It's been a while since the big update in EOS Knights, and it's about time to state that our hopes for stabilizing item and material prices have been shattered. There's been a steady decline in activity and especially in trading volume since then, only the daily active user numbers have gone up since the latest EOS price surge:

Let's have some examples for severe plunges in material prices:

• Adamantium is at 0.01 (minimum price) from ~0.08 a month ago
• Mithryl Chiffon is trading at 0.012 at the time of writing, after being at a solid 0.14 before the update
• The Giant's Blood trades at around 0.1, a drop from 0.8 a month ago
• With few exceptions, all unique material trade at minimum price, which means they're really hard to sell at all

The prices for items are following suit.

As a result, it's really hard to make money through selling, and therefore players are buying much less stuff on the marketplace. This in turn accelerates the slip in price even more, because everybody's trying to at least sell what they got at any price so they can recoup a little bit of their initial investment, or make some last profit before it becomes too time-consuming per EOS they can make.

I myself have hardly made any progress in terms of floors, etc., because I didn't make any EOS I could invest in better equipment.

Even more bad news

It seems that the new account feature has hardly attracted any new players. Now, even if it would, all the newbies would see the low prices and would wonder:

1. Whether it could ever pay off to play the game
2. If it's worth buying and materials and items at a price higher than the current one, because they know they can go down to minimum

All the existing users may currently be waiting for the prices to drop even further to upgrade their equipment, but looking at the unique material that's not even the case. They're simply not interested in those things.

The global drop rate factor hasn't really helped. It currently sits at 0.82, which doesn't really have a substantial effect. This definitely wasn't balanced enough, and there's a flood of unique and legendary materials. Even during craft events prices for rare and unique materials mostly doesn't exceed the minimum price.

Despite the fact that nothing much changed, I haven't been able to farm any epic material since the update with any of my accounts, nor has anybody else in my network. This is really weird, as the drop rates as still really high. Anybody of you has a similar feeling that epic materials may have become scarcer?

The Magic Water situation

Magic water has become unreasonably expensive with these material prices. If I can't even sell a good unique level 5 item like a 85% Admiral Ring for more than 0.1 (after having spent 3400 MW for upgrades), what's the point in buying MW from EOS Knights at a rate of at least 0.075 per 1000MW? This is a really difficult situation for the folks working on the game, because this is probably the main revenue channel for them next to marketplace transaction fees (which are also super low).

In addition, farming MW has become much more difficult, so there's generally less of an incentive to spend MW on lower-prio stuff like pets. I'll probably wait a bit before I buy my next pet gatcha tickets.

Node issues

FranceEOS and - temporarily - some of the other available nodes have been experiencing some issues lately. FranceEOS still seems to not sync properly, so I currently cannot recommend using it.

The good part

There's an upside to all this, of course. Anybody who wants to get in the game now can do so really cheaply. Within a few days and an investment of 3 EOS you can easily get to floor 1000. I myself will probably spend a few more EOS to push my main account or push a new one; new ones, however, are facing the MW price issue described above, so let's see how much that's worth for me.

The overall number of active players is very healthy, reaching an all-time high of 6.78k on February, 19th. Apparently, many players remembered that EOS Knights used to be a thing after the EOS price went up so significantly (go EOS!!).

EOS itself is still growing nicely at roughly 0.2% per day (in terms of accounts created), even though this is no extraordinary growth and Tron is growing (much faster).

In any case, we should use the opportunity and buy into some new equipment for our knights before a new wave of players comes.

What needs to happen

In order for EOS Knights to remain successful and get back into growth mode, there's a few things that need to happen:

• The main game mechanics need to be more appealing to (new) players, with a steeper progress curve (providing more motivation) even for users who invest little to no money
• It would be great if EOS Knights would start promoting the game to crypto-affine people who may not use EOS, yet. There's millions of crypto people out there, but not even 7k of them are active in EOS Knights
• The global drop rate factor should be reduced significantly until more new users arrive
• Make it more appealing to become a top player. How about weekly bounties for the top 100 players who have killed the most goblins? Or a challenge for the player who has pumped their max floor the most within a week? The dungeon challenges have the drawback of producing even more specific material (especially dungeon material), so the market is flooded with those
• I myself would also appreciate a reduction or removal of the minimum prices. This could lead to more price competition with even lower prices, but at least some added liquidity and therefore free cash flow for all selling players

Next up

Let's not forget that EOS Knights is still a young game, and there's still a lot that can happen with it. Let's remain optimistic, here. In addition, there's another update coming on February, 28th:

There's also the skins that can also be traded, but to me this seems like a typical money-making feature and not a valuable addition to the game. But let's see, maybe you folks have a different opinion on that.

So we're left with a small balance / UX update, 2 new pets (or kinds of pet, whatever that means), and the most promising new feature - the Alchemist. You'll be able to convert lower-class material into higher-class ones. This has the potential to consume a lot of cheap, unsold material, but it's unclear whether this will actually help the entire economy because there's gonna be some arbitrage into the higher-grade material markets which may cause the prices there to drop, as well. In any case, I personally am looking forward to that feature, and I hope I can finally upgrade my equipment significantly.

A small challenge

In order to help foster activity on the game I'm putting up a tiny challenge:
I'm selling a certain item or material at a very nerdy price. Whoever buys this item will receive 1 EOS from me, and obviously a 100% upvote if you post a screenshot of your purchase log including this item or material for public proof. It's on the market already, I'm curious who'll find it! Feel free to upvote, comment and / or resteem if you want to support the game, the EOS Knights community, and this little challenge.

Hint: The price of the thing I'm selling is obviously below 1 EOS :-D