Spiral Knights - Does anyone...

Does anyone...

15 replies [Last post]

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 11:36

Toy_Dragon

Legacy Username

I started playing Spiral Knights a couple days ago, and I really like it! It has a wonderful combat system, and an amazing feel all around. The developers hit right on with the opportunity of fiero on every couple floors with that danger room that your not sure you can beat or not, and with the great social opportunities for teaming up as well. The game is extremely fun, but I think the developers just got lucky with those 'ideas' because they are proving themselves to be quite the opposite of intelligent from any stand point. This energy system seems completely unnecessary, pulling in players to this game because it is fun and free is rather misleading as it most definitely is not.

I have been playing and just recently finished crafting my 2* gear, and was excited to continue my playing down to the deeper, funner, more profitable tier 2 when I realized that the fun part of the game was over :( Now things start to require an immense amount of energy, or more specifically, crystal energy, or even more specifically, money out of my pocket. Sure, I can just wait a day and get 100 mist energy, play for the second day and get 5k crowns, wait another day for another 100 mist energy, buy 100 crystal energy, and THEN craft my 3* item... But that doesn't sound too fun, does it? The game becomes significantly less addicting and less enjoyable when obstacles like this are encountered, and will further dwindle the user population. (I understand that high-level players/oldbies will be able to avoid this problem- being that they are already large parts of the economy and can readily afford the necessary energy, but Spiral Knights is a quality game that deserves a much larger base than what it currently has so we are focusing on the features that attract new players, and keep them playing)

This brings in the requirement of extremely long waiting periods to progress in the game, or to buy crystal energy with real money; and as we progress these waiting periods will become exponentially larger as well as the money spent on crystal energy. This is the main flaw of Spiral Knights! It is understandable that every development company of an MMO must make money somehow in order to keep up the servers, keep employees paid, and of course keep the CEO's happy with money in their pockets- this isn't what I'm focusing on, I'm focusing on the way in which they accomplish this. There are several ways to make money on a (potentially) massively distributed game such as this. Advertisements, for example. I doubt anyone would mind seeing an ad in the loading screens, and it is well worth the opportunity to rid the game of such a faulty structuring on top of crystal energy that will ultimately lead to either is limitation or eventual demise. Besides, if the game is funner to play, more people will play it, and more money will be made by the advertisements.

Lets look at some other free MMOs who are doing great... Runescape with 10 million reported active accounts per month?! We can all agree that Runescape is not that great of a game to play- but people can play it which makes it significantly better than Spiral Knights. Statistically, Runescape is funner, easier to play, all around better than Spiral Knights. I hate to say it but unless OOO smartens up soon this potential gold mine of an extremely addictive fun game to play (although rather dumb with the advancement system...) will be thrown out to the garbage. I hate to see such an amazing opportunity be wasted. So back to the title of the thread...

Does anyone know of a game that I can play until OOO gets their act together? This is just ridiculous.

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 11:42

Madadder

um you are suppose to use

um you are suppose to use your mist energy to buy more CE use CE to get MORE CE and THEN craft your stuff

so....
1. use the day's mist energy to farm crowns
2. if enough buy 100 units of CE
3. use that to farm more crowns to buy more CE
4. once you have enough to craft save it and continue to get crowns for more CE
5. once you have enough to fall back on once you craft THEN craft

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 11:44

Toy_Dragon

Legacy Username

It is still an extremely long

It is still an extremely long and unenjoyable process. Spiral Knights has been losing a significant amount of people because of this and didn't have a large base to begin with- that's not what the topic is about.

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 11:48

Madadder

Spiral Knights has been

Spiral Knights has been losing a significant amount of people because of this

please cite your source for this

the extremely long and unenjoyable process which you speak is no different than what you did before though only the goal is longer than before

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 11:50

Luden

Legacy Username

thats because prior to the

thats because prior to the patch, due to the extremely lacking contents this game has to offer, everyone reached their 5* gears in several days, or several minutes if you had the real cash to pay.

prolonging the progress and making it more grindy is the only way they can come up with at the moment so people don't "finish" this game in days, and get bored and sick of it in a few more.

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 11:53

kakelgis

Legacy Username

Does anyone know of a game

Does anyone know of a game that I can play until OOO gets their act together? This is just ridiculous.

As a tip: 99% chance they won't, ever. Pretty high chance they won't even reduce the crafting costs or anything. It's more likely that things will get even more expensive and gameplay will get even more grindier as time passes.

Honestly, I would certainly pay a 10$ - 20$ subscription fee to play dungeons at no energy cost. Of course, energy system and prices would need to be completely redone for this. Sadly, at this point of release, it's simply not possible to just go back and do major changes to the system - It would cause way too much chaos between players who already wasted tons of energy, and it'd be ridiculously unfair for new players if the energy got more expensive. (for RL money, that is)

Paying that much still gives about the same effect, but it's rather limiting - Considering the current longevity of the game, if you play actively for a month, it's likely that you'd get to the point of crafting four stars/five stars, at which point it's quite expensive. Sure, you can still sell mats, craft stuff, use money you make in-game... But in general, it's not nearly the same FEELING as playing dungeons for completely/mostly free. It's not limited, but it feels limited.

Another major problem about making gameplay energy-free is the current amount of content, and the size of the staff; They simply do not have enough manpower to create enough content if the game was open like that. The only way to balance such would be to add grind, which is what they actually want to avoid. (...although they aren't? tons of grind with the latest updates, it seems.)

In general, energy systems are stupid and do not work very well, but in a game where the staff simply cannot create enough content to feed the active/hardcore/paying players, there's no other system that would work properly. Unless of course, they didn't release the game at such an early stage. But it's too late now.

The best they can do will be add PvP and some sort of energy-free content. PvP is obviously coming soon, and energy-free content might show up sometime. But until then, you'll have to grind it out, I guess!

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 12:36

Nonamekm

uhhh...

There is nothing wrong with the way things work now. I'm sorry if u wanted to hop on the first day and be in top of the line gear but that not how any game should ever work. Take your time, get to know the game and work your way up to the gear. with that in mind, the crafting fees are fine, not to mention that u can buy gear off the ah a lot cheaper then even crafting fee due to people mass producing certain items to get uvs.

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 12:42

Dogrock

Thankfully there has been

Thankfully there has been mention of a Tier 1 boss to make things more interesting for the new players. It should add a bit of a challenge and help the new people stay around longer.

New players are a constant opportunity for revenue in this game, they need a way to get hooked on it with some of the action shown in the promo videos. The current jump (new player hump I sometimes call it) has been a constant topic of debate. There's the new Starter Pack option, but obviously that will not be for every one. There needs to be more of an in-game mechanic that allows from the transition from a Tier 1 new player to a Tier 2 regular.

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 13:14

Toy_Dragon

Legacy Username

@kakelgisThanks for

@kakelgis
Thanks for understanding what the topic of this thread is about, most people obviously don't.
I now understand everything you said about how they are limited by their man-power to requested-content ratio, but am I wrong in saying this game has a gold mine of an engine and has serious potential? I feel like they should put some serious effort into becoming a bigger company in order to handle these requests, and a restructure of the energy dependent economy is necessary for them to move past the small (This game is not MMO, there isn't ever more than 1500 people in the gates at a time) population that it currently has. If they were to shut down for a year or two and do some massive renovations, this game could become the next big thing, it has great gameplay and a good basis for a storyline, as well as attractive graphics and characters, it just lacks in its economical structure and advancement system.

@monkeyman135
I've been taking statistics recently and when I have a couple weeks of them they will be legitimate, but for now I'm just going off of what I've read from oldbies about the amount of players.
And about the long and unenjoyable process my point is that most of the time spent playing the game is actually spent waiting offline. ^ kakelgis elaborated for me :D

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 13:16

ShoutenM

Legacy Username

I agree

With other stamina/fatigue based games, this one has been the most demanding (DFO and Elsword come to mind). Even though you can buy more, I can only muster up about 2k per 100 ME (on Tier 1), and it's making it that much more frustrating to get Tier 2

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 13:48

#10

Oedipus

Legacy Username

It's all been discussed

It's all been discussed before. I'm only saying that to preempt anybody who would use that line to put down a thread, because when new threads constantly pop up, it provides more feedback into what the community wants / feels / needs. If you don't like it, ignore it, you silly silly trolls ;)

Anybody who's played the game longer than a week will know that the energy system works & you can play for free once your established, but to a new player who doesn't know any better it might feel like it's extortion. Especially after they've just spent 50 ME playing through the crash site & earned no more than 600 CR, and then move on to Haven to find out that once their ME runs out, if they want to keep playing it'll cost them ~5,000 CR. This is a serious problem, because (from my experience & observation) new players typically pick a day where they have plenty of free time to play a new game. New players are also most likely to mismanage their energy and run out of it, thus not being able to play the game at all (until their ME refills). This likely discourages more new players from sticking with the game, than there are players who were willing to work through that. To them, it will feel like extortion.

The only way to remedy that is, in my opinion, to make the crash site & first stratum free of charge (and remove the first ME tank). There should be at no point that a player cannot continue playing a game if they want to. In doing so, of course, CR payouts from the first three levels should be decreased to offset the lack of CR->CE investment normally required to enter a dungeon, in such a way that it does not provide better payout than the second stratum even after the CE investment.

It seems to me that a company that needs to make money to survive, would want to avoid discouraging potential customers. When a new player realizes they literally cannot play any more until they wait umpteen hours for their ME to recharge, that's a potential customer being discouraged.

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 14:06

#11

Merethif

@Toy_Dragon Sure, I can just

@Toy_Dragon
Sure, I can just wait a day and get 100 mist energy, play for the second day and get 5k crowns, wait another day for another 100 mist energy, buy 100 crystal energy, and THEN craft my 3* item... But that doesn't sound too fun, does it?

Actually you do know that this game "level cap" is 5* item. I suppose it's not something uncommon for a MMO games to force player to play longer then 3 days to level up to mid-game. I don't have huge MMO expirience but I do play in another game when you have level cap set at 60 and you can't level up to level 30 or 40 in 3 days (unless you're really hardcore gamer probably).

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 14:20

#12

Jaouad

Legacy Username

Even before the patch, Free

Even before the patch, Free players would still had to struggle a little bit. The game is free to play no matter how you want to argue against it as long mist energy exists. I think you have not taken your time to consider earning money by other stuff.

So you wanna progress a little bit quicker eh? Here are a few options

Free:

1. Become better at the game and Die less and waste less energy. The game kind of forces you to not slack off and become good at it. Imo a very good thing.
2. Buy a good recipe, 2 or 3 star. Craft and sell for a profit in AH with a lower buy price than what's allready there. T
3. When you're good enough, do a JK run per day. You can make around 8k per run with this.
4. Explore the economy and learn to make profit of it.

This all above will still require effort all in all, but what would be the point if it wasn't.

If you wan't an extraordinary boost, just buy energy I guess. I know I did when I got tempted to get a lot of items from 4*. I am now atm a free player again (wasted most of energy) and have discovered ALOT on how to profit in the game. It's basically, the more you progress, the more profit you make. So i'd say put some effort into it.

@Oedipus

What about misttank? Why u ignoring that?

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 14:42

#13

Oedipus

Legacy Username

@Jaouad I was not ignoring

@Jaouad

I was not ignoring the ME tank. It only provides a one time relief, which still might not be enough for new players. It should be, but still does not provide a solution to circumstances where players quit because the game is literally unplayable after 2 hours. What I proposed was to offer 100% guaranteed free content, which would allow new players to play the game as much as they like without fear of dieing too much to get their next CE fix. The rewards for the free content would be such that, a player could use it to gather enough CE to proceed further on, but not such that it could be abusable by players looking for fast CE (the better rewards are still in the second strata and below). Maybe even, instead of making the first strata free, add an area in the Training Hall. In either case, players can still progress through the second strata and earn CR as normal, but it would provide content for players to continue to play and progress, albeit at a limited rate, should they ever encounter a time that they mismanaged ME/CE for whatever reason (heck, even I accidentally clicked Revive All once, when I meant to revive only myself and divvy out the health).

Having the possibility that players could literally be forced to stop playing the game for a day will be off-putting to new players, especially ones that have that happen to them. I'd think you would want to encourage new players to continue enjoying the game, so that one day they might decide to buy CE. Not discourage them from playing because circumstance makes them feel like they have to pay $$ for CE when they thought it was a F2P game. Which I'm not saying it's not, but that would be the first impression.

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 15:05

#14

gell

Legacy Username

Reasons are two-fold: OOO

Reasons are two-fold: OOO needs to make money, and their way, shared by many F2P games, is to charge money for increased play time. For others, they wait.

And two: content is low. OOO said there's an upcoming T1 boss. I believe this will increase crown gain prior to T2. To use another game as an example, Vindictus just got rid of the token system in their game. Tokens were in there from the beginning, got more lenient over time (they replenished your tokens more often as they released more content), and finally were just removed from the game altogether a few days ago. They stated the reason being that early on, there needed to be a way to keep people from finishing everything in a couple days, due to low content. Now there are a hundred bosses, a few dozen raids, and more coming, so they felt it was ok to let such a limiting system go. OOO is not there yet.

However, soon it'll be time for them to increase that mist energy, or decrease other costs such as elevators. I disagree with kakelgis that everything will become more expensive. While I don't think crafting costs will soon be as cheap as they once were, with enough content, things will balance out. At least, that's the hope that OOO has also looked and learned from other MMOs (especially free ones with instance based dungeons like SK), by slowly increasing the mist you get, energy rewards for taking higher risks, and having special events, such as a weekend of free elevator rides. So far, OOO has not learned this, it seems, as they are completely devoid of events that so many MMOs have learned to embrace, and that players love. They may have their facebook game blinders on, and need to realize they are playing in MMOs waters now, and need to get with it. If they can't do it, they need to hire someone who understands these things, lest they sink before they even leave the gate.

So for now, the cost is pretty extreme, but understandable. If this keeps up in about 2 months though, they'll have done something very wrong.

Oh btw toy_dragon, if you want cheap gear, look at the auction house. People like to mass craft in this game (attempting to get a good UV). Because of this, there is a flood of 2* items. This is good for you, the newer player. You can get items for cheaper than it costs to buy the recipe and craft them. This was true before and after the patch. Get your cheap gear! Heck, some people even give away 2* gear because they crafted so much!

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 15:24

#15

Oedipus

Legacy Username

@ gell Completely agree with

@ gell

Completely agree with you. IMO, it'd be nice if OOO took a page out of Turbines book for hybrid F2P/P2P system, as used in DDO and LOTRO (OOO's natural superior, one ring to rule them all, and all that :P) Ever since Turbine took over DDO I've loved their model, with a hierarchy of three account types -- F2P, Premium (spent $$, non sub) and VIP (sub), and I think it could work in SK too, once more content is released (>5* gear, maybe as high as 10*, more tiers inside the core, PVP, raids, and more than 1 boss per tier) Otherwise, I'm completely satisfied with the game.. for the time being. As you suggested, only time will tell.

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