I'm fairly convinced the suggestions forums is where young, energetic dreams go to die, where trolls love to lurk (large proximity of potential bait), and people love to poke humor and banter inbetween.

THIS IS A VERY LONG POST. SCROLL DOWN FOR TL;DR CONCLUSION. If you want to read but get bored reading a particular area, just read another unless they all happen to put you to sleep. Sorry, I'm just a thorough kind of guy.

Anyways, curse-of-the-suggestions aside, I recently took a considerable hiatus from SK and am back again, and things have changed for the better... but some things still kind of eat at me, and there is still much to be desired. This post is divided between bug fix suggestions and actual new ideas.

...I only expect one half of it to garner any form of support.

The Obvious:
-Why haven't we fixed the bug with bad weapon speed listed for both The Avenger and The Faust. According to the wiki itself, avenger's is too low and the faust's is too high, and this is a really simple cataloging error that is so absurdly ancient it's amazing it hasn't been fixed. I know it's not a big deal by any means, but at the same time it just feels unprofessional.
-The infamous vana mask bug. I know some might argue this would make the vana fight even easier than previous tweaks and patches, but if you consider the fact that the water takes about as long to respawn as one dousing lasts, it's not too absurd. If you're worried about it making things easy, at least make watering a watered vana mask do nothing. Having a bug that (mildly) interferes with the fight and is as obvious as it is just stands out as to why something so overt as this is in the game's endgame bossfight, one of its most signature encounters.
-Infinite shield exploit with seraphynx. Yea, I said it. Saw one of my many, many acquaintances do this the other day and was amazed that this had either gone undiscovered or unfixed, and while I'm sure it's not the simplest thing, it is pretty painful. Being a maskerwraith owner, I may be mistaken as to what this bug actually entails, so correct me if I am wrong.
-[Movement speed increase useless] < This is now obsolete, after being informed that the MSI cap is much higher than anticipated, and there are more items that give it out. Learn something new every day.

The Less Obvious (Trick Adjective, it's subjective!):
-More variety/expansions on danger/prestige? I'm gonna take a deep breath and say "This has been said 10,000 times on these forums and has fallen upon deaf ears". But this is in the half I said I don't expect anybody to care about... so let's play devilite's advocate a bit here and review.

BREAKDOWN #1:
*We have 4 days of prestige. This composes of 4 danger missions, 4 average missions, and 4 indirect missions (deliver minerals and get INSANELY ripped off for reselling items for prestige. Man, I should've added this to the first list...)
*Our 4 danger missions technically cover all 6 families of monster. HoI does fiend/beast. GITM does robot/undead. LoA does more undead, man those guys sure are popular. C42 does slimes/gremlins. BAM all bases technically covered, right? But why are we left craving more? Because many of these missions include families as a sideshow, at best. I mean, even with all the emails about "barrels of whatever frostifurs eat" and invincible alphas in the bossfight, I don't even begin to consider anything but fiends in heart of ice. I bring skelly gear to tune out shadow damage and a storm driver to lock down my fiend opponents, who cares about a fistful of eskimo-lisks (inaccurate term, but I love it)
*Most missions deal 2 forms of incoming damage, and 1 primary status effect. Regardless of this, most times we only focus on one status. Fire & Elemental, Shock & Elemental, Shadow, Frost & Shadow. Suddenly, we conclude that toxoils and frostifurs have yet to force us into considering piercing defense.

CONCLUSION #1: Something more immediately piercing related. We could have fun with this and even make our most family-friendly/cute danger mission yet. Wolver god? New cube jelly utopia? Giant hatchery full of angry mommy chromas and adorable, yet moderately deadly, chroma whelps? I'm not just saying "More content plz". I think there are legitimate, fresh ideas just under the surface here we have not scratched. Seriously, there is a LOT you could do here without pushing the envelope too much.

CONCLUSION #1 PART B: Forget extra danger missions, those are pretty cliche anyways. Maybe just make extra rotations for the "normal" missions. Lots of biomes we don't see in our 4 day rotation, so why not visit some new places? Have 2 or maybe even 3 normals per danger mission, ran on a secondary cycle of sorts. C42 does normal mission type 1, and 4 days later does C42 and indirect mission again, but we're going out to some floating owlite keep or something in what is now mission type 2.

-PVP feels stale and, sometimes, ill balanced. Let's face it, 2 game types with very specialized mechanics leave a lot to be desired and a lot of ideas left undone. Even the cookie-cutter-addict chumps over at Call of Duty can come up with several more game modes than this. The fact there are so relatively few people doing PVP vs PVE is a tell-tale sign that it's gotten stale or simply isn't appealing to most of the community. Let's take some initiative and change that, like seriously... why not?

BREAKDOWN #2:
*Lockdown is horribly off-balance. I don't think I need to explain this, but for the sake of formalities I shall. Spiral knights is an action MMO, which means skill and player input have more effect vs tactic than traditional MMO. Obvious proof of this: People have solo'd FSC in proto gear, and I'm pretty convinced after surviving 40 minutes vs vanaduke dodging, minimum DPS'ing, and gaining health because minions that I could do that if I felt like battling for 7 hours in a fiery heck-hole. The point? Lockdown has 2 classes based on tactics and 1 class based on speed and agility... I can't even remember the last time I saw someone playing recon, and at least 80% of population plays one class. Which one? Oh you know. The speedy one. The sad part? OOO patched some stuff to try to change this some odd months ago. Nothing changed. It's not a point of humiliation as much as it is an obvious pointer that LD isn't fully balanced and will have a really hard time getting it there specifically because it's just the way the game is played, and it's really hard to shake that. I almost sympathize with OOO in how hard this battle must be between this unshakable point of genre gameplay and how distrustful the community has been in response to major change at times.
*Low variety of game modes. We seriously have 2 game modes to choose from, and although they have lots of little bits and features, they are far from a real suite of entertainment. I already stated this in the hyphen area, so I'll just shut up about this one now.
*Game modes are pretty specialized, and shift the mechanics considerably. Also touched this some already.

CONCLUSION #2: Add some more modes. Just like my point with missions, there is an alarming level of untapped potential here. I understand getting these balanced, fleshed out, and rigorously tested/debugged is an undertaking, but I'd consider it one worth doing, everything considered. Me and a friend sat down having a talk about how unappealing PVP was due to this narrow, specialized variety. It just didn't appeal to us personally so we pitched some random thoughts around. Here's just a couple: 1V1 gladiator combat; maybe remove/nerf dashing and lower movement speed to make this a gritty, close quarters fight fought at normal human level, I admit I'm a sucker for the idea. Or even something like small teams, no class combat. Something that has pet selection instead of class selection, or uses pets as a means to accomplish a gameplay goal. A siege mode, players take turns defending/attacking a small fort (traps would have awesome usage here) and the team tries to hold the castle until the timer expires, the offending team tries to score lots of kills or capture the fort before they trade places and try to score better than opponents did in said position. Or even some gritty, urban combat with no respawns. One life per match, like good ol' search and destroy from FPS's that uses that to add drama to the game.

-Do we even need a gunner update? This is really short attention span here, but I play a pure gunner at heart but have come to adapt a pretty proficient gun/sword hybrid player, and I have never thought that guns were "a poor primary weapon" or that there was particular gaps to fill... except maybe faster piercing guns. We had both poor variety and slow usage only pierce guns, but considering that kind of made gunning against fiends and beasts a challenge, even a dedicated gunner such as myself has to stress that it's causing solid imbalance in the game's mechanics. Guns are far from underused, and quite the contrary are one of the leading 2 weapon families, and that kinda plays into bombs being "flat" in their usage (no power attack, for instance. One attack mode, no applicable use for ASI and generally being pretty specialized)

I seriously assumed the rumors of a gunner update were a joke at first, it wasn't until the 2nd time someone informed me of its existence I realized they were actually serious.

TL;DR: This game is getting pretty old. But it's still lacking polish in some key areas. PVP has stagnant and limited game modes, and there are a notable fistful of ancient, ancient bugs and even some newer ones that wouldn't be such a bad place to start, if you wanted to clean things up a bit, get it closer to that perfectionist standard we all know OOO loves to chase and we generally enjoy the fruits of.

Formal apology to keyboards horribly maimed in key-to-face collision caused by people dozing off reading this expository essay of a forum post. That's just how I roll. /e deal with it.