The preview event is my first foray into the game and if too much Crimsonite is responsible for the lack of level variety I'd like to see ways of correcting that.

Guild-exclusive gates, maybe?

I have a couple suggestions to help balance out the overall mineral count and help create some more varied gates.

First of all, remove the player-based mineral pricing system, most people ignore it because it's way too expensive with basically no effect. Instead make an automatic system that calculates the sell price of each mineral based on how much of each mineral is in all the other gates. (Basically, if Crimsonite and Valestone make up 80% of the other stratums in the other gates, then Crimsonite and Valestone sell for the least. The minerals with the least presence in gates like Dark Matter and Moon Stone will be the most valuable, until they become more common.) This will hopefully encourage people to collect minerals that are rarer because of them being more inherently valuable, instead of Vale becoming increasingly common the more Vale-dominant gates there are.

Second of all, one of a few changes should be made to the mineral deposit system. Currently, most people just autosell all of their minerals to whatever gate happens to be handy, which causes problems because only two minerals really contribute to what the gate is going to be and the rest end up as a sort of waste. First of all, a system could be implemented that allows players to manage the auto-sold minerals amongst the gates- the reason for this is because if someone doesn't care enough to selectively allocate their minerals and just want to make a quick buck, then at the very least others should be allowed to allocate them in their place instead of being forced to take the results of their carelessness for better or for worse.

Alternatively, the first time someone deposits minerals to a gate, they should be required to choose 2 (or maybe 3) minerals and from that point until the gate is opened they can only deposit those specific minerals to that gate. This would simply work as a measure to ensure that people don't just dump whatever they have into each gate and instead give concentrated batches to each gate, increasing the chance of a disparity between materials and not just another mix batch.

Finally, I'll admit that I'm not 100% clear on how these stratum-based gates work, but from what I understand it's predominantly just based off of what the two (or maybe one) most numerous minerals in the gate are. If this is the case, and all the other minerals are just sort of 'extra' then maybe when a sgate is opened a percentage of the 'extra' minerals can be either refunded or deposited into the newest gate automatically. This, again, is simply to ensure some progress toward variation amongst the gates.

"I had no idea how those gates worked even AFTER reading most of the npcs bitherblather, I suggest those with the know-how compose an idiots guide to this miniral depot thing, and get it sticked, it might help the problem as for me and my friends I'll be keeping a close eye on this forum. As for a rarity issue i can only assume the more rare minerals unlock "better" area's when sufficiently placed, thus the more common and less loot/mat intense levels would proc more often. That system would work if people understood that to go better places they can't just dump everything in there. I didn't know that untill stumbling across this thread. The system isn't as broken as i think you guys are finding it, its just the rest of us didn't know how it worked.

BUT private guild depot's is a FANTASTIC idea :3"

Could not agree with this more. Not that a lot of new people will probably read it, but those who care about the game will, might at least help the cause. As it seems futile as is at this point, until something is changed.

EDIT: Found this on the wiki page after about 5 seconds of searching. It's fairly helpful.

http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Gate_construction

Honestly, they should just remove auto sell completely, and put a tutorial in on how to deposit. Or penalize the player for constantly depositing the same type of mineral. Or maybe even reduce/increase the rarity of minerals you can find as the stratums get over saturated with other types.

There's many ways that this can be countered, and hopefully one will be implemented by launch.

It's not that every player picks Crimsonite.
It's that majority of the minerals randomly generated ARE Crimsonite.

It's not that every player picks Crimsonite.
It's that majority of the minerals randomly generated ARE Crimsonite.

I'll just poke my head in and say that we're aware of this and have something in the pipeline to address it. :)

I wish that boosting the price paid for a specific mineral type in the tier creator would make more/bigger (compared to other types) crystals of it spawn in the clockworks.

I agree with removing the "Auto-Sell" button. All that button does is allow players to be lazy and mess up the gates for other people. Or, even change the auto-sell button, so that it Auto-Sell's to all of the gates, and deposits the proper minerals into the gates with the highest amount of that particular mineral. That would make it so the players that know what their doing can build up the colors they want, and the auto-sellers will just help contribute to their cause without having to learn anything. Both these suggestions are most likely mentioned, would just like to second them!

Nah, removing auto-sell wouldn't do any good. The people who don't care about the system would still manually sell all the crystals they have to make all the money they can in one go.

There is no simple solution to that problem, other than just removing the system of "voting" with crystals altogether. It was a nice concept on paper, but it's apparent that a lot of players just aren't going to care. All they want to do is raid dungeons, quickly sell the crystals for crowns, and then go raid dungeons again. =P