Im making a new guild called I Survived The Update

I was actually looking forward to this new implement, but it turned out to be suckish. Delete this implement at once, I liked it the way it was before, before the auction house, keep the advanced training if you guys want, but seriously, get rid of the increased energy prices, I don't care if you make the recipes cost more, but get rid of the FREAKING HIGHER CRAFTING COSTS, IT SUCKS. And of course, get rid of the FREAKING ITEM CRAFT BIND, this 'amazing' update is making everyone frustrated, and you will lose hundreds of players sooner or later. Man, what a turn-off this update was. Sorry, but you guys should ask for opinions to be submitted, warn everybody with a pre-update post with what you're going to implement, ask for more opinions, post again, and then implement it, ya can't just do random crap like this and expect to keep your players. I'm throughly disappointed, this did NOT make my day.

"Recipes
prices reduced and we are reimbursed our money, which they didn't have to do but did, thats a nice bonus and I expect a large increase in spending once the game is back up!"

Whats this reimbursement that your talking about?

Several people in this thread have asked that OOO consult players about game changes. That is what this thread is for. We are specifically requesting your feedback on this update, and we are reading what you have to say about these changes.

The problem here is that you're consulting us AFTER the big mistake, instead of before. The result is all this rage you see right now. Please, don't do insane changes like this out of the sudden.

Anyway, thanks for answering, and I'm cooling down a bit now, although I am still REALLY disappointed, so here's a bit better feedback.

800CE, 400CE and 200CE prices are way too high. Any free player that was ever thinking of buying a bit of CE in the future to help with endgame crafts will be simply encouraged to plain ragequit now. Those prices are just way too high.

While I understand progression was too fast, and endgame was ridiculously easy to be reached, increasing CE prices was not the way to go. Something like a major increase on the material cost would cause a much more desirable effect: More difficulty to reach endgame, an actual market for materials is created, and the CE prices won't cause free players to be turned off from the game.

As for the activity thing: You can be sure of it. I have already been watching the activity drop, ever since the CE market started rising up to 5K crowns. The moment it started raising there was a major drop on minerals needed to create a stratum (which is based on amount of minerals obtained in the last 7 days) - It went from 606k to 420k. That's a 33% drop, and this is really bad to happen in a single week. After that, the drops in mineral amount needed were pretty minor, being at most 25k per drop.

But really. This isn't something you can "wait and see how it'll go, and then fix any bad changes that were made or add new things to balance out". If that kind of action is taken, the game will not survive.

Aaaand I really want an answer from some staff member on my thread, so I'm going to ask you guys again to check it. It has a lot of approval from several players, veterans or not. There's several suggestions relating to the economy, and some relating to other game mechanics that aren't very well balanced. Please read it and reply, if possible.

http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/7433

good game crafting, with 200ce for a 3 star recipe how will new players get a foothold in the game at all without unloading real money!?

My last post was about implications, and mostly focused for other players. I do have feedback for OOO, though. Very simple feedback.

*Explain*. Please. Tell us what you're thinking.

You don't need to defend it against the whiners (because people will happily complain and keep complaining no matter what you say, as long as you're out there saying stuff) but at least provide us an explanation. I'm sure that you had reasons for this. Companies that are competent enough to put together a game like this in the first place aren't going to make changes this big without some pretty solid reasons, so please, tell us what those reasons are.

- CE costs for crafting. Honestly, this is the big one. Talk to us about the money. Logically, we know that with no money there is no company, and with no company there is no game, but right now all we can see is the pain, and you're going to lose people over it. It's not that it's going to be that much more unpleasant to get where we're going, after all. Having to hang out in tier 2 for a while longer really isn't that bad. Tier 2 is a pretty happening place. It's that the massive shift (with no warning) *stings*. We feel, however irrationally, that something has been taken from us, for no good reason. (It's a little dumb - obviously you've got some sort of reason, but you haven't explained it, so we don't know it, so it *feels* like there is no good reason.) It's this feeling of having been hurt without justification that's going to lose you people - even paying people - far more than the actual jacking up of the price (at least in the short term).

- Non-trade of post-binding crafted equipment. Not nearly as big a deal (as it's not a serious blow to anywhere near as many people), though it would be nice. Clearly something about the way people were playing the game was clashing with your vision for the game. That's fine. Having some idea of what your vision for the game was (and, thus, how this clashed with it) might be nice, though. There were people who were really enjoying the playstyle of "level up gear, craft it into higher-tier versions, then sell" and I strongly suspect that it wasn't *their* playstyle that you objected to. Explaining what it was that you gained by cutting them off might be nice.

- The recipe price change was obviously to counter the massively increased demand for recipes, and it could perhaps use *some* explanation. Why would you not want a crown sink here? Still, really not that big a deal.

- The boss token and recipe purchase changes are both obvious in their application, and are very nearly bugfixes. I think they're pretty self-explanatory.

- The Auction house is much appreciated, and likewise needs no explanation.

edit: and it looks like I may have already been answered. Need to go back and read the 100 replies that showed up while I was writing this.

edit 2: Nope. Still waiting for explanation.

@ flanne

O.o So, 800CE for crafting something is based on character progression now? That's new to my ears.

Game changing updates such as this should require some level of notice to the player base at least a few days beforehand to prevent things like this from happening.

You guys are not very good at developing an MMO economy!

The funniest part is how the GM that replied is actually contradicting:

He first makes it clear that our feedback is important, and then makes clear that no matter how much feedback we give. They won't change it untill hard statistics prove something.

In other words. We won't get the changes until they get "statistics".

The only bad parts of this update in my opinion is that it was completely unexpected and it drastically changes the market for the game (which could turn out to be a good thing). The updates for crafting were all geared toward stopping players from selling high star gear.

crafting 4&5* gear stay bound: obvious, no selling 4*&5* gear, which doesn't bother me at all because I never liked selling stuff.

Recipe price drop / craft energy raise: Well this threw me off at first but if you really look at it, it will still cost about the same to make one 5* piece of gear in the long run. I believe the way they want it to happen is that you buy the recipe (decreased cost) and then craft (increased cost). What this tells me is that it is no longer easy to mass produce gear looking for UVs.

I have been a paying player since the start and this update is not going to change that, but I really do understand why so many people are mad and I would be as well if I played the market. There should have been some notice and some discussion to prepare players for this huge update. Definitely a much better explanation than it just needed balancing. Players need to be told the truth even if it is ugly. If the game isn't making enough money, then talk to the players about it and see what they would pay for. This move was done without consulting the people who can move this game forward. I really want to see SK succeed, but this blind mass updating has to stop.

I am alright with this update, just angry it was without warning or discussion and as a paying player, I am extremely concerned about the future of SK now.

The damage is done, but I believe you should talk to the players and give them a truthful explanation.

This update is terrible.

Why?
I enjoyed having a mini mmorpg to play when i was bored, I liked that it was minimal money spent, wasnt a huge grindfest, kicked back fun environment.
The recipes were pretty obtainable, not to outrageous to buy & sell energy, easy to craft.
When i heard about the auction house i was excited, and even thinking of going into the crafting business to get myself some extra energy to do more runs.
& now? That idea is completely blown up.
I dont enjoy spending a ton of money on games, i have better things to do, this is now pretty much impossible to play without paying. It was enjoyable helping guildies and requesting guildies to help eachother out with gear, I liked the friendly interactions and how it brought people together, I was almost about to get my argent peacemaker but now that aint gonna happen.
You wanted feedback? Well here's a noose, go hang your game. You've just made the worse update possible.

If I wanted a grindfest i'd go play flyff or silkroad, if i wanted to spend a bunch of money to get to the top i'd go play ether saga or battle of immortals.
My love for spiral knights is slowly dying.
It was fun while it lasted, but i guess all good things come to an end ;/ I will return when you get your money grabbing heads out of your greedy [posteriors].

Who gives a flying ferret if people are bloody buying their way into endgame? That's moolah for OOO and income for the crafters. Why would you make the most absurdly silly change ever?!

I loved this game. I had the power to play as I saw fit with my energy. If I wanted to work for my gear, I'd do that. If I wanted to buy my gear, I'd do that. If I wanted to get my gear free from others, I'd do that. What you essentially did was to put everyone on a one-track narrow path whilst simultaneously killing your own trade volume in profits. Sure, you may increase your profit margins per sale (due to rise in crafting cost), but does this benefit your net profits?

I'm a Business student in University, taking marketing and business operations and for the love of God, I can NOT see why you would push for such an absurd update. Has anyone at OOO ever heard of the 4Ps?

Want constructive?
I'm a 5* player with 8000+ ce in my bank, so I'm pretty set since I've done just about everything in the game. What I've been trying to do is to bring friends in. People like me, start the game and find it engaging due to the community (you retweeted me @Zeratos once before) and the gameplay itself; I was free to do as I saw fit. I fell in love in the game and decided to take the leap and buy some CE to support the developers.

If I saw a recent change doubling the costs of making stuff, how would I feel as a new player? Discouraged, disappointed..just to name a few. Revert all the changes to crafting costs. Get rid of your modifications to equipment bind(s) transferring over through upgrades.

I'll reiterate what others have echoed: New players fall in love with the game and buy CE because of this. Don't alienate your player base by making it ridiculous to progress without paying. Give people incentives to BUY CE as opposed to making it a necessity.

This was a major FUBAR on the part of 3 rings. You decided to drastically change the way Spiral Knights is played without any input from the player base. Let's analyze this step by step.

Part 1: auto binding high level equips. Why. This is a bad idea both gameplay wise and moneymaking wise. Gameplay wise, this means high level players can no longer help out friends/guildies by giving them high level gear. It also just insta killed the trade market, since all the big money is in rare high level UV items. Moneymaking wise, most people who use CE heavily, use it on 5* unique gear. These are the people paying you REAL CASH. They just lost any reason to stockpile CE anymore. Having an auction house is pretty useless if all people can really do there is buy/sell 3* UV gear.... which leads to point 2.

Point 2: Raising Crafting prices. I realize this is a "free" game that relies on micro-transactions of CE to run, but with new crafting prices, this means each 5* item is now $3 to make from 4*. Combining all crafting costs from 1* to 5*, each 5* item is now more like $4-5. For a full 5* set of gear, that's 4 weapons, 2 armor, 1 shield, making for 7 items, which is 30-40 dollars in crafting costs alone, not counting recipes and materials. This games fun, but not THAT fun, considering dungeons are forever repeating and new content comes only once every month if even that.

Part 3: Changing how boss tokens work. Yes, playing through more levels of the dungeon means people need to spend more CE which means more money for you. But greed comes at a high price. high level players don't wanna spend an hour grinding from depth 1 to 23 just to kill vanaduke for max tokens. They want challenge, they want the most bang for their buck, to just go in fight hard bosses n monsters get their reward n then leave. Not sit around one shotting level 1 monsters. It's like asking MMORPG players to RELEVEL their characters EACH TIME they wanted to do a boss run.

All in all, it really woulda been better to consult your player base before springing such a massive change on them. Really. Hate to see you guys go the way of STO or APB.

I am just going to repeat what the other said, hopefully more people complaint, the sooner they will fix this.

Auction house, nice
Training Hall only useful for newbie
Crafting binding, sell restriction limitation, you just wipe out most of the market.
Doubling baseline ce cost to craft for 2-4 star items, and 800ce for 5 star, you just cause hyperinflation, market just from 4.7k-5k crown/ce to 5.1k+ crown/ce

For Part 3 I'm pretty sure it only means the boss levels. For Jelly it would be 15-16-17, and for Vanaduke it would be 24-25-26-27.

I find everything liveable with except the trading aspect of gear (but it is understandable). Personally, my sister and I tend to make sure and buy different recipes so that we can create two weapon paths (and so that we more or less share our recipes). I suppose that's a partial problem, it meant that while we would have usually only had the chance to buy one recipe, we were buying two and crafting for each other, thus making our lives easier in game. I also had a tendency to invite friends in to play and give them higher weapons...it made life easier and more interesting by them being able to do tier 2 or 3 with me rather than tier 1. By making recipes the only tradeable way of obtaining the high level gear it cuts down on trading and makes those that trade "for a living" have to put more energy into finding recipes since you can only buy one at a time. It does make people need to run more dungeons, and the non-basil pass thing makes it so that those in it just for recipes have to sink their energy by doing the levels.

Perhaps an unbinding fee? Something vaguely exorbitant, but not unobtainable and with unbinding all UVs are destroyed?

A warning would have seen everyone exploiting the impending update to make sure they were one of the few stocked up to gouge players by providing them pay only goods.

@Tsuyoi they said from the beginning of the boss dungeon, which are very clearly the ones he mentioned

BTW, would it have killed someone to give us more than 30 minutes of notice on changes like this?

To be blunt and honest, I love the game. It's the only game that I enjoy playing that differentiates itself from the other popular games out there (WoW, MS, RO, LoL..etc) that has a real time, FULL CONTROL combat system, where the player actually has to be immersed in the combat instead of just clicking spells and skills.

I was slightly unsure about it in the beginning seeing that there were no classes and only swords as the main form of weapons. DESPITE that, I was really drawn to the whole game.

Reading the earlier post on the launch date, saying that this game was to be 'everything we'd dream of', it's certainly reached that to a certain degree....

HOWEVER, with the completely...'wth' update on crafting and equipment, the game just took a turn from "Awesome Possum" to "Rip-off-Ville".

COME ON MAN.

Nice work building up something so amazing and splattering it like smelly dung on the floor ):

Please..PLEASE, do something about this. You guys wanted to make this game different, unique and out there. KEEP THAT GOAL.

Thinking about the level 1 to boss update:

This means 200 energy to get to jelly king, and get the max amount of tokens.

Also 300 energy to get to vanaduke, for max tokens. In the case of vanaduke:

Let's say i want the fang of vog. And let's say the max tokens is 10. This means i need to do 5 full runs. 5 x 300 energy = 1500 energy for fang of vog?

Well, that's just great.

@Collussus

you misread the update.

@ Collussus
Not to mention the cost of dying and reviving energy.. >_>;