The EOS Knights update to version 1.9.0 happened last Thursday (February 28th) so with a few days in, let's analyze what it brought to us.

Skins

Yeah, skins. Alternative skins like this for Oria, the Archer, have been released:

There's four alternative skins in total: Vampire Hunter, Assassin, Rider and Bunny Bunny. While the artworks are nice, I'm personally not a huge fan of cosmetics in games in general, so I didn't even participate in the initial sale (although I might have made a bit of profit there). To me, it looks like Bada wanted to create an additional stream of income. Anyway, if you're interested and you haven't found where to buy, just tap on the artwort of Oria in the Archer view and you'll find them. Marketplace prices currently start from 3 EOS (they're strictly limited to 70, that's why).

Alchemist

If you always wanted to get rid of your material for better material, the alchemist is your new friend:

You can choose to synthesize between 4 and 8 material of one grade into another material of the same grade or one grade higher. The chance of that material being of the higher grade depend on two factors:

• The number of materials
• Their rarity

The latter sounds a bit weird, but you'll find our quickly when checking the alchemist out yourself; materials that have a higher rarity (check the material "Book" to see how rarities are distributed) contribute more to a higher chance. An example:

• 4 Mithryl get you a chance of 8.65% to get a legendary material (at the time of writing)
• 4 Adamantium (with higher rarity) get you a chance of 15.73%, so basically double the chance

The chances for individual material simply add up if combined.

While this feature has a lot of potential to consume a lot of material and therefore help bump up the material prices on the marketplace, so far it's been rather demotivating for me. If you shove in 8 Titanium and get one Pyrite in return, that's not really what you want. In about 10 tries to synthesize a legendary material, I haven't been successful even once despite chances of up to 25%.

Anyway, with a bit more balancing, the alchemist has the potential to severely improve the game and make grinding much more attractive, especially in case even rarer material (maybe a blue "Chaos" grade as suggested by @fundurian) gets introduced.

Pets

There's two new pets: Golden Leo and Yong Wang, both ot which are Ancient. This is actually pretty cool; I really want those new ones and will be continuously spending a portion of my magic water for pets until I get them :-)

The more relevant changes to pets are:

1. The expedition times have been increased dramatically from 8 / 8 / 12 / 16 hours to 12 / 18 / 24 / 30 / 48 hours, and at the same time the amount of magic water per expedition has increased
2. Pets now give their knights a 20% higher drop rate for the material grade they are

All in all, I really like these changes. I don't need to send my pets on expeditions all the time anymore, they make more MW in total, and the total number of materials mined through pets has been reduced (which is good for the prices).

Balancing changes

These are smaller changes, mostly affecting the items that need dungeon material to get crafted because those got a 10% buff. That's quite interesting, and I've benefitted from it with my Tulip Garden Bow on one of my accounts. It also means that dungeon material is being bought more, so prices of these materials have stabilized a bit

Summary

All in all, the changes in 1.9.0 point in the right direction. They open up the doors for some incremental changes that can make the game more sustainable for long-term players. Generally, however, the update is still not shaking up the world, neither for new players, nor for old ones. Progress is still really slow in the higher ranks (at least without investing heaps of EOS) and there's only few new players dripping in. But the alchemist is good for a change and the changes to the pets make for some experiments with whether or not to adopt the higher-grade pets.

I'll definitely keep on playing and still hope that EOS Knights will become more lucrative to play once more.

Keep grinding!