I'm a weeeeee bit confused about the per gate tier passes, to my knowledge (and from what I just re-skimmed) nothing about them was mentioned in the sub-town release notes from a week or so ago. The dev who wrote them stated that the reason for the general tiers in the first place is "Limiting advancement into the next tier until players have the right gear and a certain amount of experience in the previous tier is being done to ensure players have a good experience at each major milestone of the game. There is currently a problem with many players walking into areas they are unprepared for, dying, and not understanding why. This new feature will greatly aid in our guiding players to the right content for their experience."
That is a worthy aim from both a playability perspective and a business perspective.
Little podlings (troublemakers term for greenies/newbies/noobs/nubs) will no longer rage quit or feel upset after randomly stumbling into a vanaduke level and dying (not that I'm sure how one randomly stumbles into any level but I digress). Three rings will make more money as these podlings who are no longer rage quitting will be more likely to purchase their own energy.
However, I am not sure why if I, or a little Podling, have traveled down from Haven to Emberlight once in one gate I am not "qualified" via mechanic to do the same in other gates. The other gates are not that different of content nor are they any more special then the gate I did to get my pass in the first place. I understand it produces a situation that makes me spend more energy and thus create more money for OOO but I don't understand why I should be forced to do it - there is no incentive besides the ability to play in the other gate which I'd rather just completely pass up on as opposed to spending the extra energy. I just thought about it, and it could be said it doesn't do much for OOO energywise as a a lot of players might just stick to the gate they unlocked.... as they refuse to HTE (Haven to Emberlight) another gate or just have a taxi (friend with the gate unlocked) invite them to the lower levels.
Also the reasoning states that it will "greatly aid in ...guiding players to the right content for their experience" er shouldn't I the player be picking the right content for my experience? I went through the HTE grind (yes I'm going to call it that) once, and now I am being guided to do it three or four more times (once per gate) as apparently that is the right content for my experience even though I feel that content is A. often times below my skill level, B. often times redundant, and C. Boring enough I refuse to spend energy on it. .... wat.
Furthermore you could make the argument that now new players won't be confused as to why they are dying all the time, but will be confused as to why they can't access parts of the game they have unlocked once as many times as they wish.
A better way of doing this in my opinion would be to have ONE over arching tier pass that you get after completing all levels Haven to Emberlight, the one labeled as clockwork access or entrance or something in game, and no individual gate passes.
This overarching pass would expire after a certain number of days (if you want to get piratey up in here it would be 30 log on days). That way OOO still gets the extra monies from people spending energy to reset their tier passes, but as players we're only stuck into repeating the same content once every x number of days. The player also gets to pick which out of the open gates they want to rework their tier pass in so three rings makes money, players get the experience in depths below haven, and players wishing to just replenish their tier passes get to pick which gate they want to do.
This -- to me -- sounds like a nice comprise. I'm a new player and I'm not geared to get to Emberlight yet (nor could I have made it there before the gear restrictions. At least, I couldn't have made it there without dying far more often than I'd be able to afford -- energy wise) and so my experience with the game is different than those who have already done the HTE (Not a bad acronym, really) grind.
For me, in all 2* gear, the new way of doing things works. However, I have a feeling that in a few weeks I'll be less than pleased with it. Making more experienced players tediously run through the first stages of the game over and over is... incredibly lame, if nothing else. I understand that OOO needs to make money and that they've decided selling CE is their business plan, however forcing experienced players to pay into the game to play non-challenging levels is a bit unfair. A player who is having fun below emberlight is likely to be incredibly bored above it and might decide to quit the game rather than stick it out for the elevators they've unlocked.
A separate suggestion from Cyclohexane's is that players that have unlocked a subtown don't pay energy to access gates between Haven and that subtown, or else pay a reduced fee. While this doesn't eliminate the time aspect of the complaint, it at least means that those players who can handle the harder content do not have to pay out the nose to grind there through the easy levels.