Rant below, but if you want a quick read / tl;dr, read the next few lines:

Grinding or taking advantage of the marketplace without having "fun" is not worth it if you are willing to spend a Quarter for each 100 CE. Or another way to put it: if you are so willing to spend mind-numbing hours to earn profits in Spiral Knights, why don't you try to work for or save money with only 1/5 of the time you would spend "not playing"?

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I'm sure many people have done the math for this ( and I've done myself extensively) that even after factoring in successful Jelly Runs or Buy-Low and Sell-High strategies, the "profit margins" you can get in this game is (when converted to what you could spend with real money) are factored on the scale of dimes.

Quick summary:

• 320CE~$1, or 32CE=a Dime (using a really conservative basis of buying the $5 for 1600 CE)
• Successful Jelly Run returns: 4500 crown for 30 CE spent, or ~3kcr profit
• Assuming rate of 2 runs per hour, that's 6kcr return per hour, or 120 CE/h
• 120 CE/h ~ $.375 per hour

This is assuming a lot of things, such as not factoring profit that could go into tokens and mats. But even on the ridiculous end on being TWICE as productive as the scenario mentioned, you're still looking at a rate of still less than $1 per hour.

Now remember, this is not a critique towards the people who are having fun as they are on Spiral Knights. You could have fun playing with whatever budget you so desire (which incluldes $0), or you could even have fun playing the in-game market since there is no losses aside from your leisure time (which is not really a loss as long as it really is still enjoyable).

No, this is for those who seem to be grinding for the sake of grinding, but not really enjoying the time they have in this game. Grinding in this case is either leveling, or advertising their low buying prices with hopes to sell them high for a profit. Of course, to figure this out, I myself was assuming I could "profit" from these market differences as well. But to put in the effort of not having fun playing Spiral Knights means that I'm effectively "working" for a return of $1/hour.

At the same time, there's the flip-side to this. If it's so not worth grinding since the conversion rate to real money is so little, then it should be very desirable to spend relatively little money to jump up in power TREMENDOUSLY. Even if you buy your equipment on a high end, $10 worth of CE will net you tons of 4* equipment to choose from, or a handful of 5* equipment if you so desire. While 100CE seems like so little to play the game for more than a few hours, if you actually put money into the game to get more playtime, it's almost like you get an additional day's worth of mist energy for just a quarter. It's almost like the same amount you'd pay for an additional continue in an arcade.

What I'm getting at is compared to other free-but-pay-for-boosts games online, this game seems to be the one most "worth it" as far as progress jump by spending money is concerned. I'm not in favor of increasing prices to buy CE with real money, but the current rates are a steal when you look at the time and effort you'd save grinding or playing the market while not having fun doing so.

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So for either the tl;dr or the rant, I'm curious if anyone has seen this as well to the extent of what "progress" means in this game. Or I should say, why aren't people actually putting money into this game because of the amount of time you'll save if you hate grinding in other paid games? I used to play another game by Sega called Phantasy Star Online, but the amount of time I put just on the endless grinding was what you'd always expect of MMO-RPGs. At the same time, I couldn't save myself the torture with anything remotely affordable compared to what I would pay in real life, and this is on top of having to pay the cost of the game AS WELL as the $10/mo for being able to join the online gaming servers.

My true main point:
In all honesty, Three Rings isn't making this obvious enough to people. While you see what $5 or $10 can get you in terms of CE, it's hard to actually know the value till you've seen what type of "profits" you can get in-game from any method you can see as high-returns, and comparing that to what you could've done instead by paying a comparable dollar amount (which is at least 1/5-1/10 of the effort actually doing the grinding or market-playing even on the basis of minimum-wage).