Category Archives: Spiral Knights

There’s some speculation that this is the 5-star Khorovod (not yet released).

As the Khorovod sword family is one of my favorites (currently in competition with a full set of the elemental Brandish lines), I want to step in and say: yes, this is a Khorovod-style strike. The arc as the charged attack hits is the same, the rocks that pop up behind and around the player are the same. The lightning that descends from the sky, though, that’s rather new.

I’m contemplating rejoining Spiral Knights. I’ve been away for a while, so the levels should be novel to me again (even the repetitive clockworks levels, the variety of which should have been helped out by the current “there shalt not be two strata that are the same next to each other” enforced edict from the devs). Plus, now that I’m alone in all my guild who’ll play the game anymore, having a T1 boss I can beat up for tokens to get a sharp-sharp stick, bomb, and shield sounds enticing.

The problem is, I’d be all alone.

And I can’t craft higher-level items for other people anymore, something I had actually started to enjoy doing. While an unbind shop is coming, it sounds a bit prohibitively expensive, even if you’re fairly self-sustaining on crowns-to-energy. We’ll see.

Spiral Knights added a Heat Amplifier item for 800 crystal energy. This is about $6 in real world terms. I’ll note to supporters of the amplifier that it only amplifies 20% for two days, not 100% for two days. Anyone who’s making calculations based on 100% need to revisit them.

To some people, the Amplifier will be worth it, because they don’t think in terms of in-game money, only out-game money, and to them, $6 is spare change. To some people, $6 is like vending machine money to the rest of us, either because it really is vending machine money to them, or because they have no other expenses (for instance, if it’s part of a weekly $20 allowance). I’ve even seen someone spend the equivalent in revives in one run, because they simply won’t give up even when the revives start to hit 1000+ crystal energy.

In contrast, for me, $6 is half a meal, or 2 ounces of 5-star tea ((Or, often, tea that likes to think of itself as 5-star when it’s not.)); I remember a time when I had to make it stretch to a week. I’m upper middle-class without parents to give me an allowance.

And while it’s legal and all for Spiral Knights to make money off people to whom $6 is no great shakes, I can’t help but shudder a bit at the amount of money they’re spending on something that I can do for free just on T1 runs. But the Heat Amplifier isn’t for frugal players; it’s for premium players.

The label of “premium” easily makes the rest of us think that we, who don’t deserve any kind of label, will not be the primary focus for Spiral Knights’ future development. To those who don’t mind a $6 amplifier every two days, this is just fine, because the rest of us don’t really matter to most of them; to the rest of us, it feels like the cold shoulder from the Spiral Knights team.

I would feel better if a Spiral Knights representative could reassure people that this isn’t the case, that they care about all Spiral Knights players. I think that uncertainty is at the root of a lot of unhappiness, and that a lot of loyalty could be gained back by, not just saying that the Spiral Knights team cares about all players, but also showing that they care.

What does showing mean in this case? I think honestly it means two things at this point:

• New content for T2 and T3, because if there’s one thing that F2P players and “non-premium” paying players are going to do, is grind for quite a longer time than premium players.

• Extending the social aspects of the game outside of the forums and hacking things in the Clockworks; for a long time, the main extended social aspect was crafting, and during preview, it included the various PK arenas. Guilds should have been part of this extended social aspect, but they don’t seem to be getting the love that they deserve, that would make it socially rewarding to be part of a guild.

  Why is social so important? Because it gives people things to do, even outside of content, and allows them to find roles for themselves.

Both of these seem to be aspects of MMORPGs that the Spiral Knights team seems to think that premium players don’t care about, and so perhaps that’s why we haven’t seen advancements in them. It’s part of the perception that Spiral Knights doesn’t care about the non-premium players—and remember, non-premium includes people who would probably not mind a $5 monthly subscription, even some that wouldn’t mind a $10 monthly. After all, many people spring for the monthly extra weapon slots at 250 crystal energy each; with a maximum of two weapon slots, that’s 500 crystal energy, or roughly $3.75 a month. Add in the 2 extra trinket slots at 150 crystal energy each, and that’s a total of 800 crystal energy per month, and we’ve almost come full circle. I say almost, because the equivalent of having a Heat Amplifier for every day of a 30-day month would be 12,000 crystal energy, or $90 a month. For the weekends of a 4-weekend month, it’s $24 a month.

You know what would really be horrible? If Spiral Knights increased the amount of crystal energy for weapons and trinkets slots. I could see it happening, I could see it not happening, but the non-small possibility of the first option makes me worry. I wonder if the germ of this idea, floating subliminally perhaps, is bothering folks. Well, it certainly bothers me, but I’m just another Wolver-wearing knight.

First of all, let me just say:

Spiral Knights Crusaders Knight Out in Seattle!

It was great to meet people I’d only interacted with online. We were online friends long before Spiral Knights’ Preview, and friends throughout that. Spiral Knights deepened our friendship in some ways because we got to interact “physically” with each other, especially when combining our game sessions with Mumble, which allowed us to talk in real time together. And, well, once you chat with someone while battling for life and limb repeatedly against three mobs of retrodes in the lower reaches of Tier 2, it’s much less daunting to meet up in real life.

What did we do?

Well, we did touristy things in Seattle. Even though I live in the area, I never did the touristy things on account of trying to survive my first years at a demanding job, plus playing tourist does… bad things to my head. It helps that the other Crusaders are two of the few folks who are understanding of my bipolar 1 comorbid with PTSD situation, which did come into play during their visit, and which I may talk about in another blog area. They were highly supportive, and among other things it’s why we will never leave a knight in the team to battle the phantoms alone in any graveyard.

As we walked to various places, including Smith Tower where I snapped a picture of Not a Wolver and freaked out a bit over the height we were at, we talked about the game. Not all of this was dour talk; at one point along 1st Avenue’s many many many eateries, the day was so sunny, pleasant, and un-Seattle that we wondered when the Wolvers would spawn. Wolvers always surprise you in the pleasant green areas of Cradle, and in Seattle we were without Steamwolf’s Magnus, Sparkywolf’s Flourish, and my Crystal Bomb.

We also played boardgames (with the requisite several kinds of beer and spirits, and snack foods) one night (Steamwolf’s birthday, in fact), mostly 7 Wonders. At several points during this we talked about the state of Spiral Knights.

As the Spiral Knights Crusaders split up again in real life, I must face the situation I’ve been dreading ((You know, along with those being posed by my bipolar/PTSD mash about being alone IRL again.)): that the Crusaders will not reunite in the game for the time being. They’re not rich, what with being University students, and need to conserve their resources for things like the occasional important trip to another city, medication and health care, cost of living, etc. We all want to advance down to the Core together, but that will require expensive advancement, as you can’t survive to the Core without leveled 5* gear.

Of course, advancement can be expensive in terms of either time or money. You need around $4 worth of Crystal Energy per item to get to 5*, and that’s assuming we don’t get involved with the unbind shop which would bring that to $8 per item. We had always shared crafting to lower costs, and, well, the game no longer allows that. At minimum, we’ll need, for each Crusader, one helmet + one armor + one shield + two weapons (not even a Divine Avenger will let you battle everything down there with ease) = $20 x 3 Crusaders = $60.

Sixty smackers. I could… pay all that for my friends… given time… but neither Steamwolf nor Sparkywolf will hear of me doing this for them. We were fine with $5 a knight (so $15 total). We’re not fine with this.

It’s worse for Steamwolf and me; gunslingers and bombers often feel a keen need for at least one more slot, which adds another $4 per weapon with the present system rather than $1 per weapon.

Alternatively, we could spend much more game time to get enough crowns to turn into Crystal Energy, but our assumption is that the Spiral Knights team and SEGA want us to spend that $60. Who’s to say that, in the weeks and weeks it would take us to do this, that they will see they’re not meeting their quota and to remedy this will simply raise the cost of crafting yet again, setting us even farther back? No developer has come out with a promise that this kind of increase won’t happen for X months, so the future being that uncertain is morale-destroying.

I know there will be a few who’ll take us to task for not caring enough about the game to dump $20 a knight into it—and that’s assuming we’re not going to explore different weapons or armors, which raises the cost per Crusader even higher.

And with the higher cost to crafting, there’s been apparently a rise in people who only use swords, because with guns and bombs you’d need to spend much more to experiment and use weapons that the tutorial actually taught were useless, and who would spend money on that? Swords just are more practical, since they deal more damage more quickly, if often straightforwardly so. But it’s sad to see the variety go because experimentation is just that much more expensive, plus it points to a lack of seasoned veterans to show off the excellence of non-swords. Or even, so I hear it, the excellence of non-main-path swords like Flourish.

I don’t know that I can continue without the Crusaders. Even if FailPatch never happened, the social features of the game need improving. I feel now that the game was released too early; that if they had waited, they could have sorted out the micropayment system (i.e., Crystal Energy) better. But they did not wait, and so even after Release Day I think we can all agree that this is just another Preview. It’s never Release Day; it’s always Preview, it’ll always be volatile, and not everybody’s signed up for that.

The other Crusaders, for reasons of money, feel like they aren’t welcomed, and I will not stay in a game that does not welcome my friends. For better or for worse. Some may say we don’t deserve to be part of the game, and to that, I say, fair enough. Perhaps we don’t.

And that’s the ultimate in morale destruction, even for me.

So I don’t know if I can go on, all alone in the Clockworks. I don’t feel like subjecting my sometimes insanity on unknowing knights. It’s tragic but life isn’t fair and all that jazz.

The Spiral Knights Crusaders will still hang out together online, it just won’t necessarily be in Cradle. We have all of BrettSpielWelt to explore, and online boardgames are definitely improved by the presence of Mumble or similar programs.

In the end, the Spiral Knights Crusaders are about hanging out together, not about Spiral Knights. And if that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Warning: I’m channeling a little bit of Angry Joe here. Or a large bit.

GamePro, GamePro, GamePro.

Why did your reviewer have to write a review so inaccurate with regards to gameplay mechanics that it’s obvious they didn’t play the game? The detail that made it all fall apart to me was this one:

And you’ll often have to pick up and throw things at enemies, including bombs and attack vials that have special effects like freezing enemies.

Bombs can’t be picked up; all you can pick up are vials and capsules. In fact, the mechanics of bombs are so radically different than what this one sentence implies that it throws the entire rest of the review into question.

But let’s be generous. Let’s assume that this was a simple misphrasing of some sort.

We run across this bit:

Spiral Knights forces you into a party before you can go into the dungeon. You can still solo once everyone else in your party leaves, but then you will discover the reason for the forced parties: You will get killed if you attempt to progress alone.

NO. That’s not how it works. That’s never been how it works. You can solo just fine in this game, depending on your skill; with my “skill” I can solo to the midst of Tier 2. There are people who solo all the way down to the Core, through Tier 3. The implications of what’s said here aren’t very good. Either the reviewer is an idiot, always possible, and misinterpreted what was going on, making this a review based on shallow game play; or alternatively, the reviewer never played the game and is relying on heresay or press release information, which is even worse.

The really weird part is how the review could get so much of the game mechanics wrong except for the pay structure. That’s strangely accurate—apart from downplaying the repetitiveness of the levels, which is getting even to me, and I’m the one who played the very limited Dragonfly dungeon in preview repeatedly and with great joy. In fact, the veracity between these two parts of the review is so blindingly different that it would seem to indicate that either the reviewer is really, really keen on the monetary payment aspects of games—and this is Gamepro, after all—or, this part was fed to the reviewer, who didn’t do any further research on it.

For if the reviewer had, they would have realized that one vital aspect of the game got cut out with the recent update: the ability to trade higher-end weapons. In fact, the ability to trade is entirely skipped over. Weird, don’t you think, since the game is almost entirely about the weapons and armor (there’s no character leveling), and thus that drives a thriving commerce in making and selling said weapons? The reviewer didn’t even cover crafting, which is so important to the game.

This Gamepro review is full of shoddy research. It’s so shoddy and yet has that one terrifyingly accurate reprisal of the CE system that I can’t help but think it’s just a sockpuppet review.

I hate this review so much. It reeks of both ignorance and dishonesty.

And not to put the point too lightly, I hate that the Spiral Knights dev team has been so closed to the players that they put out a radical patch without warning after release day. That part alone more than any other poisons a lot of my enjoyment of the game, because there’s the possibility that it’ll happen again.

To be fair—or to be gullible, I don’t even know anymore—the developers seem to be trying for some transparency in recent posts to the forums, but that doesn’t yet make up for the fact that they haven’t acknowledged the long-term issues of the current game mechanics.

It makes me sad and angry. I turn most of that on myself, but this here is but a small chunk of the bile that’s circulating in my veins and makes me wish I’d never known about Spiral Knights.

I have been this angry before, but I do eventually forgive. But this is just awful, and that review, more than anything else, cinched it for me.

Part of me wants to believe, really wants to believe, that the recent sudden patch of fail was a SEGA directive. But Three Rings Design has stood up in the past before against large gaming companies like Ubisoft—which led me to the conclusion that the Spiral Knights team thinks of SEGA first and the players last. This could entirely not be their fault, it could have been part of a contract even. Contracts can be messed up. Still, that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

And that bad taste? Not being washed out by promises of new content or a new Tier 1 boss, which are both quite necessary additions.

Still, take this post with a grain of salt. Look at how much love I bestowed upon Spiral Knights for 43 posts before taking a turn for the bitter in The Squishing of the Squee, the night of FailPatch. What could it be but temporary insanity that I end up writing a post like this?

I didn’t want to write this post at all. I know some folks are all, “Don’t blame the Ringers,” which is disingenuous, or more often, “Don’t yell at the Ringers,” which is a derailment tactic that I usually see employed in social injustice dialogues, but I guess it shows up everywhere. But I can’t help but think that sugar-coating this feedback would do the Ringers a disservice, because this is honestly how I feel.

In the interests of not dealing with a flamewar that might crop up here, I’m turning off comments. The Ringers have Eurydice, who is showing quite a bit of grace under fire, but I only have me, and I’m no Eurydice nor an Angry Joe. I’m just angry.

First of all, a really good post by Copperwire about Fun in relation to game content.

Second of all, the other Spiral Knights Crusaders are coming to my home city, and this is exciting to me. I’ve befriended so few people over the years because of really quite terrible things happening when I trusted too easily; I’m grateful that Spiral Knights let me have that extra interaction I needed to feel comfortable with my soon-to-be visitors.

(As a note, they actually met over Puzzle Pirates, also a Three Rings game, and from thence blossomed a beautiful relationship.)

But while they’re traveling, they won’t be playing the game, and I’ll be busy cleaning house and then entertaining them and working to make up missed hours at work and suchlike, which means for me a short hiatus from playing Spiral Knights for about a week.

And maybe when the Crusaders return to the game, the changes will sit better with us (unlikely), or there will be extra tweaks. I have no idea how money stats will look on Three Rings’ end, nor how quickly they would act nor how they will act if crystal energy buys actually drop off severely enough. I know for now I’m holding off on buying crystal energy until a few more months go by, to get a feel for how new production releases will go, how rocky they might be. I have enough stockpiled, and enough weapons and not much of a rush for T3, that I can go on for quite some time.

At this point, I just want to see new content for T2. Us Crusaders worry second-most that new content will stop showing up for T2, thus making expensive advancement required. I like more than most a familiar run, but even I can only stand so many re-themed small sets of configurations. At that point I would stop playing—not out of spite, but because Spiral Knights and my desires would no longer match up. My friends are already tired of the lack of content at our level. I understand that new content is going to be a priority soon, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

What do the Crusaders worry about first-most? The coming lack of a feeling of achievement for players who don’t shell out for T3. There’s a ceiling we feel we’ll hit as casual players, and perhaps the Spiral Knights team can’t or even won’t prioritize us. That’s really the breaking point for us, alongside the content. And for this, I worry a lot more.

Does a hiatus from playing mean I’ll stop posting Spiral Knights content? Well, no. There are great aspects of the game, whatever the payment structure might do to it in the end, and I want to help those new to the game, or even those new to the concept of working up heat levels on their weapons for upgrade purposes.

I’ve not been terribly satisfied with Nick’s response to half the criticism, which addressed bound items and did start one-off remediation for players who intended to give now-bound items away. Somewhat good, except the higher energy costs are clearly here to stay (and weren’t explained).

Highlight dissent: vitek, McFrugal, Churgethoth

Sirrocco interprets Nick’s post the best way possible, but still has questions about the crafting price hike.

Incidentally, apparently the game’s lag gremlins don’t like the patch either and are attacking it with full “graaaaah!”. If you’ve been sliding around weirdly in the dungeons, you aren’t alone. I actually played a few levels on the night of the patch, and slid around at the worst possible moments while the lag meter was at three bars for me. ((More bars is good, for the Spiral Knights lag meter.))

I did not spend time on Spiral Knights tonight. I spent some time locked out of my car, which sucked but gave me some perspective, i.e., after the locksmith’s bill I’m probably not going to be giving Spiral Knights any more of my money.

And then I taught 7 Wonders over BrettSpielWelt to the other Spiral Knights Crusaders. I forgot how decent I am at that kind of thing. Mumble helped immensely in that endeavor as well, so it really can be used for more than just Spiral Knights. (Of course it can, I just forget, not having gamed online much.)

Reaction thread to last night’s patch. Over 350 posts, 99% negative. My friends who were long-time Pirates over at YPP! are amazed: this is the worst explosion bar none they have ever seen, and they’ve seen some serious fail from Three Rings happen on Puzzle Pirates.

There’s even been a severe drop in players in dungeons. We’re talking the halving of online population when it should have been doubled at least during a patch night. This is beyond the pale.

Some of the BNP (big name players) like Magnus, who’ve always been on the SK side of the crystal debate, are now calling for boycotts. This is incredibly disturbing.

Part of me fears that the unannounced severity of the patch means that they knew this was going to be unpopular, and they aren’t going to roll it back.

ETA: Along with the unannounced severity of the patch, they also screwed over the crafters of 4* and 5* items: without any warning, they were unable to give these items back to friends and customers. This is unacceptable.

I await further news and will keep y’all posted.

Thanks to the latest Spiral Knights patch, this is what the Spiral Knights Crusaders have been up to for the evening:

“Oh well, I’m logging off. It’s not like I need to be on
for the support request to not be answered.”

In this screenshot, we’re in the 80th minute of waiting for a response (other than “we got your request”) to Sparkywolf’s in-game query as to why her 12,000 crowns disappeared after being outbid in the Auction House.

We’re pissed off.

Hell, I’m pissed off, and I’m one of the most forgiving people around.

We’re also not happy about the increase in energy spent crafting; as Sparkywolf pointed out, that means a single 5* piece of equipment costs $4 of real-world money just to craft, not even pre-made or with a guaranteed unique variant on it.

Oh, and forget about buying it from someone else. I was all excited about getting into the crafting part of Spiral Knights, because it sounded just like Pirates, but guess what? You can’t sell 4* or 5* gear anymore.

And then the final straw came when the moderators started locking petition threads.

I’ll wait to see how tomorrow turns out before I unleash any of my own invective over this, but this update did not go well. To be honest, I could have dealt with any of the update except for the part that going to chase my friends away, the increased cost of crafting. They’re the reason I play the game.

This is not the post I wanted to write tonight.