i really think this is mostly a nothing burger

you listed a bunch of consequences for this situation, but most of them are avoidable or not that impactful or important:

1) don' trade using energy and you won't feel the inflation
2) the only loss in value happens if you try to convert energy into crowns
3) that's like saying someone bought an expensive pair of shoes a month ago and since they are now 50% off in the store, it's bad for them. sure it sucks, but you can't expect the game to preserve the value of your items in perpetuity.
4) always found it weird that people used two currencies at the same time for trades. most other mmos that come to mind do not do this. energy is fine the way it is as the utility currency for special unbinds, progression helpers, sparks of life, etc.
5) people will no longer trade each other using energy. why is that bad? this is amazing. if the game ever gets an influx of new players, just think about how easy it will be for them to get more energy for the alchemy orbs they need to pass the grind walls in the game. love it for them
6) "this is bad because scammers exist" report them, ask the help of a gm, make sure you stay informed, help inform others. nothing new here
7) people always try to get better deals from themselves. this was always the case, even with more valuable energy, nothing has changed. in fact, it will get easier going forward if people only use 1 currency in trades, no more conversions needed

tldr: i believe game would be healthier if players only traded between each other in a single currency, one for which you have to play the game to obtain rather than spend real money or buy one currency, wait for conversion prices to shift in your favor, convert for profit, repeat.

energy is just as valuable as before and just as useful as before to get sparks, orbs, crystals, unbinds and whatever else your heart desires from the depot.

I find this situation fascinating because I've been playing this game off and on (a big chunk of off until recently) since 2011, and the only money I've ever spent on it was to buy OCH. I've never once bought disposable premium currency for a game, and I have no plans to ever do so. It's just...completely against my nature. So in that context as someone who only rarely buys things from the AH, doesn't roll for UVs unless I get a free forge box ticket, and could not care less about pretty cosmetics, this situation has been fantastic. I've made a few recent Depot purchases I never would have otherwise (new battle sprite!), and despite usually resisting it and waiting for luck to strike I'm almost at the point where I may start throwing energy at orbs occasionally. I get that at its core the game requires someone to be spending real money in order to keep functioning, and I'm very grateful to the collective playerbase that does so, but given how far I've seen the energy market skewed in the other direction in the past this feels pretty good.

(Now if GH really wanted to get my money, they'd offer a few permanently-obtainable things for it. Like if they woke up tomorrow and said "here, how about $5 for a permanent third weapon slot unlock"? I'd do that in an instant without thinking twice.)

What you're identifying right now is the same thing that happened when the game rereleased as a Steam game. It's a good thing. It means blood is pumping and there are efforts to grow the game instead of just wring out anybody left attached to it. I'm personally very pleased even though my pile of energy I set aside years ago in case a friend ever wanted to play this game but didn't want to fight the microtransaction hellscape it became is now worth thousands of less crowns at today's prices than when I'd put in the buy orders for it.

Spenders keep the lights on. Spenders are the people buying energy today because they already find the current price acceptable to them, which the existing bubble could not have predicted because it was predicated on several years of GH not doing anything to develop the game and exclusively catering to its existing userbase of a few big spenders and sterling representatives of the free, info-blind market (scammers).

Speculative, hoarded wealth in a game where money prints itself is fundamentally volatile, and so only items that are completely exclusive to realworld direct purchases are 'protected' from the actions of the playerbase regarding crowns generated and CE purchased. I have no pity for people whose inventories got devalued by falling CE prices in the same way I try not to blame anyone for selling things at exorbitant prices when CE was more expensive. It's how the system was originally meant to work, where paying players subsidize free players and vice versa. Right now, the game is being made more welcoming to new or returning players by the actions of the new and returning players actually playing Spiral Knights instead of primarily using it as a trading simulator with a fashion show and game attached to it vestigially. An excellent development, courtesy of GH advertising stuff and things of vague intent are in the works on the gameplay side of the equation.

There are no shortage of crown sinks what with UVs and slime lootboxes (also guildhall upkeep but that has very little gameplay impact), both addictive gambling with extremely high upper boundaries. Featured auctions also sink crowns for more cosmetically-inclined players. The blindspot for CE right now is a lack of Supply Depot specials, where the prices for cosmetics relative to real-money-to-CE have usually been absurd as they're proportional to their original acquisition rates from the boxes they came with, if they were previously released that way. It would be nice if there were more depot listings to revive those items - which would raise the prices of energy which I personally don't like, but would make them far more healthily available since depot purchases are completely consistent, no gambling involved.

The removal of mist energy did not uncap gameplay. You could continue to play and earn money despite paying for the elevator costs so long as you were committing to runs to get to deeper floors, selling your materials from underplayed stages (esp. Monster Bones and Green Shards because crafting was the only means of generating UVs), or slaving away in the highest paying floors. Your value of time to gameplay was actually improved by mist energy, where you were guaranteed to be making progress no matter how you spent it since anyone playing in excess was being gently taxed. Raw crown output trended toward the highest-paying stages; material worth trended toward the crowns in circulation just like it did with CE; and CE was occasionally bundled as a bonus from purchasing paid cosmetics. Elevator passes existed as a subscription middleground between the existing microtransaction walls and playing the game. It was a very nice setup where no matter what you did, your time was worth something. There were other little things involved that greased it too, like tier latejoin fees and the like... Still, it would've been nice if the mist cap was higher; say 200 rather than 100.

In terms of the hours you spent playing the game, the original system was restricted grind with consistently fast progress, and what we have with the Forge is infinite grind with consistently slow progress. CE prices utterly exploded when mist got removed and were more susceptible to rigging with no such farming clamps and with the addition of direct crown-to-UV trades via Punch, alongside rarities, missions, and the like. You could now grind indefinitely with no upfront tax (a very effective trojan horse change) - and in exchange you have to grind far more than you would've in terms of game time. You could spend 7 hours over 7 days previously or 7 hours in 1 day today and still be playing the same number of levels, but in the latter's case we have an environment where inflation has no brakes and crafting costs were generally sharper because it was no longer possible to buffer 100 CE's worth of crafting costs with mist and orb droprates are low enough that playing early stages is not more efficient than playing the highest-paying T3 stages that can convert crowns to CE to buy them from the depot directly... Even today's CE prices are contextually less favorable despite being similar to the ~3k the game had on release and on Steam rerelease.

I think the forge box changes were brilliant. An excellent move! The unused orbs from longtime players can now be used for UV-chasing just like the pre-Punch days of yore, which is driving material prices up for desirable items, and because the primary rewards from forge boxes are UV tickets, this serves as gentle equalization between energy and crowns beyond vendor prices. A strong balance patch that improves a lot of the game's underperforming or worthless equipment to encourage the creation of more gear would have beautiful synergy with this. Turbillion is a fine weapon numerically and one of the few nice things GH's done on the gameplay side since its reacquisiton, and all they had to do was tune its stats and give it a new model! They didn't even have to fix its still-malfunctioning terrible charge attack. I wish they would, though.

Knowing how all of these systems work, it's a miracle the game's so quickly returning to healthy shape economically, and it's proof that SK always could've been something if only something had been done with it.

EDIT: ... and now there's a Rage prize box, not Rage items directly, in the depot. Oh well. So much for things looking up.

Fallen made a valid Point and another player said that Promo boxes being better on real currency over Energy packs could force the Energy hoarders to get rid of it instead of Just pilling...(this could backfire, but extend the Low rates and they'll have to move the Energy, because demand wont stop)

I exist in a similar position to Vyre at this point. I've already gotten most of what I want that would cost me real money. I got my dream costume. I have all of the reasonably acquirable "good" weapons. At this point, the only thing left for me to spend on is messing around with more gimmicky or just bad gear. I just play for the sake of playing now, although it's always nice to get the "number go up" dopamine hit when looking at my crown count.

Merchants seem to be playing a completely different game from the rest of the playerbase. Feels like when someone reaches the "endgame" they either start trying to do trading and focus on money or just start collecting gear or even just quit since there's nothing else to do. A lot of people just don't care for the whole "economy" shtick and so they just putter around with nothing to do and nothing to buy other than the few cosmetics they genuinely want to use.

Supply depot listings may placate your needs for now, but how will the new players feel when they have to watch the price of energy rise in real time? A surge in energy prices could very well cripple the effort to revive this game. Just because it's been years since energy was 10kcrs doesn't mean it can't happen again and a huge surge of new players flooding the market with more crowns than ever before will cause that pretty fast I'd think. This market is more headache than it's worth.

edit: forgot to bring this up but I feel like even as a progressing player crowns don't hold much worth to me. It's always cheaper to buy orbs via depot than it is AH. Energy was always my go-to when I was progressing, even if a majority of stuff offered there was overpriced (700e for 50 radiant crystals or $10 for a 5* gear good lord). What are crowns used for that a new player would engage with? Recipes are really the only thing that comes to mind. Not much else is really worth even buying on AH. Materials have been a non-issue to anyone not looking to rage craft ever since missions were introduced. Maybe the occasional orb if I'm really really impatient. No sane person blows crowns in a mission lobby for a vitapod or some junk like that. Crafting costs are negligible.

If anything I think crowns hold too little value to the average player, not energy. It's only once we hit endgame that our demand would theoretically skyrocket and that entirely hinges on us perceiving UV gambling or cosmetics as worthwhile ventures which many don't. When allowing us to trade between two types of currency, we'll need to constantly try and balance their value by surgically messing with the things they're used for. This is just a lot of unnecessary work.

I don't want to softball my argument by playing both sides - but I would be remiss if I didn't say that I do actually agree with Refraizen, in that there is an economy problem that is getting slowly worse, and I do think that there is value in keeping players invested in the game economy, whatever shape it takes.

I just disagree that the solution to this problem is playing with the values *in* the game economy, when this boils down to a question of it's worth in the *real world.* Players want good value from this game - players want good value from any game. Expecting heavy investment from players into a game as aged as this so soon after rather minor changes, then ultimately claiming that "this will fix all ills" is not exactly compelling reasoning.

The most telling things here are that 1) Rage Boxes have been re-released, and the market has remained pretty fixed around 3200~3800cr (VERY generously estimated) even despite a brief uptick in energy value, and 2) Rage Boxes have been re-released, meaning that we're currently only selling to players who a) want those back, and/or b) know what to expect. It's good! BUT, while this feels like an olive branch for returning players and a treat for new players, these two factors taken together makes it appear that this move only appealed to past players who are used to this treadmill.

New players who aren't aware that the wiki lists what a re-run prize box contains might not want to take the risk, as stat tables don't show in-game, and if they do know that the prize pools are listed, they're able to "wear before they buy" in a way. This curtails whatever brief value might have been injected by the introduction of a past prize box as soon as players start writing off a cosmetic pack as "uninteresting." It's a nice gesture, but it's just not enough. Fixed Depot Trades would help, too, but there needs to be more done than simply play with such a volatile economy until it starts behaving by accident.

The tension being engineered here is this: Under the current game design, Premium players want CE to be valuable so that it's worth spending it and obtaining it, Free players want CE to be valueless so that playing the game isn't tedious or overly reliant on statistics they have little to no control over (inclusive of the economy itself!).

It isn't possible to please both groups without introducing another factor to the calculus that's being done here - by its very nature a player driven currency-trading economy is zero-sum (in fact, negative sum, with 2% crown deduction). Grey Havens gets their money no matter what, because it gets to them when the transaction is completed, not when players start spending it.. Even if players just swap currencies back and forth forever, that 2% depletion WILL absorb 50% of energy after 35 exchanges no matter the value of the currency, because that deduction is made in the immediate term (at least in most cases; we can posture as much as we want but players hedging on their CE gaining value over the course of a full year are in the minority (or at least they should be, in a healthy game that is correctly incentivising spending)). That energy absorption is READILY amortized over even a modest player concurrency, with the first fifteen trades on the same "batch" representing the most absorption.

The missing piece is almost certainly worth. Premium players want buying CE to be worth their money, and Free players want earning CE to be worth their time.

If a premium product isn't worth the money, then it's undesirable by default to a premium player, or would perhaps be offset by crowns earned through play, but if it's not worth a player's time, the situation is completely different - that doesn't immediately imply lack of worth, so much as it implies immediacy of want. A free player might become a *paying player* on the merit of that alone; "I DO want it, but I want it NOW, not LATER." Failing to win the "worth game" for a premium player imperils retention of a player that's already paid for their fun, but failing to win that point for a FREE player deprives GH of earning potential outright, so the risk of failing to appeal to them is (arguably) higher, at least when modelling in the long term. It's so important to remember that buying energy with crowns can form part of a premium purchase - a free player might meet the cost of a premium item halfway through gameplay, and make up the rest with real dollars, and that's still a win for GH.

Fallen makes a compelling point when they claim that crowns aren't worth much to them - I find myself thinking that moving boosters to the crown side of the economy and keeping progression skips on the energy side could be a step towards that "separation of currencies," but it's of course not the whole solution to the problem. In a way the separation should be notional rather than actual; engineering an economy where F2P players don't feel like they're being squeezed just to play is the end goal, while leaving the door open to the enticing world of "things they could get if they put in a lot of time (or juuuust a little money :) )"

Crucially, I don't believe there's a monster to slay here, I just think that GH has inherited a game with complicated incentive structures from a company owned by a publisher (i.e. SEGA) that would be rightly interested in high and fast return on investment. That knot will take time to unpick because it's deeply engrained into game structure, and the best way we can assist with that is by keeping a healthy discussion that validates the concerns of both player groups. Making claims rooted in the stability and safety of the trading elements of the game is *relevant,* but mostly just to players that have paid... but for some reason, haven't spent.

It's unbecoming of me to poke holes, but at least on its face, the outlining points in post 0 here are:
1) focused on the cost of progression-skipping items (devaluing gameplay and game "worth" by removing time spent playing),
2) A point I fully agree with for reasons aforementioned,
3) relevant only to players in that minority who hoard energy (meaning they have seen nothing worth buying in the depot),
4) see 3,
5) see 3,
6) A reasonable but easily managed concern even in the short term,
7) Pretty standard in *every* economy containing people willing to round prices up for convenience, but also true,
and 8) see 3, but only because those panic-purchased crowns are *going somewhere.*

I will not sit here and say these points are *wrong*, but they're leaving an important player group out that in actuality has the same concerns.

@Refraizen -
I solidly agree; also with the assessment that 4~7kCR is fair. (Specifically, 3800cr to 7600cr, because that has good parity with completing one or two full tiers without bosses at current crown drop rates. There's a "roundness" to that that feels fair.). I've said in previous dialogue on this matter that I'd probably check out once energy creeps above 8k, as it just kind of stings to fight with prices that high. The problem absolutely does exist, too, I don't want to give the impression I believe it doesn't - just that the window for establishing a solution to the problem is as wide as the balance is complex, and I believe this mostly because of competing incentives.

Some disclosural concerns do exist but one factor that has me reaching for that pinch of salt even now is a lack of information on who holds what across the entire playerbase - specifically how much CR and CE is in fact dead (even anecdotally across the ~800 player concurrency in my region). That's information that GH has and can act on, but we don't, so we're back to your initial statement that "only GH can address this problem;" you are absolutely correct about that, because there's no ledger of total market capacity available to anyone but GH.

I think most of my fixation on specific parts of your posts emerges from my wanting to impress the idea that "a market is an expression of economic health, not an inducer of it," and state some worries that making changes just to "fix the market" might neglect real issues by making a spreadsheet of values look correct, instead of creating a game environment that results in a healthier market, but as you've clarified, you don't want top-down price fixing; you want a healthy game, too, so I'm more than glad to admit my defense of F2P players was overzealous.

It is *very* easy for a player like myself to look with envy at people holding value, but it's understandable that they're not really doing that by choice after putting fifty bucks in and suddenly seeing it's only worth thirty. In fact, it makes me a hypocrite *not* to consider this, because the state of the market right now is why I haven't bought energy yet despite wanting to, and I should really admit that this problem is exactly why, rather than fronting it as "holding the line for the F2P side of the fence" while I actively encourage free players to climb over it with this commentary I'm making on game value...

If I haven't said, also: good post, by the way? I want this game to thrive too. Thank you for keeping people informed and opening this dialogue, I mean that sincerely.

I do agree that the game's economy needs to stay healthy. To me I think ~4200crs:100e is a tolerable balance given a run of vana currently gives somewhere in the 8kcrs range (excluding tokens because those aren't immediate returns). Someone spending a good 40 mins should probably be given at least 200e for their time. Keep in mind that's scaled with late game players in mind. My issue is mainly in terms of the methods being used to try and maintain a balance.

As for the depot box listings solution I'd honestly argue what we got here was actively detrimental to the game. I don't see a good reason for box reruns to be listed as a whopping 3500e depot listing. Not only is that literally double the normal price of boxes, but it also means we miss out on the bonus boxes from buying higher price bundles. It's incredibly stingy for something we're already blowing money on. Most other games give boxes for between $2.5-$5 but usually just $2.5. This game's default price is $5, already more than most games with lootboxes, and yet now we don't even get that? We were already able to buy boxes with energy by just buying it off other players and their prices rarely went above 2.5ke.

The rage boxes bumped the energy rates back up by like 1kcrs for a bit, sure, but at the same time they're just a continuation of another larger issue: Almost everything that we've even gotten on the depot to begin with have been WILDLY overpriced to the point that not even a casual spender would be willing to blow money on them. Shroom caps for 12.5ke, a shield reskin for 12.2ke, or a hazardous hedge coat for a whopping 42.4ke (nearly $100). This has been going on for years and I think it's counterproductive to give GH much credit for solving one issue by exacerbating another. Even just one instance of this being done, even in an "emergency" like this, causes damage. Sadly this isn't the first but rather somewhere in the hundreds.

Some really great discussions continuing in here. Something Fallen-Feces said jumped out at me, about the true value of crowns to progressing players. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm still very much in need of them for two main reasons. As mentioned, one of them is for recipes. My own personal "endgame" for SK is the only slightly-insane goal of crafting one of every single reasonably-obtainable piece of gear in the game. Maybe not all of those ridiculous gunner armors or the event reskins (to say nothing of absurd things like Orbitguns), but at least all of the classic lines. It'll take me a few million crowns to buy out the rest of the Hall of Heroes, and that's not even counting Basil-exclusive recipes. I always try to keep a good stash of crowns while running the Arcade, just in case I bump into some exclusives that I don't own yet.

The other use is for energy trading, though the only things I really use energy for are fixed-price items in the Depot, so I have no real interaction with the whole player-driven economy beyond the trade price. I just want to buy weapon slot upgrades, or the occasional Shadow Key, or Evo Catalysts for upgrading my Sprites. I've generally avoided buying alchemy orbs directly, since I seem to get enough from box drops to suit the pace at which I want to craft things, but given current energy prices I may dip into that a bit more. Of course there's little things like opening the occasional Danger Room or energy gate if I can peek the boxes.

This is way, way more thorny than I had realized. Would higher lockbox availability and low, stable key prices even help in this space, then...? I feel like steady and low rewards with occasional specialties, paired with fixed depot sales for players looking to avoid the randomness might help, but... Ugh, there's something here about enforced rarity that feels misguided. At this point I'm out of my depth because I never actually participated that much in depot buying, so I'll probably just lurk in the absence of anything constructive to say, but there has to be something, right?

As aforementioned, I think depot items being proportional to their rates or even deployed reactively to the state of the energy market to burn it is varying shades of uncool. Brutal prices aside, it would've been nice if they were at least listed as individual items instead of gambleboxes.

But speaking of fixed purchases, if you think Silver Personal Color being 100k CE from the depot as a fixed grab is silly, it first appeared as a 1% droprate item from a real-money lootbox that went at cheapest for 14 for 50$, so around 360$. No pity systems, by the way. Gacha games have better odds. Could've been part of a Deep Rock Galactic-esque supporter bundle and people would've eaten it up, but until very recently, SK was almost exclusively about targeting its lingering whales, so...