I've been thinking about how gates tend to just vanish, with no explanation or fanfare, so I came up with this idea to make things more interesting.

Firstly, to give all players a fair chance to participate, increase the gate cycling interval to a staggered amount, so it's not always at the same time of day, Say an extra 7-11 hours.

The three hours before the changeover are a period of instability, the oldest gate is decaying, the levels are beginning to erode, difficulty increases, but with the chance of finding special things, such as strata-level equipment which is chipped and discarded from unfortunate soldiers who died in the gate, copies of normal equipment, but nerfed 5-10%, and after 30 days, crumbles to dust.

The heat level indicator could behave completely insanely, after getting a random amount of heat, it would level up (or down) to a randomly rolled internal level, with the displayed level silly things, like level q, level , level 9001, etc.

Then the gate collapses, there is wailing and gnashing of gears, then the new gate activates, starting a three hour "new gate" event.

Since it's a new gate, while the strata theme might be known, absolutely nothing is known about the actual maps available. No skipping to T2 or T3, not even for cash. All the monitors are question marks, and while internally the system goes on as normal, there's no way to plan or predict what you'll be facing until the three hours are up, and the clockwork techies have mapped out the gate from the info from those daring initial explorers.

The special bonus for those bold explorers who dare to go blindly where no clank has gone before would be express elevator tickets, one for each strata completed, one per strata per player. A T1 strata gives a 1* ticket, a T3, a 3* ticket. Untradable, and is only usable in that dungeon, and so expires with the dungeon. The tickets would be redeemed for a single elevator trip to any specific level in the dungeon in the tier the ticket was earned, with an express fee of a few energy, perhaps based on how many elevator trips were skipped.

Additionally, either or both of these events could earn small vanity items, such as patches that match the explored gate symbol, or a carpet for the guild hall.