Found it!

http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Release_Notes_2011-04-04
"Increased the chance of a random mineral type spawning in place of a given level's associated mineral types."

So a Valestone or Luminite in Royal Jelly Palace... will have a chance to be re-rolled to a different mineral on spawn.

This explains everything except the part where Dark Matter has -additional- prevalence over other mineral types.

GMs will mix it up when it's released anyway, it's highly unlikely they'll leave any gate pure -anything-.

Shock is always the sole type of every gate made these days, and yet when they're released you don't see all that Shock anymore. If GMs left it as is then there would be less variety in the game since players would be seeing almost no other monsters except Shock types.

Ah, thanks for that reference, Gigafreak. That one little note answers a lot.

This is dumb it's almost awesome.

lol wow.

Either gate system would have this problem, because it isn't the gate system. It's the mineral distribution in levels. All this system does is make it blatantly obvious. Either boss strata need to have all colors able to spawn or we need a reason to play a t2 that isn't Royal Jelly Palace.

I thought all the new gates are by default all shock because they got rid of the question marks. Remember how a new gate looked like all question marks until that stratum was set? Well, now that they've made it more fluid, I thought that every stratum starts as shock until people put enough minerals into it to change it to something else.

I could be mistaken, though.

No, this is a problem with the gate system. The previous system was either neutral (gold values were equal across all minerals on a stratum) or beneficial (if you boosted) to players trying to craft a gate. The current system actively works against anyone trying to affect the outcome of a gate, directing autosold minerals counter to what's currently highest in a given stratum, bringing the gate to an equilibrium that is, apparently, shock.

The problem with avoiding shock levels is that under a system where the minerals to make shock levels (and fiend) are more common on other types, everyone avoiding these levels will just create more of them until we have all shock and fiend with the 3 boss strata. The only way to make other types of strata form is to man up and play the shock and fiend levels to get the other minerals. However, with the jelly run being so popular, this isn't going to happen, as more shock and fiend levels just push more people towards it because at the end of the day it's a game and I personally don't find it fun getting smacked down by 4200 chairs in 2 seconds or getting shocked once and dying due to it stopping me moving and cancelling my shield.

I'm pretty sure this gate system is temporary and the only reason they changed it was because boosting wasn't working as intended. I think Nick said that they were working on a new system. At least that's what I picked up from the release notes when the old system was removed.

(Edit: The guy before me just finished saying the stuff I just cut out. /derp. My bad. Moving on...)

If you see a (friendly, open-minded) new player, be sure to let them know that the purple ones are "common and cheap" whereas green and gold are "uncommon and more valuable." For one thing, they won't want to take the purple ones, and for another-- it's the truth anyway! (Yes, maybe it'll even help if you refer to Luminite as "gold" colored instead of just yellow.)

In the meantime, though, I wonder if maybe stratum mineral payouts ought to be determined by the neighbouring strata's mineral counts instead of the stratum's own mineral counts. Though right off the bat there's a problem with this suggestion: it's a bit counterintuitive for new players, and tricky to explain.

Ehh, yeah, the idea was to get the purple minerals all concentrated to the same stratum so that other minerals can become dominant on other strata.

Adding purple minerals into stratum 2 would reduce autosell value on purple for the strata 1 and 3, but NOT stratum 2. Therefore Autosell will concentrate all the purples into the stratum 2, meaning we only have to put up with one or two Shock strata per gate.

New issue: this is a feedback loop (Adding purple into a stratum makes people add MORE purple into that stratum!), and those almost never end well. I'm sure I can probably come up with at least three ways this can go horribly awry, if I thought about it long enough.

Is good for Quicksilver equipments no?