug vana to buy the crystal meth i need to craft.

You mean you never thought that "Energy" might be so named for some kind of reason? Bleh, okay, whatever. Look for an NPC named "Energetic Knight" or something like that, whom you can find in the Town Square.

The game is already tied to real life: creation of CE is literally what provides the means for the servers to continue to function, and the developers' redox-powered meatballs to continue to function, if in a roundabout way. That's not the least bit exclusive with CE being a currency, which it does be, by the way.

How are steroids like CE? Steroids are hormones belonging to a group defined by chemical structure, as opposed to biological function. They do a very wide variety of things, mostly due to being grouped by chemistry more than biology, but none I'm aware of do anything like what CE does. For more detail, consult the oracle Google, or whichever oracle you prefer.

Cholesterol is a steroid, and it probably has gobs of potential redox energy, so I'm gonna assume that's what you meant until you clarify otherwise. I'm no expert on Humans either, so don't be embarrassed, but I'm pretty sure it's not a very good fuel for them. They're powered by breaking down Adenosine Triphosphate, removing up to two of its phosphate groups to release their binding energy, but because of many boring details the only practical way to quickly provide more energy is not by directly feeding ATP, but rather to feed Glucose and Oxygen, since their machinery is geared toward accepting fuel in that form. No one's really bothered with all the study and experimentation required to figure out how to do something like that, but FWIW my guess is you'd tap into the Human's power system and feed the glucose dissolved in a mixture of fresh, oxygenated erythrocytes with a saline serum to keep the consistency right, chilling the mixture as waste heat builds up, since cooling is one of the performance bottlenecks for their systems. If genuine Human components are not available... For the oxidiser component, pony erythrocytes might do in a pinch, and another alternative recently discovered is bubbles of gaseous oxygen surrounded by compatible lipids- kinda surprising, but their systems can assimilate it that way too. For the electrolyte serum, coconut water can also do in a pinch- NOT to be confused with "coconut milk!" Such feeding might be highly survivable for an emergency use, but for prolonged or repeated boosting you'd need to upgrade some systems; the first bottlenecks are probably the midgut gland and the spleen, but like I said I'm no expert either, so consult your oracle or local Human expert.

I manage to get through my life without injecting myself with anabolic steroids.

In a surprising turn of events, OOO reveals mist energy is actually Mountain Dew, and crystal energy is Doritos.

Lag is like sleeping. I'm not talking about the status here. There are three types of lag, all coinciding with various versions of sleep.

Dreaming lag is the worst kind as it is often a precursor to a disconnect. In this type of lag, the world around you freezes. You continue to walk through the meadowy grasslands of the aurora isles as you gaze at the trees slowly rotating in the breeze. But wait! What's that? The monsters are in a perpetual frozen state. Furthermore, your weapons cannot damage anything, including boxes. A pacifist knights dream. You gain the ability to walk through traps and not be harmed. While this may seem all dandy and fine, the moment you wake up and snap out of it you find yourself staring into the bowels of Cradle, gazing into the mysterious rotating clockworks. A message! From a mysterious "we" who seems to be having a problem no less. You disconnected apparently and must login again to resume. Ah, shattered dreams. Better than having a nightmare.

Nightmares. Not knightmares although those can be pretty bad too. Too bad it's not a knight's mare either as that would be quite interesting. How about a knightmare knight's mare's nightmare? No? Fine by me. Nightmares are chaotic moments of lag with brief glimpses of the conflict you are embroiled in. Oftentimes players complain of the nightmare inducers that are known as Nitronome, Polaris, and various other common weapons. The peak of nightmares occur during intense fighting; the screen freezes every few seconds then pauses for several frames before moving on. This has led rise to the mythical blitz antigua and many other anomalous hallucinations. Framerate drops like the temperature in Death Valley at night. Or like an elevator on a computer with absolutely no lag. Or like a Trojan's sword. But definitely not like a dying lumber. No, those things are ugly. They look like a bad actress fainting at the sight of her knight in cobalt armor. Like cobalt knights, nightmare lag is the bland, normal, semi-okay, semi-horrible lag, unlike its cousin dreamless lag.

Dreamless lag is like normal sleep. One second your heart is pounding at the pitched warfare and the next, you're still in that warfare. Same position, same mid-action pose, etc. frozen in place, unable to see or do anything. The world around you is moving but you don't notice, nor see. Occasionally this is followed by a wildly appropriate blank screen and you may even crash. The calm before the storm. The lull in the battle. That is, to you. To your teammates you are as good as dead, snoozing it out, sprawled like a drunken knight after getting in a bar fight with an angry jelly. The second you wake up, you are either dead, or near dead and thrown into a huge battle. Your teammates are mad at you for the explosive blocks you kept hitting and the various times you messed them up while sleepwalking.

Oh wait, sorry. This wasn't a spam-a-random-essay thread? My apologies. I'll be going now.

.......even if that is one intent of it, would you really go so far as to deny it as OOOs way of making money?

.......if NJThug bought OOO from SEGA and funded Spiral Knights to the point that they didn't need or want or care about making money from anyone else, would OOO still want an energy system in their game?