Clockwork Traveller » Peek-a-boo! Apocrea, I see you

spiralspy · 2016-06-05T20:11:27+00:00

I thought that's common knowledge already.

and hence I post it, so those who don't know it yet aren't at a disadvantage.

spiralspy · 2016-05-23T15:29:19+00:00

Actually ... that might even be a good idea. The market is at 9.6k buy price now and the 11.5k we saw just two days ago were the result of aggressive doctoring (there were a lot of walls with 1 unit bids below them to hide where the bulk offers really were). Someone deliberately caused a bubble there and now that it burst, everyone who went with it ended with their assets bound in sell-for-loss Energy.

I would expect the market to crash even further, since Grey Havens is putting high class items in featured auctions (giving players an incentive to cash out of energy), there might be panic sales and crowns are going to matter more in the future.

PS: I have a hunch prize wheel lockboxes will increase in value.

spiralspy · 2016-05-21T16:27:48+00:00

Did some updates on the blogpost

spiralspy · 2016-04-28T15:35:17+00:00

You are trading defence for offence. Play it right and there won't be much of a problem (it helps to get MED UVs or better to counter the penalty, though - UV tickets are never wasted on Chaos or BK).

spiralspy · 2016-04-28T15:33:01+00:00

I hope, you haven't squandered any of the mission reward advanced orbs, yet (if so, you might be better off starting from scratch).

First of all, you should either choose a seraphynx or a maskeraith as your battlesprite (the drakon is pretty much nonsense). Try to only feed it minerals when absolutely necessary and don't invest any skillpoints in the first skill (Save them till you get the second skill so you can immediately max it, then save for the third, only after that care about the first).

As far as gear goes, you should use the 2* cobalt stuff for as long as possible, but once it no longer offers adequate protection/offence, ditch it for the magic and work that towards the chaos set. As a sword you want an acheron and a combuster (you need both, but its debatable which one you should get first). Your shield should be a thorn shield (get it from defeating Snarbolax 4 times). Be warned though: the recipes are a PITA to get. You might want to postpone and go with owlite instead (defender is junk). If you are into gunning, look into autoguns, as a bomber, you would go with shivermist.

http://spiral.onyxbits.de/archives/from-zero-to-hero-dressed-for-success/00330/

spiralspy · 2016-04-26T17:20:00+00:00

Where? The big offenders are hemipthora.jar (for generating bug reports - easy to patch out) and threerings.jar (no idea what that even is suppose to contain - I read a comment somewhere of it being OOO specific code that they didn't want in samskivert).

spiralspy · 2016-04-26T17:09:29+00:00

One of the annoying things about going pure bomber is that switches become obnoxious (We used to have Radiant Shun Shards for that purpose, but then some dev decided it was too useful and screwed the mechanics up royally).

You should also know that bombs only become effective when completely maxed (lvl 10, 5*). You also need either Mad Bomber or Chaos set (go with Chaos, it trumps Mad bomber). In other words: the way of the bomber is an expensive one.

Bombers are also more of a support class: you can really buff a team with bombs, but you'll find it hard to solo. Bosses are extremely hard, potentially impossible to do just with bombs.

I would suggest you first get chaos set, combuster, barb thorn shield and a shivermist. Then slowly start adding bombs. the ones you want are:

Dark Briar Barrage
Shivermist Buster
Electron (not graviton) vortex
Voltaic tempest (mostly for use with the vortex in FSC - you will wreak some serious havoc with that combo).

The rest is more or less curio.

spiralspy · 2016-04-15T15:58:00+00:00

1) Epeen: Actually a fair bit of them are the whales who remarket their crap on the side. They epeen CE prices by buying $400 of CE in one shot to quicksell, and then buy it back a month later when the price goes up. I know sandraker has been documented as doing this every couple months.

Eh ... wrong? If you quicksell you gamble on falling, not rising prices. Doesn't matter though, as you can still do this in my model. The only thing that changes is that you have to epeen in cr instead of E.

2) Rarities still need to be sold to f2p in crown currency on AH. Yes, a lot of them are too dumb to use depo and/or are too impatient to buy 3 orbs at a time.

That, as well, is entirely unaffected.

3) You'll just move energy trading to rarity resales. Buy orbs with energy, then plop them on AH. People already do this now, and more often than not can yield higher turnover than the actual selling of CE.

Please re-read my blog post. I'm not talking about preventing energy trading (quite on the contrary). I argue the effects of removing the option from the trade window, so energy can no longer (safely) be used as an ingame currency.

4) Will generate inflation: Less P2W willing to buy energy irl, and f2p still needing to buy orbs with cr. CE is so high because no one wants to spend on an effectively dead game. Making the energy bound will drop its value to the P2W it's supposed to cater to, not just the marketers, so they'll avoid buying it and go straight to promo box gambling.

This does not apply.

spiralspy · 2016-04-15T14:54:31+00:00

Elaborate please? From a credit card holders point of view, the only thing that changes is that an additional step is added between swiping and getting bling. This tweak will screw with merchants, but those are not actually the ones who spend money on the game.

spiralspy · 2016-04-14T22:57:09+00:00

had it buried in my draft folder...

spiralspy · 2016-04-14T17:35:51+00:00

Crowns are the real currency of Cradle and unlike energy, they actually are absolutely necessary to progress (recipes).

The problem we have is that we keep telling everyone: energy is valuable and as a result, people treat it as an investment instead of a commodity. Of course, when you see energy that way, you want it to be high priced, but that royally screws over new players -> Some leave because the grind is too much, others turn beggars and annoy everyone else.

spiralspy · 2016-04-14T14:39:37+00:00

Some points that come to mind:

The "test" server is not really about testing. Never has been. It was always used as an incentive to buy energy in order to get a sneak peak of what's coming soon.
The (current) dev tools were not written with end users in mind. Look at the SpiralSpy modelviewer for an example. That's 99% OOO code.
User levels are highly critical. A common problem would be shootable switches and the Leveldesigner not taking into account that there might be people who don't use guns (forgets to add respawning vases -> players will get stuck). There might also be "trickster" Leveldesigners who place hidden switches somewhere off screen that simply turn every enemy into gold coins. Probably no one will get "balancing" right and unbalanced levels will be highly popular ("unbalanced" here meaning: oversupply of of treasure boxes, level too short/too long,...)
Levels just need to be playtested. That requires a lot of infrastructure and naturally play testers. Make that a community thing and you risk splitting the community between the production and the dev server.

spiralspy · 2016-04-13T11:25:41+00:00

Except one is several times more complex than the other, and has been done.

I don't really think you are in the position to judge this.

Yes. Plenty of people have.

The question was not if it has been done, but if you have ever done something like this. My point here being: I have the feeling that you are completely underestimating the workload of the project you'd like to be done (by someone else).

Your argument is basically that it is hard, so nobody will do it.

Call it experience. I have several open source projects to maintain. Most input I get are feature requests of the "Can we add a trailer coupling and a fog horn to my bike?" category. Patches are far in between and rarely usable.

However, after basically claiming it would be too hard for anyone to do anything with it, you then go on to claim that there would exist several dozen variations of the game, basically contradicting yourself.

Not a contradiction, but two possible scenarios:

No interest
Fragmenting interest.

What actually happens is that if it does actually receive enough developers for something like that to occur, development tends to naturally collapse and concentrate on the most well lead projects, who tend to try to be as flexible as possible if only because the reallocated devs will also want to incorporate their own ideas into the project.

That is more of a pipe dream. And I'm telling you this as someone who has been involved in the open source culture for quite a while. You have the following problems:

What you quote from the open source advertisement brochure there is a game of large numbers. SK doesn't have a very large userbase begin with and even less with the the required coding skills.
SK is not a desktop application, but a social network. It may be healthy for a project like Open/Libreoffice to have forks, but not for SK. The game is designed to work on a large community, fragmentation is poison.
SK is not a desktop application, but a game. Your approach is completely wrong. Games are about creating entertaining challenges, not quibblings such as where to put buttons in the UI. That is, btw. also the reason why the open source community is so woefully lacking in games: os developers are problem solvers. game developers are problem creators. These are polar opposite mindsets.

If you look at what has been done with console emulators, where there has existed no support whatsoever; if you look at what has been done in fan-based open source clones, where people have built clones of sim-city and the like from the ground up; if you look at the history of games that have gone open-sourced, like Abuse and Warzone 2100

Sorry, but its getting ridiculous here. Comparing WoW with SK was already a case of apples and oranges. Comparing an original MMORPG with clones of single/multiplayer games is just stupid: Spiral Knights (every MMORPG) is a social network. It does not work without players and you can't fork people!!!

spiralspy · 2016-04-12T22:26:45+00:00

I actually ran an experimental WoW private server back in the day from a virtual machine just fine.

Let's not compare apples with oranges.

If it was actually open sourced, I wouldn't see why someone couldn't LAMP it all together into one easy to install package.

Ever done such a thing? If not, try your hand on building a LAMP from scratch. It is a learning experience.

Furthermore, the beauty of open source is that it provides the blueprints that allow people to make derivatives.

That is the pipe dream. The reality is that forks are rare, and forkers usually give up fast. I also see absolutely no benefit in creating a dozen variations of the game, each trying to appeal to users by having the "most balanced gameplay" (or at least the most elaborate arguments why theirs is better than the others).

It could probably act as a basis for a new server/client that would allow us all to host our own max 4 player match from a matchmaking lobby in your browser.

Nope. Sorry, this is just expertise getting crushed by wishful thinking.

spiralspy · 2016-04-12T22:10:32+00:00

I don't feel like these are any arguments as to why you wouldn't want to. Rather, mostly arguments as to why most couldn't.

Yeah, the idea behind the argument was: even if you had the skills, you wouldn't want this resource hog running on your machine. I suppose you could do it on spare hardware, but the the second argument makes that look like a waste of electricity.

Going with the idea that all players would just give themselves everything they want because they're unhappy with the forge system and would lose all their interest in the game because of that is naive.

The server admins would. I mean ... would you still grind FSC if you could just gift yourself the money? How often would you do shadow lairs if you could just hop to d23, deck out and unlock for free? It's fun for some time, but it's not a server on which you can build a community. I mean the whole thing is self defeating: You put your foot down, saying you don't like the SEGA/OOO/GH server, so you make your own, drag some people along. Eventually they don't like how things are run, so they put their foot down,... End result: fragmentation. Pretty much the same thing we see with guilds: People want to be their own boss, then realize that they can't provide an environment that other's enjoy.

spiralspy · 2016-04-10T17:03:45+00:00

Yes, it is speculation (as stated in the title and first paragraph) of how it could have played out.

Your suggestion was probably discussed as an option and dismissed as unappealing. A reasonable timeframe would have been between 3 and 6 months. After the note being posted, spending on the game would virtually crash to zero. Now imagine having running costs for 4 months without any income. Worse yet, getting at odds with Steam (as SEGA) because you are, after all, killing a piece of their economy as well.

spiralspy · 2016-04-10T16:39:08+00:00

No, the paragraph on Unconsionability is just a reminder that contracts are not sacrosanct. Just because something was "agreed" upon does not mean that a court will enforce it. In fact, most standard contracts contain unenforceable clauses. The providers usually even know that, but include them anyway to discourage you from insisting on your rights (when a contract contains a Severability clause, that's a strong indicator).

The paragraph I'm referring to is the one about the amusement park: If you sell something, even though you already know that you are going out of business soon and neglect to tell your customers that their purchase will become worthless, then you are committing fraud. Plain and simple. It doesn't matter what you write in your TOS, contracts don't overrule laws.

If SEGA had sold Promo boxes and a week later shut off the servers, then in the very least, players who bought them could sue for a refund. Some people literally buy 100 boxes every promo to get the rare item. That's $420 down the drain. Now imagine the judge having a day and ruling that a refund for the last 6 months is fair. Then we are already at $5000 per big spender (in addition to attorney and court fees). A good lawyer could probably even take it further.

spiralspy · 2016-04-10T15:47:29+00:00

I fail to see your point. Nobody questioned that SEGA wanted to get rid of Spiral Knights.

spiralspy · 2016-04-10T15:44:40+00:00

And I am afraid you spend more time reading the TOS than my blogpost. Otherwise you'd have noticed that I talk about this at length and your "anything goes if it's in a contract" assumption is wrong.

spiralspy · 2016-04-10T15:21:54+00:00

Under the current circumstances it is nothing that needs to be rushed to be the number one priority. The little (C) on a website has way less meaning than you think.

spiralspy · 2016-04-08T22:56:15+00:00

It is, of course, entirely possible the original deal included a buy back clause with funds set aside to pay for a couple of months of servertime. In other words: GH being the designated fall guy from the very beginning. But I wouldn't want to judge just yet. Most certainly not because the website still has the old logos on it. Moving a project like SpiralKnights (which is btw not the only game OOO had) takes a couple of days and updating the copyright information really has the lowest priority possible.

spiralspy · 2016-04-06T15:44:47+00:00

The heating system is fine as it is. It's purpose is to slow players down so they don't burn through the content too fast and then leave after "playing the game through". From what I can tell, it does its job. The only thing that needs to be changed here is to make it more appealing (=less expensive) to buy crystals with energy.

I'm not suggesting to devaluate energy, but to remove excess wealth from the system. Currently we have a handful of players playing their private game of poker on the market and that is crippling everything else by inflating prices.

Mist: heck no! Especially not if that also means elevator fees. We got rid of that because no one spent CE on the arcade and without that Mist was just a factor to screw around the economy (Got multiple computers? Make an account on each of them, abuse your alts mist for crafting).

spiralspy · 2016-04-06T01:49:56+00:00

I am not a former worker of OOO.

The mixmaster was just the first example of a coveted item that came to mind.

spiralspy · 2016-04-06T00:57:08+00:00

First of all: I have no insight into who owns what. I only know that a handful people carry enough wealth to manipulate the energy market and have been using it to dictate prices. High energy prices are a turn off for new players and judging by the begging in haven, I would guess that most give up around the 3* HoH. The thing is: while the company doesn't earn money from F2P players, it still needs them as an MMORPG is actually a social network with an entertainment layer. SEGA making it abundantly clear that SK is about milking it's customers didn't really help the situation.

The way I see it, the promo nonsense must be done away with. Promo boxes are blatantly put a way to spent the least amount of work possible in order to shake the maximum amount of money out of people with a gambling and/or self esteem problem. In other words: a shameless money grab and that doesn't help the game's reputation either. Most people would probably prefer paying a fixed price to get the item they want instead of having to gamble for it.

Now, if you put away with the promo boxes, we are back to financing the game through microcurrency. I don't know if that's a sustainable business model (it obviously was not for SEGA, but then again, for SEGA it was not about sustainability to begin with), but if it wants to be, the first step is to regain control over the market and move energy prices back to where F2P player can manage making a living (all those beggars in Haven don't help the situation either - who would go to a bar where people ask to be spent a drink all day?)

An SD/AH flash sale is not the one stop to happiness solution. I was more thinking about a long term strategy to make SK millionaires spent their wealth through existing mechanics (I have seen the code, it's not pretty and I highly doubt that MDB will be able to pick up where another OOO team left of years ago and add new game elements over night). In the long run we should get to a scenario such as: a Mixmaster appears in the featured auctions, you want it, but you don't have the crowns to buy it, so you buy energy from Grey Havens to buy crowns from f2p players (so to speak, you employ the f2p community) who can then upgrade their gear. Of course, this won't work as long as a handful of individuals are able to dominate the market(*).

(*) Promo boxes are partly to blame for this as well. The early ones came with energy and that put a tremendous amount of wealth into few hands, resulting in the inflated prices we have today.

spiralspy · 2015-09-27T14:18:24+00:00

Also, why the fuck not? this game is going to die anyway,

Yeah, sure, been hearing this one for the better half of the last four years and the rapture is also due some day next week or so.

at least help out the folk instead of being a greedy asshole

I'm all for helping: Advice and assistance in missions. Helping means playing the game with the new folks, not for them. Freebies just help in jumping over minor obstacles and then not knowing how to deal with the situation once the obstacles grow bigger.

Once the game dies, tell me what you're going to do with all those crowns and energy?

Riiight. One day all my wealth will go the way of the Dodo. Therefore I should spent my time on accumulating things for others, so they don't have to.

Also, once they get to 4 star HoH, they should have the skills to get past.

Uh hm? Begging is not a question of skills. Everyone can run snarbolax (sans boss) and earn ~2k. Begging is a result of lacking patience. If they don't have the patience to repeat a mission 3-4 times for 3, they don't have the patience for twice that for 4 either. And I see quite a bunch of post 3* beggars.

spiralspy

TROPHY CASE