Roll out new content, make it very hard and new items very rewarding to the point it makes the current 5* gearset obsolete in the eyes of those who aim for the proverbial end-game.
The current level of gear can then be left alone and the new gear can be made appropriately difficult, both in time/resource investment and skill requirement to obtain. Think something like the fang of vog, except actually significantly improving upon the previous tier of items and impossible to sell. The market for the pre-requisite gear would still exist but it wouldn't be so common as to devaluate it.

Not only would that give the Devs a clean slate at rebalancing the end-game gear's scarcity without being unfair to generally everyone currently but it'll also give the current population of players who are willing to pay for CE some newfound motivation to play.

This dev reply lecturing people for playing their precious game the 'wrong' way confirms these problems will never be fixed. I was holding out for a few days to see if the bind on craft thing was getting rolled back and I see the devs are even more wrong-headed than I even imagined.

Seriously, telling people they are playing the game differently than you designed is completely misguided. A game might have been designed by a small number of people to play a certain way, but once thousands of others get their hands on it and spend enough time, there is going to be a metagame that develops. It would be very unusual if the developers could have predicted the quirks of the emergent gameplay that the community builds.

Great example is the selling of basil ports. People realized that going through 4 levels of annoying dungeons for a pull at the recipe slot machine with very little heat and crown return was boring and a waste of 40 energy most of the time. So after a while a few people figure out that when you hit the jackpot on some good recipes, you can share the wealth and skim off the top, so to speak.

So from the above example, its a gestalt behavior that's developed as a workaround to the game mechanic that achieves the desired reward (getting high level recipes) without going through the undesirable aspects of the game (slogging through the poorly balanced and frustrating tier 3). So as a designer, you have to ask yourself: If players are using exploits to bypass undesirable portions of your game, what does that imply about your design? It would be rare for the devs to have anticipated such an emergent behavior.

So you can shrug your shoulders and say 'no problem'. But many people find this unfair and consider it an exploit. So now's your chance to put your design skills to the test and admit that the current design is faulty and reengineer it. Which is what you did with this patch. But another option might have been to make the 4 levels leading up to basil fun and worthwhile, or maybe introduced some random item into the dungeon like a 'Cryptic Schematic', which you scrounge up on the 4 floors leading up to Basil. Once you reach him, he will decipher them for you and reveal which recipes he is selling, one for each 'Cryptic Schematic' the party discovered along the way. Or some other redesigned game mechanic.

But the most important part of this process is to realize that this game no longer belongs to you, it belongs to the thousands of players who pay real money to be a part of it. So maybe some kind of explanatory post such as the OP might have been useful a month or two ago when you started to realize certain trends that didn't meet the original design document. If you had opened a dialogue with the player base a few weeks ago, you could have avoided this negative backlash and still had the chance to address the issues you saw developing. Or just maybe, there might have been a way to get player feedback and suggestions... oh, right, the suggestion forums! How silly of me to forget.

Now it's too late. The game is over for a lot of people and instead of gathering data and then implementing a change with plenty or warning, we get a massive dump on the goodwill of the player community, and then some blowhard shows up a few days later to lecture and reprimand people for having the gall to misbehave on his game. Better to bring up the subject and give people fair warning than to cludge together some amateur hour 'balance' patch and then try to be diplomatic about it when it blows up in your face.

So, boo freakin' hoo, everyone is running around with Divine Avengers. No one gets to feel like a precious unique snowflake and be the only one on the server with a glowy sword that they worked ever-so-hard to get. Cry me a river. Maybe don't attach the snowflake sword to the only halfway profitable grind in game and then you wont see dime-a-dozen Sealed Swords and Antiguas. There's a design tip for free. Or here's an idea, how about you do something about the gaping balance problems with tier 3 shock dungeons, chainstunning ice mobs, useless armor stats (seriously, piercing resist is the mark of a noob), and the million other problems that have existed since beta that have gone unaddressed. Not a word from the devs has been shared about the myriad design issues that may have contributed to all these players somehow messing up their enjoyment of the game by 'undervaluing' items. Seriously, your actions on this patch have generated much more dissatisfaction than any amount of regret over how 'easy' it was to get a glowy sword. What's more important, people paying money to you to have an item that they care about, or people getting a spanking over daddy's knee and a character-building lesson on the value of hard work? Please...

The biggest tragedy is that the money lost from this disastrous patch might have been spent on something that would have saved the game: more items, more monsters, more dungeons, more stuff to do. Sure that costs development time and art assets need to be created, but do you actually care about making a good game, or do you care about bilking money from suckers and chiding them when they try to do things you didn't think of?

So this is too little, too late in my opinion. I'm not going to be jerked around by some company that doesn't know what they're doing, and worse, won't even admit it. All this "Well you need to understand..." stuff is patronizing and insulting, and doing it after the fact is laughable. If this patch was given a week or two of warning, I could marvel at how inept it was, then take steps to guard myself against the brunt of it's negative effects. But the fact that it was dumped on me with no warning really just makes me shake my head in amazement.

So your post revealing your design dilemma between crafting-to-trade and maintaining the ~specialness~ of 'rare' items is cute and all, but your comments don't have any actionable information at this point. It's either misdirected and pointless consternation about theoretical game design or an attempt to appear 'in-touch' with the community, neither of which I find compelling. Again, it might have been good to know this a week before the patch that your game was having an identity crisis.

It's pointless now. Nothing will change, the game will tailspin, and I'll be long gone. What a shame.

Seriously I do not think raising crafting costs and adding an unbinding cost is is the correct way to go about fixing a rarity issue. I know devs don't like the fact that tier 5 gears were becoming more common, but seriously what difference does it make if people are running around in tier 5 gears. Its not like it is end game once you have 5 star items, people will continue paying and attempting to craft other equipment to test out different play styles like bombing or gunning, elemental weaknesses etc. The problem right now with the game is its lack of content, for example (only two bosses), floors that seem semi repetitive, and rare items that only drop from boxes and not monsters themselves (for whatever reason I don't know). Your patches should be focused more on implementing more items like the recent brandish series, giving people more incentive to continue crafting and Pay you for CE. I'm pretty sure your company made plenty from the recent rose regalia promo along with flourishes. Why fix whats not broken.

"Over the next month, we plan to implement a new store that will allow players to "unbind" items. There will be a fee for doing so, roughly equal to the CUMULATIVE cost of crafting that item."

Wait so the fee you're going to impose is going to be cumulative..? So unbinding a 5* item is going to cost relatively to crafting it through the 0-5* too? I hope you're kidding.

Either way it's painfully obvious this is all for Three Rings to make a much bigger profit than they were before. There were many ways to get people to buy more CE without completely slapping us all in the face and increasing the prices of alchemy by tons.

Don't want people to just buy items from crafters? Give them an incentive to craft it themselves rather than make it COMPLETELY mandatory to craft themselves. Figure out a bonus that you can only get if you craft it yourself and make the bonus disappear if you were to trade it. Another MMO I've played gives a 10% stat bonus to any item you find yourself with the bonus going away once it changes hands which adds a pretty good incentive to acquire items yourself rather than buy them.

Want to make certain items rarer to get? Make materials that are necessary for rare crafts that much rarer to find. Or make recipes RARE recipes which crafts a Rare item that can't be traded. The recipe would still be able to be traded and would still appeal to the base of players who enjoy doing business and you still win by having people need CE to spend on the alchemy of that recipe. You could make these drop very sparingly from monsters or have them on Basil (very very low chance). This would make finding a rare recipe feel very satisfying as you would have something that most other players will not have and can't have without finding one of their own. This gives people who are already in Full 5* armor something new to do (and spend CE on) and more people buy CE because they want to craft that item badly. The rares could even have a higher cost to them CE and crown-wise (in my head they would look close to what current alchemy prices are...).

ANYWAY the point is there was a ton of way you could've handled this patch and had the fans of this game love you to death AND still end up with more money for your company. There are so many ways you could bring in extra CE purchases without doing this it's unbelievable that you expect us to believe you're doing this for us when it's obvious that you just want to force us to pay more to have a chance at playing this game at all.

Instead of thinking of ideas to please your current players and attract more with more content and giving players an incentive to buy more CE, you've created nothing of value and increased the price of playing the way we were all before. This is rightfully angering all of your current players and giving us no reason to recommend playing your game to anyone because we already know they will face the crafting crisis of needing TONS of CE to advance anywhere in the game.

The more I read about all this, the more pissed off I get.

I enjoyed playing this game, a lot. I spent a lot of time, and decent chunk of change, for a game anyway, on this game. I had every intention of spending more money on this game. The only updates you should have done was add more content. Now it seems to enjoy this game to the fullest, you either have to grind for years to save up enough crowns to buy enough CE, or you're forced to spend money on it. I can't imagine how new players feel coming into this. It'd be a horrible experience. I can see paying a large sum of crowns to unbind items, but not CE. The first thing I thought of when I started reading this was, "Man this sounds too good to be true. I bet my ass they make it to where you can unbind items and a ridiculous amount of CE instead of crowns." Guess I was right.

Hell, why even have crowns in the game if you're going to make everything cost CE? I understand so you can buy CE with them. However, at the current crown to CE cost, which is 4900 for 100, you'd have to do at least three Jelly King runs to get enough crowns to buy a spare 100 CE with. This isn't including reviving cost. You're screwed if you have to revive. So in the end, you're looking at somewhere over 100 Jelly King runs to even make ONE piece of five star equipment, if you're starting with at a one star piece.

Why you guys had to screw this up is beyond me. Why you had to drop this huge "F U 2" bomb on us without warning or gradually introducing it is beyond me. You should really consider what to do about this before it's too late. Sure you'll keep a couple people who have more money than brain cells. But for the most part you're going to lose a lot of your player base. And they won't be replaced by new players. New players will play for about two weeks, realize how hopeless it is without spending money, and instead of doing what YOU want them to do, which is to buy CE, they will leave.

I'm giving you guys a week before I uninstall. It's no longer fun, or worth my time and money. You have effectively driven away at least one PAYING costumer and if you think others won't leave, you're really ignorant.

Really hope this game recovers.

@iamah Actually, we were always there. I've been pure F2P my entire time here, and I'd craft for UVs and then sell at a loss (or semi-loss). Crafting off mist is also a factor here - if you're a relatively rare player, then converting mist energy to CE-equivalent (by crafting and then selling) is actually something of a win. The average price for 2* gear was actually about 2kcr a bit ago - which is to say, enough to recoup the energy costs (at the time) and nothing else. Of course, these people were limited by the fact that they were, by nature, not crafters, and they didnt' want to spend much time in chat - so any individual one of them/us would only be selling for a little while at a time - leaving the more dedicated crafters/merchants plenty of time in which to make a profit. Now, of course, we have an auction house, and so all of the people who want to sell in a no-hassle way are flocking there - and since it doesn't really require effort from anyone, you no longer have any competitive advantage from being willing to put in more effort.

As for where it all boils out... well, that depends on how much people want UVs, and how many people there are to soak up extra no-UV (or cruddy-UV) 2* gear.

Gah, This whole thing reminds me of when another of OOO's games, Whirled, changed it's look from black to white. People bitched CONSTANTLY for about a week or so. They had petitions to change it back and almost everything that is going on now here in SK. What about now? No one really cares anymore, they got over it, I think it's time you angry players do also.

Come on guys, Give the Dev's a chance. |:

Post 56 is spot on.

To recap: don't punish us for playing the game "wrong". We're the customers, and we're always right. If the way we're playing isn't the way you think we should play, then you're thinking about it wrong.

Or a third version: Were any players complaining about rare items becoming common, or was it just you guys?

@Cobalt

Thats what the Devs want, they are PERFECTLY aware they're screwing their own players over, They're just gonna wait out the people that are not moronic masochist to quit the game, and then milk out money from the rest of the masochist that have become to attached/addicted that stay in the game.

This is a COMMON occurrence in MMOs, please stop trying to make it sound like the dissatisfied costumers are in the wrong cause we're not.There just a very limited things we can actually do at the end of the day the Company that owns the game is effectively GOD.

What Churgethoth said +1

So we get to pay double for our items? SWEET!

Money. Grubbing.

Item rarity is something you messed up a few patches ago by implementing rarer materials into the token shop. Do not complain about that now. Rare materials meant rare equipment and variable prices, a true market.

Getting others to craft it for a price is simply how an economy works. Some people prefer dishing out money over spending time grinding/earning in-game currency, you should be happy about that since it finances your bloody company! This is not wrong on their part, it is your fault for not having anything else to work towards in this game.

The only point in the end-game is crafting high tier sets for others. The most important point for new players is getting a high tier set. That is not going to change. No matter how many silly additions to the pricing schemes you make you will not be able to change that. If your game had character progression rather than just item progression you wouldn't have this problem.

I'm sorry, Khaim. This is completely wrong - ESPECIALLY when it comes to games.

I'm going to bring up a quote that a WoW CM said "Game design is not a service industry." After saying this, he got a ton of community backlash - until people actually listened and understood it.

"Game design is not a service industry." This is 100% true. Customers do not go to a game development company and ask them to create x game to y specifications. Games are designed and created around the vision of the developers - sure they want to make it appealing, and will use techniques and design choices that will drive customers to both enjoy the game, and buy it. However, that doesn't change the fact that there is a set vision for a game. If you don't like how something is played... then you don't play it. If you don't like First Person Shooters, you won't like Call of Duty, and if you go and complain about how its a first person shooter to the company, then that is just being ridiculous.

MMO's are a bit different grounds (seeing as how they are ever evolving), but still share the same concept: The developers have a vision for the game and how it is played, even going forward. It is COMPLETELY in their rights to change things up to get people to play the game how they envisioned it - hell, you probably agreed to a ToS or EULA that allowed them to change it at anytime without your direct consent.

Obviously community involvement and communication is NEVER a bad thing. It is incredibly useful, so that you don't see upsets like this, and so that they can see what players like. However, if they choose to listen to players and add or change things to what customers like about it - then that is their prerogative (be they loving intentions or greedy ones, it matters not); they have no obligation whatsoever!

The entire "I'm the customer and I'm always right" mantra needs to go away. It is so selfish and entitled in this day and age. You pay for what you get, and if you don't like what you get because you don't fully understand it, it is not the seller/producers obligation to change it to how you like (unless of course they didn't fulfill what they said they would).

I'm not saying these changes aren't bad or anything - I'm just saying that demanding it to be reverted because "you don't like it" is a bad reason. They don't owe you anything, and the least you can do is point out why it is a bad change or why you don't like it, especially without being hostile.

OT: I agree that there should have been a lot more communication - specifically letting us know in advance that a patch such as this was going to be occurring. Most large MMO's out there always release patch changes early on, sometimes months in advance, so that players know what to expect, and so that they can see how players feel about it. This is something I believe you guys should consider.

Well said, Cactuscat.

Good heavens, anything but character progression! If I want leveling [bullcrap], I'll play WoW. Or RO. Most likely RO.

But anyway, I'll add to the people speaking before me:

You messed up when you made items easy to get. Basically, if Faust was actually hard to get/rare, the market wouldn't be flooded with it in the first place.

The first step would be to remove the non-boss token stuff and replace them with random mat drops. Why would I need to craft stratas when I can pinpoint anything by running arenas all day erry day?

Alternatively, you could make the weapons you want to keep rare suck. You know, like about 80% of the equips noone is using. I bet cautery sword and the scale mail line are rarer than anything else in this game, save probably for blackened crest and fang of vog and some other drop only stuff.

Or wait, I had a better idea! Make other items worthwhile, so that rarity actually factors into the decision making process and you aren't forced to pick one of the top 5 swords/2 armors/1shield if you want to play without gimping yourself!

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. It's my natural reaction when I'm hurt. You hurt me OOO! You broke my heart with this stupid update :'(

PS.: I'm still happy you took the time to write this out, even if I consider the decision making process bad.

But cactuscat, your words are probably falling on deaf ears.

The community has already ploughed it's furrow and are not looking back. They are going to seed with their anger and hate, and sooner or later, the community is gonna resemble a schist quarry than a blooming wheatfield.

The battle lines are drawn, and it's too late for the community as a hole. They will Larch towards a most fernicious fate, and it's all their befriending fault for missing the cave for the granite. Or waas it the granite for the cave.

In any case, it's a bit too late to stop the inevitable. The only thing we can do is sit back and sling puns.

Honestly, I don't think I can say anything more which has already been written here, but I just want to make sure that whomever from the developer side is reading this topic, please, PLEASE read and actually listen to what Vitek and Churgethoth have written with an open mind.

Cactuscat222, I respectfully disagree with your position. Though I am in complete agreement that the customer should not be in a position of absolute power over the course of the game, I think you're looking at our concerns in a wrong way. The entire reason we're complaining is because we are deeply concerned for it. We're not complaining about the nature of the game, we're complaining about a change which has drastically made it neigh impossible to progress through the game without either a substantial injection of money to reach even the first set of completed 5* gear or a pious devotion which is completely unseen in most games today. To expand upon your analogy, we're not complaining about an Italian Restaurant because it's Italian, we're complaining about how they're cooking all their dishes next to a giant vial of rat poison.

I, too, am tired of players thinking that they have the god-given right to dictate the terms of the game, but these concerns should not be scoffed at. These are real problems. And they are affecting a larger population than the developers are admitting. I've been with this game for a long time and have gladly invested significant funds towards this game. I've been appreciative of their service (countless times where GMs have rescued me from non-loading load screens) and supportive of the game which I have considered to be my favorite since I first saw it back in Fall 2009. I disagreed with some of the choices that were made, but I still played.

However, I have grown weary of the fact that instead of embracing that the game has become and expanding upon it, they're violently jerking it back towards their initial vision. Yes, it may be right to do so at times (I personally approve of their solution of to the black-market tickets to Basil), but completely blasting crafting and purely murdering the current game system is by no means the right way.

I feared something like this would happen, but after they made the Jelly King easier, I thought this was an intentional design to make Sealed Swords and Antiguas more attainable. Yes, UVs were virtually everywhere, but I think that's what made it great. No two people would have the exact same variants and it is because of this that there was actual variety. I fondly remember times when although my friend and I had the same pieces of gear, we had different UVs which allowed us to divide the battlefield and completely conquer before joining together on the large threats. I fashioned myself around anti-Constructs and boy, was I ever efficient at it. With the new system, two people with the exact same gear will be just that. Exactly the same, no "variety", as they so claim. Whereas before, two speedy swordsmen could specialize within their own groups, now they'll be nearly the same now.

As I said before, I hope the developers take the time to read all the feedback with an open mind. Criticism is often what gives way to perfection and I hope our cries fall not on deaf ears. But for now, these changes have spurned me from what I considered to be my love. I'm not a big name, I haven't made a new topic screaming about how I'm leaving and demanding others to feel sorry, I'm just another humble player. One among many whom rarely speak up and are seldom noticed among a throng of far more vocal participants. It's been grand, but I'm afraid until something is done, I'm simply going to elect to stay out of this game as so many "defenders" of these changes have so demanded.

Fare thee well, and I sincerely hope that our grievances and suggestions of my fellow brethren are seriously considered in due time.

"In considering this problem, we've had to balance two conflicting goals:

a) how can we retain the excitement of owning a relatively unique item that was a challenge to make and craft while;

b) allowing players to explore the option to make and trade items?"

Make Unique Variants the realm of crafters, and crafters only. Rather than being a random chance at a random bonus of a random magnitude, create special materials that will set the type and degree of the bonus (two categories: type like "Damage Bonus - Construct" and degree like "Low"). Have it so that you add the UV onto the item after it's been crafted, and doing so makes it bound (so only crafters can have UVs). Makes the UV items themselves expensive: lots of mats and lots of crowns (maybe a moderate energy cost, but the game has enough of those). A "Maximum" degree item could cost 500,000 crowns, 5 five-star mats, 10 four-star mats, 20 three-star mats, 40 two-star mats, and 80 one-star mats. Make adding a UV to an item require the recipe and cost the same as crafting that item - except the lower level item - materials and all, (this is in addition to the materials and crowns spent getting the UV item). Make it so that upgrading a UV item removes the UV.

That would make crafting provide a special bonus to the crafter. It also removes the ridiculous lottery that is UV farming. And it sinks mats and crowns like a boss.

The energy cost increase on crafting is somewhat preposterous, as energy is already highly in demand (the cost change discourages people from crafting their own gear). An increase in materials needed (to help deal with the flood of materials), and crown costs (because this game needs more crown sinks) would be much better.

Mats for 4 and 5 star items should be made much more rarer or else the recipes should require something like double what they already do. Problem of 'high tier item glut' would be solved right there, without this very unfair CE-gouging of crafters with this binding/unbinding business. Also, make tokens able to buy fewer rare mats (or make the amount you can buy with them limited, for instance make Brinks only have one or two at a time of each mat every 24 hr period per player.

CE gouging and punishing crafters is not the answer to rare items not being rare enough. Control the rarity of the MATS instead -- make 4 and 5 star recipes require rare, untradeable, boss-drop-only items or something (and then add some more bosses).

I find Nick's statement echoing the sentiments of some of the players back in this thread from December. The main topic there is that you shouldn't just be able to waltz into the game and be able to arm yourself to the teeth with top gear. Somehow a player should have to earn the item or prove their mettle somehow to have the privilege of accessing the powerful gear. Some more cruising though the old threads will reveal lots of changes that make it so that you have to actually play the game instead of dropping a wad of cash and being at the Core entrance all to quickly.

(Please don't revive that thread. If you want a discussion that topic I recommended you create a new one that is up to date with the current game.)

I think that even putting weapons like the Sealed Sword or the Antigua up for token swap on a medium difficulty boss character was a mistake. Inevitably you end up with someone grinding out for the tokens, making (token) price increases fairly irrelevant. Heck, knights were soloing Vanaduke for fun long before the well known Magnus ever picked up this game. These items used to be very prestigious because they could only be found as rare chest drops; on top of that the crafting materials for them were really hard to find (once they finally started dropping). If we could once again have those upgradable items that require luck and skill to acquire it could really bring back some of that flair from the past days.

Though the general commentary on crafting costs will take another few days in the least to see the actual impact. This is not the first time there has been a major price swing on things. The most recent one was when Recipe and Item costs were increased from what people had come to expect from the later weeks of the Preview Event. There were cries of bloody murder in the forum, yet no one bothered to acknowledge that the Crown drop rate was much higher than it was in Preview.
In a couple days the Clockworks was turning again as if nothing ever happened. My point is that the Dev team does not just arbitrarily change the cost of things in game without tweaking other things that help maintain the overall balance. These things may be a few pokes here or there that the vast majority of players may not notice, as such behavior must be observed as there's an obvious lack of verbal feedback on there tweaks.

As always, with the other times things were "broken," the Clockworks will keep turning. Tweaks and fixes will be made, but they will likely be what the game needs and not what everyone wants. Plenty of people have left of "poor decisions" and "unfair changes" but the population of Cradle keeps growing.

@d0gr0ck, I remember the initial Release price hike on recipes/items. I thought that one mostly disappeared because, for most MMORPGs, preview prices are fractions of release prices, so there was plenty of "this is just how it is, sorry," and that seemed rather reasonable. And it was crowns, which can be earned, rather than Crystal Energy, which more directly hits the pocket book of a paying player.

The current changes made me think last night, well, what if Spiral Knights always had this high of a cost for crafting? Or rather, if the cost had been raised to this post-Preview, along with the item/recipe crown price increase? What if people were never allowed to unbind crafted items on Release day?

Well, there wouldn't be a bait-and-switch feeling amongst some of the paying players. The expectations would have been properly set, and people wouldn't have been caught off-guard with the crafting of 4* and 5* items. Indeed, that would have been gone, and would probably have been accepted as "that's the difference between Preview and Release."

I think this patch was essentially a new Release Day—in fact, Nick referred to it as the game's first production patch. But this time, players were under the impression that Release had already passed and only incremental changes would come by, an assumption most rudely uprooted.

This isn't the last of changes, probably not even the last of radical changes. It's never stopped being Preview, it's never stopped being Release Day. It's always Release Day, and the game's byways and rules perhaps should be treated as volatile: here one day, gone the next patch.

@ajericho

this isn't an issue of things just changing some and that's it.

this is an issue of materials being virtually worthless, crafting being useless for profit, and even the stuff you do manage to sell on the auction house, guess what, you have to put up a huge listing fee which you get back if you're lucky enough to actually sell the thing, but no even then you're still going to lose 10% off the top anyway.

this game had a pretty major issue with crowns and materials being pretty useless, particularly materials and instead of doing anything about that they actually managed to go in the opposite direction and make it worse somehow.

virtually the only way to advance in the game outside of buying CE for $$ is to run jelly king until you die of boredom, due to the fact that the worthlessness of materials makes it mostly pointless to do T3, and the fact that the two jelly king levels before the boss fight are the most lucrative in the game crowns and heat wise wipes out the other gate options unless you magically get a gate that's almost nothing but graveyards and arenas.

ajericho
Interestingly enough the original crafting cost for 5-star items was 500ce and halved per star downwards. People were very happy to drop to 250ce in the Preview. I was somewhat surprised to see that it did not go back up again when the game was released. It made many of those neat little low star items effectively useless since you could easily skip over them because the meatier items were in reach the moment you start.

You have a good point with Preview vs Release. I think in Preview people were much more open to large changes since the event and state of the game catered to possibility radical changes. People now largely expect a more static game, which they likely now know, isn't what's necessarily going to happen.

I have to echo the comments about making materials/recipes more rare and difficult to obtain (think Diablo 2 ZOD). There's a certain amount of excitement when I find a new recipe from Vatel or Basil, the joy of discovering a gem. Or when I'm running a level and some random monster drops a material I've never seen before, I immediately go onto the wiki to see what my new mat can eventually bring me. That makes me want to come back and play more, discovering new materials and buying new recipes. I'm a relatively new player, still working on 2* gear, and every night at 3am EST I log on to see what special new recipes Vatel has to sell. Some nights he has nothing I want, ho hum. Other nights it's a new Alchemer or Bomb, and buying the recipe means I want to craft it NOW, so I scrounge up the mats and crowns to make it. This is fun. Grinding to discover new things is fun.

Simply increasing the crafting cost is... less fun. It's not about discovering new items or rare mats. It's now about grinding for currency. If you made the mats more rare, I would have to play through multiple times to "find" that mat, and crafting my item is more rewarding. By increasing CE costs, I still have to grind through multiple levels, but not for the joy of unexpectedly getting a rare drop, but for the sake of accumulating currency.

I would pay $10 for the CE to do more runs and maybe, MAYBE stumble across the mat I'm looking for, b/c the rewarding feeling of finding it is worth it. I wouldn't pay $1 to simply have the currency to craft an item. Where's the reward in that?? It's not about HAVING the item, it's about FINDING the item.