Ironclaw Munitions Factory is still played. It gives about 1.7K cr for the 2 levels prior to the boss, which is about 1000 cr less than fighting the royal jelly gives, but more importantly, it gives boss tokens used to buy a plethora of items, most of which are either useful, or cool looking, or some combination of both. Thus, players still run it, despite being able to fight the jelly palace, which would allow them to craft their armor faster, and make more crowns to spend on items.... At 7200 cr for 100 ce, this means that for the 3 levels in ironclaw munitions factory, players lose crowns to play the game. Not only will playing the royal jelly make you more crowns, it will make you crowns period. And as I said above, people continue to play through these levels for the amazing token items they can gain.

Missions are the same way. With infinite jumps to a more profitable version of FSC and Jelly King, there is very little reason to waste your energy on unprofitable runs in the arcade gates that don't give you very much. The arcade gates don't give prestige, or crowns (unless you're on mist or have an elevator pass), or recipes or anything worth getting, and as such, very few knights venture into them.

In order to rectify this, I'd like to propose giving the clockworks something of an advantage over the mission system. The missions will always have the advantage of being easily available, and a nice way to make a quick buck, but the arcade needs something too. All I'm asking for is a new piece of gear, or even a piece of costume armor that is only available from playing in the clockworks. Even another reskin of an existing armor would be nice.

One could argue that the arcade gates have the wheel of fortune, and the recipes for boss token items in it, but neither of them make up for their lack of straight up crowns. Lockboxes are far too rare to be found reliably, and recipes (given that you find applicable recipes regularly enough) take time to sell, and cost you crowns if you overprice them, or fail to find a buyer. There is also Gwen's argument from another thread- that lower ranked players don't have access to the HoH, and that this will keep Basil in business. This doesn't hold up too well though- players can just wait till they get to the correct place in the game.

Implementing something like this would not be hard at all. Adding tokens to clockwork levels similarly to the mask fragment after Seerus or the shadow lair materials and then placing prizes for them next to other token items should not take too long, and reskining a weapon or piece of armor shouldn't be too hard either... I've even seen armor reskins by fans (like voltail armor) that could easily be used as costume, or even as actual armor. And how hard could it be to duplicate an alchemer or haze bomb and make a "stunning alchemer" or a "Toxic brandish" type of weapon?

All in all, I'd hate to see the clockworks phased out of the game... like they are now.

EDIT:
Another idea that was brought up in the discussion was to buff the things that are clockworks-only, namely Danger Rooms. This could be quite instrumental to pulling this off well. Add danger rooms to all clockworks levels, and make them hold the tokens, preferably with a 100% chance... and give them out at subtowns/basil. I like this.