• By eek5
  You could spend $1000 and get the best UVs on every piece of equipment in the game.. and then what? Playing levels is part of the fun and some people find enjoyment in making profit while they play. FWIW, I think a lot of people ARE putting money into the game. What is giving you the impression that they aren't? All the CE that exists in the game is energy that somebody paid for. Just some food for thought.

I never suggested that extreme, but more along the lines of a hundredth of that. Also, I'm very sure that people are putting money into the game, but I'm also betting that those people put a LOT of money in the game, yet are few themselves. It's what I hear of things like FarmVille, where there is a very small percentage that pays money, but when they do, they can go overboard and spend hundreds... Not that I think Spiral Knights is pulling the same numbers due to being able to spec yourself our in full 5* gear for multiple characters for the price of an actual paid game.

I'm talking about the casual players, who could be convinced to put in a $5 amount once, and be set for a month. My suspicion is that the audience is highly segmented with an either-or that you either buy in bulk at once or not spend money at all. I don't know about the CE being all originally paid for, as how could the game have started in the very beginning with so little CE in the market?

• By eek5 tanonev
  Fun isn't binary. When people claim to not be having fun while grinding, they usually don't mean that they'd rather be getting their teeth drilled. What they *really* mean is that they aren't having as much fun as they would be playing other games. And whether X% fun for free is worth the same as (X+Y)% fun for a quarter a day is very much up to the individual. If you actually find grinding Jelly King to be as boring as grinding burgers and fries at your local fast food place, then sure, the latter is more cost-effective; chances are that isn't actually the case, though.

You have a point about that, but that's not the grinding I'm talking about. I know grinding since I've done it plenty in another Sega game (maxed out the in-game timer that has an upper limit of 999 hours), and that type of grinding can very much exist in Spiral Knights as well. That's the type of grinding where if I could get that rare-and-elusive item 10 times faster by paying $1, then I would consider it.

But the other type of grinding here includes people who are the "market watchers" being vigilant getting the best deals, offers, and margins on trades. Even if very successful, it's a bit off-putting to know that after all that in-game effort of taking advantage of the market, a person grinding burgers is at least ten times more efficient than you.

Also, the whole issue is the scale at which the grinding operates on a return-per hour. Like I said, doing all this grinding gets you a net gain of around a third of a dollar an hour. Just working at a minimum wage job for only 1 hour nets you fifteen times the amount of return in the same amount of time.

• By TiVVV34
  In the end, it's not grinding if you have fun playing the game. And compared to about any typical mmo, this game here actually has enjoyable pve about destroying huge groups of monsters.

Oh I know, but like I mentioned in my rant, my points aren't being addressed at players like you at all. You actually enjoyed your time doing that, so it's not the mindless-grind I'm critical of.

Off-topic, any good ways to actually show a quote? Other forums usually have some way to divide the quoted and my response, but the cite tag doesn't seem to show any differences. I'm playing around with the formatting using the list tag, but I'm hoping there is an easier way.