I would love to have some response to this, just to know that ooo read this. Let me start this out like a real letter....... Dear Spiral Knights, I have been playing this game since about a day or two it came out. I was really excited to see a new online game that looked different from most. Before this update, there was none of this crap about leaving and boycotting (which i am starting to support), but anyways, i really do not see how this update will really help the game in the long run. I have to say whoever came up with this foreshadowing idea is wrong, and this game will majorly suffer from it. From a business standpoint, i do not see how this is benefiting the game. All i see is that more of your "devoted" players will leave. Some great examples of this are SWG which you may have heard of in the forums. But the failure of an mmo that i remember the most was the Nanovor Evolution update. I would know that, because i experienced the decline. I was there on the last day of its existience. I knew tons of players would spend lots and lots of money on the game. Then Smith and Tinker decided to revamp the entire game. This caused the amount of people who played it, i dont mean people who paid for it, BUT played it to decrease significantly. It was a shocker to most when the update arrived (similar to this). The game barely lasted for 3 months after it came out. The game itself was around for more than a year (most said it was amazing). One of the major reasons this happened was that the devs blindly made something for the game which none of their players supported (including I). Now from what i see in this game, it isnt this extreme, but this could evolve into what i am talking about. For one, you have wiped out the merchant "class" which most people were really mad about. Two, you "listened" to us barely about the idea of test dummies for guild halls, but instead turned it into a "advanced training hall" which is mainly just a rehash of all the stuff you see in the clockworks, so that doesnt benefit anyone, and it makes people start to doubt you. Three, now some people might not care, but when you introduced the auction house, you took away a main part of the community, which was interacting with players when you wanted to trade, but now you have replaced it with just a click. Four (yes i do have alot to say) have you ever realized that people dont always have the time to go and find things, i personally have a limit, so the trading saved me soooo much time and frustration, because for what i can say, going through the clockworks over and over with the same boring crappy equipment can get boring, so from what i see, trading HELPS the longevity of the game. Five, this update will cause most people to dread updates because of the stuff you included in this update, thus causing them to not invest for CE, and then that means you WILL lose business, but thats just my guess. Six (one of my biggest complaints) this may be the worst part of it all... Increased Ce prices for crafting, and then you have the idea of implementing a un-binding store. So what you are saying is that 1. we pay to go into the clockworks AKA we pay to play more, 2. we pay to craft, 3. we pay to trade for unbinding, I mean REALLY? Think of this from your average players standpoint, are 12, 13, 14 ect. made of money?????? Thinking into the future, your average kid will play the game longer if he knows it is a sustainable game to play, insted of going through 400 bucks every year just to play, and have you even seen the crafting charts? It blows my mind. I sincerely hope that you are able to actually KEEP your players, let alone get new ones, because this game was gold, now what you have done is taken a chunk of it out, and put some fake gold into it. I believe that because of this update, your business will change, your player base will change, but what I truly hope that you get out of this is that your mindset for making games have changed, and as gamestop's motto says: POWER TO THE PLAYERS, and that is entirely true.

Sincerely,
Digitalartificer