So, like everyone else, I like everything about this patch except the increased crafting cost and preventing the sale of 4*/5* items. Here's why.

I have a limited amount of time to be able to play games. I have a job, a family, yadda yadda. You know the drill. If I can squeeze out 2 hours to play in a day, that's a good day. 1 is more common. Despite this, I don't pay $$ for items. I am happy to pay real-world cash to extend my playing time, so that if I'm having fun and have time to keep playing, I can afford that next elevator, or one more rez with a good group, etc. But paying for items crosses a line for me; it feels like I'm buying success. I want to succeed or fail at the game through my own skill, not based on how much cash I've paid.

That goes for crafting costs, too. If it costs 100 CE to make an item, I require of myself that I buy that CE with crowns, not with dollars. Crowns that I either pick up in a dungeon, or get from selling something that I picked up in a dungeon. An hour a day gives me about one to two runs through T2, for maybe 5k-10k crowns. Call it 7k/day average.

So for me, this patch means that in order to get my sword up from 4* to 5*, the recipe price may drop from about 48k to about 23k, but the CE cost will go up by 500CE, which is 25k crowns AT TODAY'S PRICES. But I fully expect CE costs to go up, up, up since people need fewer crowns (and there's less to spend them on) and more CE. So, I expect that it will take more days of grinding to get my equipment up to 5*, let alone think about any UVs.

I play this game because I enjoy the gameplay, but I gotta say, I'd like a little more variety. I'd like to be able to look forward to upgrading my gear to something where I can play in T3 rather than T2. But this patch has pushed that day farther away, and increased the odds that I'll get bored and move on to some other game.

It's from High Priority - Lowest.

1. BALANCE the Crown and CE in the Trade Market. Otherwise, popularity rate will drop.

2. Disable the heat requirement equips, so it can be Trade-able (as the game is not adventurous/quests like WonderKing or WoW, as Players "need" to merchandise) - THIS is a "NEED" not a WANT because other players sell-out so they would be able to continue grinding in Tiers.

3. Lower or limit the cost of Crafting, "reasonably".

4. Change the Auction House functions - Input TIME countdowns other than "long, short..etc" (to specify, please find Dragonica - just an idea of the layout and how it works)

- 1 & 2 is a MUST!! 3 & 4 is a choice.

Nothing in this update helps me.
I sell mostly low level mats and the auction house don't serve that well at all.
I'm all 3 star gear and now the gap to 4 star just became huge.
At least trade chat seems to be less noisy. That helps me some.

Auction house is great! I just want to see some actual timer instead of a "Short", "Medium", "Long" etc. words, it's unclear at that point.

-People saying this is good coz it stops others from paying a buttload of cash to go straight to tier 3, what kind of reason is that.
It was one incentive to pay, and a reason why a lot of people did pay.
Reason to pay no longer there.

-Increasing the cost to craft? There were alrady multiple threads where players were suggesting to makemore crown sinks to give people a reason to trade CE for crown, this update does the oppisite. It swings more weight towards CE.
Ive given away about 10-15 wolver sets, 15+ owlite shields, cutters, strikers, made avengers for ppl for the cost of alchemy alone, without factoring mat cost or any profit just to give away items to new players as a nice gesture. Now with the extra cost i wont be giving away a thing.

-There has been mixed reviews about the Auction House, me personally, i find it easier to go through my friends list to buy any mats i need, i have no reason to use the auction house at all.

-I usually solo'd the first half of any tier, and if i didnt feel like soloing jelly king, id invite people when i got to basil. Now people are less inclined to join midway through, and i'd rather solo the first half anyway, anything that drops is mine. I never felt cheated that i did the earlier lower profit area while others warped in towards the end, i liked it. Throwing a few tells around to people i enjoyed doing jelly runs with.

-So far the only positives ive found since this new update is shield bumping the robots in trainers hall out of their area(through the mist wall) and setting people on fire in the training hall.

-If there is a single positive thing since this update that has given me any reason to have any faith in any of the 3 rings staff, its the bugfixing and patient attitude Poseidon had when assisting in fixing the auction house glitch i had. He was polite, patient and quick to figure out a way of fixing the problem, and rather fun to chat to during the time it took for him to find a fix, which was soon mailed in a Spiral mail after it was allworked out.

+1 to poseidon(thanks again)
-1 to update, not a single thing that benefits me so far, although this is the first time my mist has maxed out since i started to play.

The only suggestion I have at this time is to put an alchemy machine next to the auction house. When I buy a recipe or the last material I need to craft something, I don't want to walk all the way over into the bazaar to make it. It's a small thing, but it will make the instant gratification of the AH that much more instant.

The only suggestion I have at this time is to put an alchemy machine next to the auction house. When I buy a recipe or the last material I need to craft something, I don't want to walk all the way over into the bazaar to make it. It's a small thing, but it will make the instant gratification of the AH that much more instant.

They have one it's down and to the right up the stairs, a stranger stands next to it. I am in favor of a vendor in the same area that way I can sell things I don't need there without having to go to the bazaar.

I have to say, I don't get time to play much, but I've been buying recipes in order to help out my guild, and help stock up the newbies and stuff there. The increase in the price of energy crafting, and the sealing of 4* items and above has pretty much killed that from the get go.

Which... is kinda disheartening. There's now no real purpose to buying recipes now, because you get them for cheaper off the sellers for crying out loud, or to craft for yourself, which, let's face it, is only good for a one time deal.

I'm strongly disinclined to continue playing now, because that tier 4 armor and stuff I was looking at just got yanked so much further from me that I'd be looking at scrimping and saving for ages now. So yeah, good job guys.

To start, I was pretty angry last night upon reading the patch notes and had that emphatic response eurydice was talking about.
Now, that I've cooled off, I'd like to let you guys know about my experience with this update.

I hardly ever post on forums, activated my account just for this, but read them often.

I bought CE early on in-game (around $60 worth) because I liked the game, wanted to progress my character to the content that I found challenging, and genuinely wanted to support the idea of the game. I did not mention this to give my post any more... weight, but just because eurydice has given me the impression that she is interested in individual experiences with this update, and I am providing as much information as possible. I absolutely loved the choice given to players on whether or not to pay real money for the game. Free to Play players would progress a lot more slowly, but it was doable with real life time constraints.

The reason I had been logging into the game was to craft and resell. It's the part of the game I found I had the most fun with. I really liked doing dungeons with my guild, but when they weren't on, or the runs were full, I'd craft and play the market. I've done the same thing with other MMO's I've played. It's what I enjoy to do.

This update takes a lot of the fun out of the game for me. I honestly do not know whether or not I will keep playing. I do not think I will purchase more CE, but I had made that decision prior to the update. I payed the normal retail cost of a game, and felt that I had contributed.

If I had sovereignty on what would happen going forward (knowing I am ignorant about the reasons behind the update, which I would love to know), I would definitely unbind the 4* and 5* items. This is what was most fun about the game to me, personally. I understand the want to not allow people to get to T3 immediately, but, if that's how they choose to enjoy the game, bully for them. It doesn't detract from my experience and even allows me to play the game the way I like to (playing the market). I am fine with increasing energy costs slightly (the amount that they were increased is slightly worrisome to me however), as I understand this game is still newish and trying to become stable.

Overall, I feel that this game has evolved past what I enjoy in video games with this latest patch. That may be more in line with what the developers had in mind from the start, and that's fine. It just removes a lot of the fun of the game from my experience. I wont clamor for a refund because I had fun with my purchase while it lasted.

Best of luck to everyone involved, and I will keep watching, and may log in occasionally to do a dungeon run or two.

I hope this post has been helpful to someone.

I'm going to ignore all aspects of the release except the two controversial ones: crafting costs and 4+* binding.

While there's been a tsunami of negative feedback regarding the changes, they are something the playerbase can adapt to, and potentially even understand. So I'll try to explain why neither of the changes is not the end of the world, though both of them were very poorly thought out from the player point of view. Both changes are obviously intended to slow down the progress of players, and for a good reason. The gear/tier progression is way too fast in SK (or there's too little to do once you are in full 5* gear, pick one).

The crafting cost increase might make life considerably harder for (new) players, especially F2P ones, but as long as it's possible to retain overall positive energy flow from doing Clockworks it's not an issue. Consider, currently 100CE costs approximately 5k crowns, and spending 80energy to do a t2 run nets you around 7-8k crowns, plus drops. Thus, even for a F2P player effort and time put into game equals progression. A slower progression than before, but it's something that is doable. This is obviously subject to change if the energy/crown ratio in the market gets out of hand in the near future.

Binding high-star items upon crafting is a good way to limit gear progression, at the cost of shooting the ingame economy of your product in the foot. I don't claim to have complete understanding of these things, but as far as tradeoffs go, it seems fair. However, players totally will see this as screwing them over, because from our point of view it hinders us twice, instead of taking something away and giving something in return. The stupid thing about how the patch tried to "fix" the player progress is that it did nothing to the aspect most obviously flawed: material drop/usage ratio. Every single player in SK has literally thousands of materials they won't use and can't sell to others because they have the exact same problem of material overflow. Crafting simply is not a big enough material sink, aside from the few most improtant materials like Swordstones. You added a sink for crowns (auction house) and energy (crafting costs) but did not touch the one aspect that was actually broken? Too difficult to balance or what on earth was the problem?

Anyway, the only way this release really screwed the players over was failing to notice us of the changes beforehand. That was frankly quite a dick move. I now have 5 4* items of various heat levels in my inventory that are useless to me because I already own the 5* versions of each. I was going to craft them to 5* and sell, but now they are just piles of wasted materials, time and CE. This, I'm sure, is a common situation with more advanced players and frustrates me to no end. If there had been even a week grace period for us to get rid of our stuff there would've been a great deal less anger at these changes.

So, how do I feel after this release hit? I was a pretty active F2P tier3 player who has done everything there is to be done in SK currently, sitting on a pile of CE and crowns and finishing off my alternate weapons and cool looking 5* items to use in costume slots. Today, after logging in I ran tier 3 once, to get rid of my mist energy, and then instead of playing more, I logged out. Why? Because there was no point in staying online further. Using my CE for dungeons didn't feel worth it anymore for me, since I can't level up gear for sale, so I chose to do something else. I mean, sure I could run more dungeons to hunt for the couple of recipes I want or level up the last item I need for myself (and still gain crowns in the process), but it just didn't feel worth it. As I said I can only talk about the economy of Spiral Knights from what little I understand, but I figure the 200-300 CE that I might've used tonight must've come from SOMEWHERE, even if it wasn't me who paid cash for it.

All in all, not giving a warning for the item binding sucks, but even disregarding that (and understanding/accepting the changes) my interest in spending time on SK dropped greatly. Outcome: not so good.

I'd like more fire and oil jar spawns in the Advanced Training place. We don't have PVP but with more of that we could have jar throwing fights >.> Gotta take off my volcanic stuff though, I wasn't being lit on fire enough(this should make me happy lol...)

So when exactly did Activision buy Three Rings?

The crafting fee increase is too steep and too sudden. A gradual increase or an increase after an advanced warning of a week or so I might have been fine with, but even if I want to adapt to this, I can't.

My friends and I (a group who moved to this game together, including some who spend money and some who don't) had a nice system going. I like crafting and they don't. They paid toward my recipes and then I made them their items at cost price with me taking no profit. We sat down last night and worked out exactly what we can afford and were going to start on 5 star things tonight. Now we would no longer have even close to the energy needed AND they are short of the recipes since I can no longer level anything to craft 4 and 5 star items for them. At least one of them has been playing with 2 star items to put all his crowns toward my recipes... because he's been waiting until I can make him the five star items so we wouldn't double up on recipe costs. Now he has 2 star things, NO recipes and no way for me to make him the things he has already paid toward.

I'd now have to buy quite a bit of CE to pay up on all the agreements I had and for a game that suddenly hikes up it's costs with ZERO warning.. I'm not willing to spend that.

It's also just lovely that I now have a load of learned recipes I paid so much for just this week and hadn't quite got around to using yet.

Now... I know you want to make more money and increasing the need for CE can encourage that, but we worked hard as a group and would have had quite a few 5 star items made this weekend. We planned for it for a long time. A week's warning would have let us prepare for this change. As it is, we feel like we've been kicked in the teeth and that customer service is a concept you really need to work on. Happy customers = customers who don't mind spending. None of us will be anymore because there's just no fun in a game when plans you spent a few weeks over get crushed like this.

Thanks for making a good game and we'll come back and deal with the increased crafting costs if you at least make it possible to craft 4/5 star items for one another again (though really... too big a change too suddenly). Anyway, apart from maybe an odd run with mist energy, we're gone now.

4* 5* binding and ridiculous transmute costs have effectively ended my interest in this game. Please emulate larger studios and do extensive testing and player research before attempting ridiculous balancing acts. Thanks for the fun while it lasted, I'll probably check in about a month to see if this ludicrous patch has been fixed.

The Jedi Patch atleast didnt kill the main aspect of the game...

@aeolianmode, #383

It really is a joke they didn't consult the player base and/or do extensive testing before making these sweeping, game-defining "balancing" attempts. It's absolutely inexcusable, especially for a developer that's been in the industry for the better part of a decade.

@ Feynt: Your math is a couple decimal places off. it's 50,000 crowns for 1000CE, not 5,000,000. (you were multiplying 5000 by 1000 I guess?) So it'll take you 1.25 heavy days of grinding to get the capital you need.

I'll be watching what happens over the next few weeks, to see what the energy market does at the very least, just out of curiosity. But I'm done spending CE for the moment, definitely won't be buying any with real cash anytime soon, and if things go as I expect I'll probably throw in the towel when the rest of my friends leave.

I got in on the first real release day (no beta) bringing in some friends who I previously played Diablo 2 with. We chipped in together to buy some CE, mostly to support the game since we were having fun, and I continued harassing other friends to get them to join this entertaining game. I hit 5* gear just a few weeks ago, and finalized my preferred build just this weekend, so I'm not quite done with end-game content (we failed at Vanny a couple times, trying to figure out how to deal with him) I was also selling Divine Avengers, partly to gain back CE spent crafting/running, but mostly to have enough on hand to outfit any friends who joined me and set up my Fiance so she/they could join the rest of us in Tier 3. Now I can't. I have no incentive to tell my friends to join in, as it would likely take them several months to be able to join me. I can't even just give them some of the costs for getting that far, since alchemy prices skyrocketed at the same time. I was originally going to get more recipes and build different armor/weapons for alternate set-ups, but no longer have any interest in bothering to do that since the crafting cost would basically run me dry. All of my friends who managed to join are in similar situations, especially those who were getting ready to craft things for each other, and are generally rather thoroughly disheartened by this change.

The auction house is nice and all, but with the mandatory fees I will not be bothered to use it (especially since the main thing I was selling cannot be sold anymore) I expect to see material prices plummet there, especially the 4 and 5 star mats, as the interest or ability for people to make 4 and 5 star gear will be crushed, while the materials are honestly not that difficult to obtain. Heck, at this point, you'll easily gain the tokens you need to buy the materials for crafting in the amount of runs you'll have to make to just afford to craft them. And that's not even getting into what I am sure will be a rather notable CE cost spike (although, oddly enough, it actually dropped between last night and this morning. Players selling out before leaving the game, maybe?)

While I do understand the interest in stopping people from rushing into Tier 3 and end-game content, forcing them to stay in tier 2 for several months before hand seems to not be a fair trade off. I've played for a month, and Tier 3 is the only interesting place for me, and even that is starting to get a bit dry. Maybe if more content was provided, it would be easier to swallow. Hell, then I could play with new people and explore new lower-level areas. As is.... well, I'll just wait and see.

Patch kills the game for new F2P players (gear for T3 now way less attainable)... kills the game for endgame players (unable to craft for guildies or for sale). Thumbs down.

lol several? more like 30-40%

spam crafting for UV and the market for those UV items was probably Three Rings highest source of CE profit.
Reasonable crafting costs and the ability to trade 4* and 5* items helped to complement this UV market. The changes
in the new patch effectively destroys Three Rings highest profit segment. I don't know why a profit oriented company would
do that.

I don't understand the claim that this patch makes it so that you can't buy your way into T3. You can still pay $$ for CE, sell it for crowns, buy all the recipes and mats you need from the auction house, and craft them using purchased CE. Sure, you'll have to pause briefly to farm some heat, but, come on. It's not like that's a real barrier.

There are a few items you can't get without grinding now; ones that have seals as prereqs. But they're in the minority, and you can certainly put together a T3-viable build without them.

for the very first time in my life e can read GAME OVER in a MMO patch.

does the adm plan to come here and say something?

Auction House Release

Pros
- I avoided trade chat at all costs and prefer to level up my character by actually going through dungeons (some call this grinding, I actually enjoy going through them :).
- It's nice to know that I can follow the price of certain items I need at the Auction House, especially if they are difficult to obtain in the dungeons.

Cons
- I "learned" my Aegis recipe, and now I see my investment of 45k can be purchased for only 25k - and it's going to cost me even more energy to craft it. Pretty hefty loss there, without prior notice.
- Been doing Tier 2 today and noticed at least 3 times, there are no minerals at the Crossroads Terminal...so even less to be gained in crowns upon exchanging minerals.

I figure I'll throw my opinion in too...

Re-binding alchemy products hurts, but I can kind of understand why it's done.
To make it hurt less, recipe costs were reduced so that more people can get them. Alright.
To keep alchemy costly after the recipes became cheap, energy requirements were raised. Sounds fair.
I think the energy requirements were raised -too much-, though. I'd like to see it toned down a fair bit-- maybe to something closer to 500 CE for a 5* item. I mean, I just got Tier 3 access the other day, but now my two best friends are going to have a serious uphill struggle to join me. (I was, incidentally, the one who got them into this game-- and for the first time I'm wondering if maybe that wasn't a good decision after all.)

The Auction house, in and of itself, is great! Trade chat really did cut itself down, and I even got into a bidding war over a recipe. (I gave up quickly though, the other guy was pretty determined.) However, 10% feels kind of high for the listing cost and the cut. I was much more comfortable with a 5% cut in other games-- just enough to be felt and considered, but not enough for it to really hurt. I mean, the tax on the Energy market is a mere 2%, and it does a decent job of distancing the buying and selling prices. The auction house's 10% is pretty hefty in comparison. And I realize this would take new coding, but it would be nice if "outbid on ___" mails either
1) could not be deleted before accepting the attached crowns, or
2) had no delete button, but automatically deleted themselves after you accept the refunded bid, or
3) automatically gave you the crowns when you clicked on them, and then promptly deleted themselves.
Not a top priority-- but it'd be helpful.

The Training Hall is a good idea, but it seems a bit easy for new players to walk right past. It might be better if newly-arriving players were given an objective to go in and talk to the clerk inside, who THEN gives the objective to visit the Arcade and Clockworks-- after inviting the player to fool around with the practice exercises first, of course. ESPECIALLY the southeastern infinite-mob-spawn room, where they tell you about the all-important shield-shove ability.

That's all I got right now. Hope this all works out somehow. Thanks for putting in so much effort, at least.

I'm not going to rage, though I probably could. I'm just going to say that I logged in with the intent of buying $100 worth of CE. I saw that the game got an update and was thrilled, but thankfully I read the update before buying the CE. I can safely say, that without some serious changes I won't be spending anymore money on the game.

My reason is simple, I liked that this game let you play in whatever way you wanted within the boundary of the system. You could be a merchant, a tour guide, a grinder, etc. You could do what you want. Now you are forced to play one way, which I believe to have shattered the spirit of the game. I might still play, but given that I like many others have been ripped off at least 100K crowns I'm not sure that I can continue playing.

On my review site I gave this game rave reviews. I have to go change that now to protect my integrity.