I'm torn on the issue. I kinda feel that people wanting uniqueness through "rare items" are generally being elitist douches (yay blanket statements!), and reinforcing such behavior is unhealthy. At the best of times I don't care what the hell you are wearing. At worst of times it's a balance breaker and item rarity=power which is upsetting, not inspiring. Uniqueness should come from the combination of stuff you use, not from how much you had to farm to get it.

But apparently there's a crowd out there to cater to, so...

How about a compromise? Rare items that have no gameplay impact. RO has auras and wings, not to mention hats. Like, you kill Vanaduke, he drops a "Flame Aura" that doesn't do anything aside from looking cool. Or like... achievements? Vane people love that stuff. I should know, I've got quite a bit of vanity myself.

Locking 4*and 5* is just... counterproductive. I mean, if they weren't required to access more than 1/3rd of the game, alright, fine enough. And they were also what was left of the game once you were done with that remaining 1/3. And then the promise of un-bounding is sending the wrong message entirely to boot, to both sides (those who want to access everything and those who go "nuh-uh! Earn that equipment I got 2 months before you when the game was totally different! Earn it".... you know, the douches). It's saying "well it's alright as long as you pay... more".

@Amarao

Yea it's great that they reacted, but when their reaction is "tough s***, but hey we'll insult you by making you pay another 2k+ CE just to unbind a 5* so you can sell it"?

Sorry, no. They want to sell another $5-10 of CE just to get it unbound, and then probably it would have to be $20 in CE for someone to buy that because of the insane costs they're attaching to it on top of already ridiculous increased costs to crafting. The funniest thing is that reduction in the cost of recipes isn't even relevant here because that's just the cost to start. You have to pay the 800 CE each time you make a 5* whether you've already made one or not. The only reason they could pretend the price of crafting a 4 or 5* item stayed roughly the same before was because you'd only make the one for yourself.

What exactly does adding this kind of an unbind option do? Absolutely nothing, because maybe one tenth of one percent of the people playing are going to be stupid enough to be willing to shell out $20 for one item, so what's the point of having the option to begin with?

I think the best way to make rare item is to play with the price the recipe ask for crafting...
Some crowns -> Common items
Lot of crowns OR some crowns + some energy -> Rare items
Some crowns + lot of energy OR Lot of crowns + some energy -> More rare items
Lot of crowns + lot of energy -> Rarest items

I also think that the rarety of an item should not depend on his star level, or then only players who buy CE will have the possibility to progress. More an item is rare, more it is helpful, by giving other ways of use (like Cutter) or effects, but not indispensable.

Sorry if my english isn't very good... *:

of course its in ce, another reason to buy it with real cash, right?
OOO was once respected by me and many other players, but you guys just keep showing that all you want from us players is our money
honestly, i dont think im gonna play this game anymore (i've crafted my way to 5* gear except for the shield, and i was really excited about them when i get them, it wasnt easy and neither less rare because some people just bought it).

to me, the rarity of the item depends on the UV it has PLUS the number of stars, and thats really fine that way
if you want to turn this beautiful game into ONE MORE of those replicas we've got around, which the main objective of the game is to GRIND, let me know and i promise ill never show up here again

I think having some alternative to either crafting everything by yourself or purchasing items from other players (either unregulated as it was before the patch or via some premium unbinding fee as proposed) would go a long way in curbing player greeed. Simply put, there needs to be a cieling on how much crafters should sell their items for.

I don't think I've ever seen vendors in Haven sell any equipment higher than 2* (despite the wiki listing prices for items up to 5*); to be fair, I don't think I checked more than once since my first week and again just now. To address this, you could place vendors in Moorcraft Manor who sell a random assortment of 2*-3* equipment and in Emberlight who sell 4*-5* equipment.

Having a base price to compare against will help set fair prices for the player market (for all equipment, not just the high end). I don't think the wiki's current price list is adequate, hoewever; with simple arithmetic, it's trivial to show that the current prices are over twice the expected sale price of 5* items (assume 4700cr/100ce and unbinding cost equal to cumulative crafting cost). This is not competitive enough in my opinion.

Just dumping some maths before I go to sleep.

Old
recipe: 1000 + 5500 + 15000 + 450000 = 66500cr
ce: 50 + 100 + 200 + 300 = 650ce

New
recipe: 1000 + 4000 + 10000 + 25000 = 40000cr
ce: 50 + 200 + 400 + 800 = 1450ce

Old cost of first craft @ 4700cr/100ce: 66500 + (6.5 * 4700) = 97050cr
Subsequent crafts cost 650ce: 30550cr ea.

New cost of first craft @ 4700cr/100ce: 40000 + (14.5 * 4700) = 108150cr
Subsequent crafts cost 2900ce: 136300 ea. Problem!!!

Since there's a cr part and a ce part to all cost equations above, there are fluctuations due to cr/ce rates. However, I think its easy to see that the biggest problem that the patch fixed was removing the ability to purchase a piece of eqipment for roughly 1/3 it's total value. It's interesting to see that the new crafting cost for the first item is only 11kcr higher than the old cost (approximately 11%). Unfortunately, if the unbinding fee is equal to the cumulative cost of crafting the item, the new formula is prohibitively expensive for multiple crafting.

I began running into problems here while trying to come up with a suggestion for an unbinding fee that would be simple, fair, and applicable to both 4* and 5*. I guess I'll end my post with some semi-unrelated analysis.

New-Old cr/ce equilibrium cost:
40000 + 14.5x = 66500 + 6.5x
14.5x = 26500 + 6.5x
8x = 26500
x ~ 3313cr/100ce

Nick,

From what I read, I feel I can summarize your post best by saying: "Items didn't feel rare enough and especially with the implementation of the Auction House, we had to do something drastic to make items rarer.".

I understand the logic, but the whole point of the game prior to the patch was to delve into the clockworks for fun and profit to get materials, recipes and boss tokens. You would use those items you acquired to use/craft, outright sell them, or to craft items for the population.

An observation. The only thing rare in the game was 5* mats and some recipes that just never seemed to drop.. Random FTL!!! =)

The only real things to "trade" with the community was those 5* mats and craftables. Unfortunately, that boiled down to mainly craftables as 5* mats could be had from a vendor in town if you really needed them.

So again, the only thing to really sell to your fellow players, was pre-made items and item creation services. You killed that in the hopes of making things rare. I think you'll find you succeeded at a great cost.

You've essentially killed that, while simultaneously raising the cost to play.

You've also made doing boss runs more than tedious. If I want to do jelly king for tokens, I have to do the WHOLE thing to make it worthwhile. Which I can see is an obvious cash grab, make me use more CE taking elevators. Well, I don't want to do that and even if it didn't cost CE, I still wouldn't want to run the previous 12 levels to get to the jelly king levels. I have ZERO incentive to touch the bosses now.

So in the end, I don't want to touch bosses, I can't craft for profit, and the AH makes doing Basil runs next to pointless.

How was it different before?

Doing boss runs wasn't real long and tedious. I would get tokens to make items to sell. In the process I'd be spending CE.
I'd do Basil runs to try and get recipes I wanted to use and/or potentially sell. In the process I'd be spending CE.
I'd do dungeon runs just for rare mats to either sell, or craft items for the population. In the process I'd be spending CE.

Now I'm left without wanting to do Boss or Basil runs.
I can't craft items for other people.

I'm left with doing dungeon runs for materials that are dropping in price on the AH and are somewhat already limited in value as a vendor sells them in town already.

I really like the game in general. It's cute, fun.. well at least was.. Even before patch, I had trouble logging on as I was doing nothing but grinding on the same levels over and over, the same bosses over and over. Now I have little incentive to even do that.

Cutting off the nose to spite the face is all too relevant here.

You've overreacted to a problem that could have been solved naturally by adding new levels with mats you can't get off a vendor and bosses of which are hard to kill that drop tokens for rare items. Sure, you'd have the "vanilla" stuff that would be common, but you'd have "fang of vog's" that next to noone has.

You hit the mosquito with a nuclear weapon and left a crater. Sure the mosquito is gone, but so is the world you created, and so am I.

I think having a way to unbind items is a great idea, but I'm afraid the very high cost of doing so will destroy any possible market for selling these items.

The market for finished items existed not just because people wanted stuff instantly, but also because the recipe prices made it expensive to create ea single item but cheaper to create subsequent items - thus giving buyers and sellers a bargaining zone equal to the recipe price and making the transaction sensible for both of them.

Now the recipe price has been reduced, and the binding fee is based on the crafting cost and not the recipe price and much higher than the recipe price. What demand will there be for selling things at a much higher price than it would cost the buyer to make them himself? Already we saw that 4* items were trading at 650-900 CE at most. The crafting cost for these is around 600 CE if we don't take into account the mats. This means the buyers are not willing to pay much for the crafting service itself (including heat gathering). If the difference between buyer and seller cost (which was caused by the recipe cost) goes away, I predict there won't be much market for premade stuff.

The unbinding fee is essentially a 50% tax on selling stuff. And the only advantage to buying as opposed to making it yourself is that you don't have to track down the recipe and that you don't have to gather heat. The heat is pretty easy to gather and something that even noobs can do because you can do it in T1, so I don't see much demand there to delegate the task to a seller. The recipes are also going to be reasonably easy to get at a markup because of the auction house and all the people who will be farming them. Plus they were never really rare in this game - it's easy enough to get to Basil and he's selling 10-15 things at a time. That's like a game where every time you killed the boss you could choose one or several of 10-15 "rare" drops. Oh and he's not a boss but a friendly salesperson. Going back to my original point, what business could possibly survive with a 50% tax on it when the only thing it has to offer is some stuff that isn't really that rare or hard to obtain?

Here are some alternatives I could see:

- Make the unbinding fee a fraction of the recipe cost, not of the crafting cost, to keep the buyer/seller cost difference. But better yet:

- Make the unbinding fee not a fee but something you earn, like heat. After an item is fully leveled there could be an option to turn on another progress bar on that weapon to gather heat for unbinding. Or else make it so that only level 10 weapons can be unbound (it takes a while to level a 5* to 10 so this will slow down supply). Or make the unbinding require some rare mats or tokens, possibly dropping off several bosses and treasure boxes scattered around all levels - I like this solution the best, because boss farming is considerably more interesting than heat farming. Or make it cost not the CE cost of crafting, but the mat cost of crafting (ie you have to pay for the mats again) - this will also provide a mat sink since many people are complaining that mats are in oversupply.

This solution would reduce supply of sold items while still keeping it profitable for sellers to sell stuff. The problem with just imposing a 50% tax on sales is that anyone can sell the items, since paying a tax is not a specialized skill or something that requires work. So there will always be tons of sellers willing to sell an item (since they all had to craft it for themselves) and very few buyers for the reasons outlined above. So yes it will encourage the people to craft stuff themselves but in a way that completely destroys the sellers and the market. We should instead find a system where the sellers who are willing to work hard and are the most skilled can still make a profit. Supply should be reduced by making it hard to loot/create an item, not by just increasing cost. When JK used to be hard the prices for JK weapons were high and the supply was low because so few people were good enough to loot them. We need more of that kind of loot rarity in that game, not the "this is rare because you have to pay a ton of CE/real life money for it" kind.

Kalielle, it would be pretty complicated to go through all that trouble to unbind items when you could just have them not get bound in the first place. It'd be simpler for both the players and the devs if they tinkered with numbers some more and reverted the whole binding change instead.

Deckard that just plain isn't true. Did D2 have all the resistances and builds equal? I think not! Not to mention runewords (freaking enigma, seriously?).

...

It was still a bit better than SK though, in this respect.

Hi!

Do you still use your Big Angry Bomb? =o

+1 for irrelevant exuberance

I think Thunderslam #87 summed up my point fairly well.

I'm not saying that we're the god-kings of Haven and the devs should do everything we want, there should be a balance: we and the devs work together. This update was not a cooperation, it was the devs deciding on their own to do something and not listening to the players about it.

I was quite serious in my earlier post, and I'll repeat the last question to Nick. Were there actually players complaining about how "rare" items were becoming common? I don't recall any threads about it.

The reason I'm so disappointed in this change is that it killed off a form of gameplay that many people enjoyed while trying to fix a problem that wasn't even there. Perhaps I can best explain this via story:

Once upon a time there was a father and his son. The father loved his son and got him a present: a Lego set of a castle. The boy was very excited and opened up the Legos and started playing. The father was happy and went off to do grown-up stuff.
Later the father came back and saw his son happily playing. But when he looked, he saw that the boy had build a spaceship instead of a castle. So he took the spaceship and broke it.
His son started crying. "Why did you break my toy?", he said.
"You built it wrong", replied the father. "Now you can build a castle like you're supposed to."

Adding an unbinding shop without changing the way crafting works makes everything the same as it was pre-patch, but slightly more expensive. Unless the unbind fee is outrageously expensive ($20-$50 or more), people will still pay it because it's easier to find someone who already knows a recipe than it is to find a recipe. I still think it's a good idea to be able to unbind things for a reasonable fee, but there need to be changes made in conjunction with it if you really want crafting to be a special accomplishment.

If you want to limit the number of rare items around, you need to make the game mechanics limit the number that can be made. The rarity of recipes is the first step of this process, but once someone learns a recipe, they can make infinite copies. This could be prevented by 1. forgetting the recipe when you craft an item from it (or a specific number of items) 2. adding a cool-down time to each recipe so you have to wait a number of days to craft it again 3. make recipes as common as spit but make them require fantastically rare materials (though this is frustrating for people purchasing recipes). 4. require something that is not a standard material that is super rare and block purchases of recipes until you have the item.

Well, that's my two crowns.

@Khaim I love the lego story. It's so true - mmo's are about seeing the game evolve in ways that the devs never intended. I love it when game companies take what players bring to the game and run along with it, rather than fighting it.

@LoneKnight Of course I would love to revert back to not binding items! But since the devs seemed determined to stick to the binding/unbinding route, I was trying to come up with ideas for making that work without destroying the game.

I suppose, but it seems like a LOT of people got screwed over (or at least feel like they got screwed over) by purchasing the 45k recipe, learning it, but not crafting (usually because they didn't have the 300 energy at that time) just before the patch, only to log on and find out that they now have to get 800 CE. While the people who just happened to buy a recipe (with every intention of learning it, but didn't the time), get a 20k refund (rolling with the example of the 5star recipe), which really lessens the blow because that 20k shaves off roughly half the cost of the CE needed.

The math:
Learned recipe, not crafted: 45k for the recipe + 40k for the CE = 85k to craft
Unlearned recipe: 45k for the recipe - 20k for the refund + 40k for the CE = 65k to craft
Crafting before the patch: 45k for recipe + 15k for CE = 60k to craft
Crafting after the patch: 25k for recipe + 40k for CE = 65k to craft

For reselling: 45k investment = > suddenly, prices are 20k less! => People aren't going to pay 48k for a recipe they can now get for 25k => 20k refund, so that you can stay in the competition (trying to resell for 28k)

Although, in the AH, I've only seen people trying to sell 5star recipes for 50k. To which I say ":|"

I see how the refund would help to balance it out if they wanted to craft (or resell the recipe), but I also see how if you learned the recipe without crafting, you just got sucker punched into paying an extra 20k.

So I think that if they can check, they should see who bought a recipe, learned it, but didn't get around to crafting before the patch, and give them 20k (or whatever amount they should've gotten for the refund; the 20k is just going off my example of the 5star recipe). I personally don't care if I don't get a refund for all of my learned recipes, because I've already crafted the craft out of them. But I know people who were affected by learning their recipes without crafting before the patch, and they're quitting because of it. And I'd rather not see them go because of something like this.

Also, lol, sorry for not responding earlier (three pages later...).

sorry if this has been brought up by someone else, but i really didnt bother reading through the first few responses of this thread, not even playing this game past my mist tank anymore anyways, those dev explanation are totally bs anyways.

Quote DeckardCain: "Currently it would cost I believe 1450ce +8900cr to do this for a 5 star item. Prior to the update it would've been like 650ce + 8900cr."

Quote Nick: "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...... it will factor in crafting costs, material costs, etc. to determine the total value of the item."

I'm sure the exponential growth in crafting expense for end game items isn't due to the fact that 3O's are getting money hungry.

The simple fact that more and more people are selling 5* gears is because the game lacks content. If you played a lot, the game simply gets repetitive after a certain point, theres no pvp, theres no impossible bosses / gates to do, you simply have nothing different to do other than trading and selling stuff. I guess the changes sure is a pain killer solution to this.

Simply changing the binding aspects of crafting end game gears, you gave up on a lot of the non-paying player base. I can see that you dont really give a damn anyways since theres nothing impossible to solo, or anything that requires player interaction *namely pvp and trading(which you just killed)* in this game yet, and to 3O's, their player base who dont contribute in cash might not appear to be contents of the game to them, but its all fine.

I first started this game so I can just relax a bit and do some mindless wacking after a day of school. I don't pay ce, and my only way of earning some ce back was through selling 5* gears, which helps my progress and allows me to dive some more when i use up all my mist energy. right now that is no longer viable, and i dont really feel like adapting to the new play style, coz grinding boss levels 24/7 for like 50 ce profit simply isnt my thing.

Regarding item rarity, I think the problem isn't that too few people are crafting items, it's that too many are doing so. The market got flooded because almost everybody could craft all the popular items. One way to fix this would be to dramatically increase the cost of the recipes - not the cost of actually crafting the item! - or make the recipes rarer/harder to get (like putting Basil on level 29 or changing the recipe drop rates). You can't have a system where 1) becoming a crafter is cheap and easy 2) crafted items are tradable 3) good items are still relatively rare and 4) being a crafter is still profitable.

Another solution would be to make a recipe usable only once, so that you could make and sell unlimited amounts of an item but only if you bought the recipe over and over again. There are games where that's the case, and it does make the items rarer. There are also games where good loot isn't crafted from scratch but is a rare boss drop, so you could turn SK into that if you really wanted item rarity that much.

But SK isn't one of those games and I don't think it should try to be. The beauty and uniqueness of SK is that almost all items are crafted from scratch and not drops, and that specializing in crafting certain items could become a profitable profession. It's such a neat concept for a game! Why throw that all away to try to become like all the other games out there?

Edit: Also, if you're worried about people power leveling themselves too soon by buying 5* items from the start and the getting bored with the game, a solution would be to add classic leveling component to the game - like a personal heat meter that you have to level to 10 before you can put on the next tier of gear. Or just increase the number of T2 levels that you have to do to pass the gate guy and get into T3.

Of course if you have a game where players have no level naked and the only thing that matters is the level of your equipment, and that equipment is tradeable, you're going to have people buying their way into the higher levels. It's debatable whether that's good or bad - I thought this game prides itself on having done away with the grind. But I think what happened is you did away with the grind and then you realized people consume content too fast, which is bad for business. So then you fixed it by making items not tradealbe, but that destroys a large aspect of the game for the many people who like to trade. Just add a leveling requirement if you're trying to make the game "longer" - it would fix the power leveling without disturbing all the other aspects of the game.

I kinda like the one time use recipe idea. I say kinda, because it stops being a recipe and becomes that very rare ingredient you need. Without the ability to learn recipes the services one can do for a friend/clanmate really do boil down to "lend items". I'm not sure if that's good. It'd def make UV of wolver gear and the rest rare though.

EDIT: The more I think about it, the better I like this. It gives you a better handle on the pulse of the game (you can keep things that you think should be rare rare), so there is no need for the bounding restrictions. Of course this still makes materials less valuable, and dedicated crafters don't really have a margin to work with (so their profit comes from selling the item ready, saving you the hassle, instead of playing around with the recipe cost), but that should be compensated by rarity going up.

its sad to see someone who "HAD" to spend money , instead of "wanting" to SPEND money for this game.

Though i have to agree that, given time, new batch of players might come in and feels that the system is justifiable.
Probably the old players can adjust to it too, but not with such suddenly drastic changes to the game.

However, i believe how a game is set out, should maintain exactly how it is, as not many people like their system of playing to be replaced.

I still feel that something great was lost with this update and even the amends. Spiral Knights felt like a game that never punished the player for playing it with taunting requirements. Anything the player set their mind to doing could be achieved in a reasonably sort amount of time. It was a game that existed to soul please the player without the need for excessive grinding. This was great because it gave everyone equal chance to obtain awesome items in two different ways that appealed to them. Now Spiral Knights just feels like every other free to plat MMO in its time curve.

(But that's not the main problem I have) The main problem is regarding the energy now required to craft anything, its just plain ridiculous. It's a clear exploitation on CE that gives pay to play people a vastly unfair advantage over everything else. I get you need to make money of this game, but every other "free to play" has found a way to be profitable without essentially forcing you to pay to access an important part of the game.

...anyway, I appreciate your fast response to this, glad to see our response has some meaning to you.

-srry if theirs any spelling errors, just woke up-

I never minded the binding. It makes sense from the vision that you wanted items to be rare. Perfect sense. Offering an un-binding store will most likely remedy the people who want to sell those rare items. To make these items more rare of course, I do agree with people about making the materials that make these items more rare. That way, if the person takes the time to make said rare item for the sole purpose of selling, it's still a rare item because the materials to make the item are rare (and not just rare because they had the money to unbind the item and whatnot).

I agree with Flashblackjon as well, especially about the "achievement-based Material rewards". This could definitely add much more playability to the game if you can't always churn out new things for us to explore. Daring us to go through a whole dungeon without using a shield for example (and not dying or getting hit), or without using a sword, et cetera.

I still am hoping for a reduction of energy to alchemy the items. I don't mind a little bump up in energy price to alchemy an item, but from 300 to 800 for a five-star item has me a bit wary about even wanting to play because I don't have the money to spend to do that and I do not like grinding to get crowns.

I'm glad the devs are taking the time to discuss this with us and try to offer solutions! That's a whole lot more than other MMOs I have played have done, so for that I am very grateful.

If you want items to be rare, make the materials rare. Being able to buy them from Brinks with tokens is not making them rare. If Brinks didn't exist, I would have to go looking for and fighting many Trojans to scavenge enough horseshoes to build my Seraphic Mail set instead of puttering around Tier 1 and Tier 2 to collect a bunch of tokens and cash them in.

If you want 5* items to be rare, don't make it only affordable to people willing to spend money. There's more of them than you think. Or maybe you know just fine and are okay with making great money on them. My occasional $5 or $10 a month clearly isn't worth your time, so I'll go spend it somewhere else. The hint here is "premium content" and the bigger hint here is "premium content available to select users", by which you mean users willing to cough up the money. 5* items aren't really rare in your book, they're just "premium" despite being "required" to see endgame content.

My question is, as you add content, who will get it first? The premium users or the freeloaders you clearly don't care about? You could add 6* items or deeper levels - you should, there's not enough game as it is - but with your stated policies as they are, you will be in a deep hole. $10 for crafting a 7* item? $20 to unbind it? Are you mental?

Because of the implementation of the Auction House and the high crafting/unbinding prices, there will be easily enough materials and recipes out there that a credit card knight can pick up everything they need right off the AH and be fully kitted out in under a week. So someone else doesn't level it up for them. The end result is the same. Only the poor, cheap knights get screwed out of endgame content and a good time.

If you want the items to be rare, make the materials harder to get. Or make the items require more of them. By the time you're building 4* and 5* gear, you're overflowing with materials anyway. $DEITY only knows, I don't need 200+ frackin' gel drops, but even a Royal Jelly Shield only takes a whopping *5* gel drops. Ooooooooh, SCARY. How about 50? 100? 500? Make us work for the items! Make ultra-rare recipes drop from bosses or mini-bosses. Make recipes usable only a certain number of times. But all of this needs to be balanced by lower crafting energy requirements.

There are better ways to make things rare. Try again.

Glad you've at least acknowledged that we're not happy, but this isn't enough to make me recommend this game to anyone again.

---Trade spoiled.---
As for the solution you offer... Why in the world would anyone unbind to sell if it costs a massive amount anyway? If unbinding would cost roughly what it takes to make the item, I'd rather keep the original and make an alternative so I can choose to use either. But...
---Crafting costs too high.---
With these costs, I won't be making a single new item for myself, since I now would be really pushed to even help my friends get into t3 with me.
---CE---
No. I'm really not buying any ever after this. And it's the only fix I'd find for the above problem. I'm fine with spending money because I enjoy the result, but if I feel pressured into doing so in order to progress, then it's not happening.
---Chance to have items sent back to the people you levelled them for.---
Great. I at least won't have to drown in guilt over the three hats and three shields I was working on. (All for friends who just paid costs and nothing else. I'm not a seller.) But you could increase the time limit a little maybe? You're not even giving us a week to get in touch about it and you should know that not all customers play often.

---Ideas---
If you want rare items to stay rare, focus on materials. Maybe even go so far as to remove materials for some of the more popular things from the token trader. That would encourage trade between players more for them and push their value up, so then the auction house would maybe come into it's own as well.

Or if you want people to have to play to gain equipment... maybe make it so you have a non tradable drop that is consumed in order to bind equipment. Without binding it you can't use it... you have to play and complete x number of levels on the appropriate tier to get that thing. I'm sure there's other ideas that are much better, but there's so many ways to make equipment more challenging to obtain that are actually challenging.

All you've done is make us need to pay you more if we want to progress at any reasonable speed. That's not challenge.

The unbinding can't be crown only, as CE price changes make it so that the crown price of items is dynamic. And their goal seems to be to make the method so expensive that it is not worth using (unless you don't mind spending around 10$ worth of CE for a single weapon).

EDIT: in fact this means that if you want to sell, you better not upgrade past 4* because that's basically saving 800 right there. You may as well sell 3*equips with recipe and mats in a bundle and it'd be still cheaper. The only problem is of course the bound token items (but if you unbind them at 3*, you still save a lot).

"Spiral Knights now costs more real money than any other MMO out there with the least amount of content."