So I'm one of those weirdos who still prefers running Arcade gates to doing anything else in the game, both for snagging Basil recipes I still don't have and just because it's fun (i.e. unlike FSC). With the removal of gate construction ages ago, we're at the whim of whichever RNG deity decides the themes for each new gate. And that would be just fine, except for the fact that the game can get stuck in serious theme ruts. For instance, I feel like every single new gate over the past few weeks has had at least one undead T2 stratum, and let me tell you, after the recent Black Kat nonsense I don't want to so much as look at another Candlestick Keep for a few months. The other day I saw a new player who doesn't have T3 access yet make a Steam post bemoaning the fact that there wasn't a single active Arcade tier he could access that had a chance of dropping the Fine Fabric material he needed to craft something. Now I don't know if there was truly not a single gremlin-spawning level in all of T2 then, but at the bare minimum I know I haven't seen a gremlin-themed stratum there for a good while. It's especially rough in T2, since at any given time 2 out of 8 strata are reserved for boss levels, as opposed to 1 of 8 for the other tiers.

I don't expect gate creation to come back anytime soon (though it'd be awesome if it did), but barring that, can we at least get some sort of guarantee built into the rotation that prevents a lengthy theme drought? Sure, new players could always turn to missions to farm specific materials, but that presupposes they've unlocked the right ones, and without some wiki-diving it can be difficult to parse which of them correspond to which depths. The Arcade is still the best way to get exposed to a wide variety of level types, and it'd be nice if it provided resources for new players evenly.