We could go on about crystal distribution for days... But when it comes down to it, in the end, the problem lies in two areas:

1.) The "Autosell" feature for minerals. The masses come in, sell their minerals without any thought as to what effects they have, and take their small sum of crowns and go on with their lives. Part of this is due to lack of documentation I think, but that's for another topic.

2.) Lack of Guild Leadership in the community. Simply put, the system was put in place to give players control over what they want to play. However, in these early launch days, the Guilds haven't stepped up and taken leadership in encouraging certain mineral drives for elevators. It is up to the Guilds to take leadership in the community and see fit that good elevators are constructed.

With that said... I've been mulling this over for a while, and I'll be posting my idea in the suggestion forum soon enough.

Guild Leaders: I encourage you to tell your members to hold onto their minerals, and plan out what levels you want to see. Talk with other guild leaders, and take charge in the community.

Don't worry. Sbdajpplifrozk, the Troll Guild, is here for all your Gate ruining needs!

Time to put nothing but Crimsonite in the next gate, as per Chronus' commands!

Don't worry. Sbdajpplifrozk, the Troll Guild, is here for all your Gate ruining needs!

Time to put nothing but Crimsonite in the next gate, as per Chronus' commands!
- Avlein

Buahahhaaa~ It seems as though my FREE PIE campaign from months ago has come back to haunt us all.

By the way, welcome back Sbdajpplifrozk. You can call me Aeca now, as you may have figured. (I'd also rather not be confused with the official Cronus GM. xD)

BeAuMaN,

Myself and a fellow knight, and I'm sure a few others, have been recording deposit ratios and the kinds of stratums they lead to; it's been rather difficult, but you can see some efforts in this thread:

http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/2062

Guild coordination would seem to me quite difficult, given the casual nature of Spiral Knights and the apparent complexity of the pattern. It wouldn't simply be one guild being enough; it would have to be across multiple guilds, maybe even mostly game-wide coordination. That's not gonna happen.

If Wegner gives out more information about the formation of gates, then I could see more directed experimentation working; but until then, the problem space is unknown.

What would be equally appalling are the creation of self appointed "Gate Bouncers" who become downright hostile to anyone depositing crystals not of their liking. This kind of situation creates a sense of elitism and hostility toward new members. New members are needed to keep the game alive.

Every gate I can view right now, except one, has more yellow than any other mineral. Something is definitely up.

SirNiko, the only problem remaining with that would be that certain gates always see a predominance of traffic due to very specific things like "most arenas" or special boss levels. Those gates tend to be run more, or at least that's my feeling. Given that mineral output is based on the type of levels being completed, a pure sell-all distribution in a situation where one gate is being predominantly chosen by players will never result in the proper variety of minerals to get the kind of gates we saw in the original four April 1st gates, which were extremely diverse (almost no duplicate levels).

Gate stratum types will continue to be relatively hegemonic (as in preview with the beast stratum flood) if the minerals being harvested are similarly hegemonic due to player choice of gate.

One solution I see is to set a threshold for duplication in gate elements. The first Fire level requires the standard color majority, but the second time Fire's mineral conditions would be met in that same gate, an additional 20% lead on the other minerals would be needed or else it will fall back to the second closest element match. This percentage could increase further for every instance of Fire in the gate. That would add some enforced variety while still giving players the control to organize "all-fire" gates if they really really wanted to. It would just take more minerals.

It doesn't matter what's said in here or in General chat. The simple fact of the matter is at least 3/4 of the player base will AutoSell for the most Minerals no matter what. It is unavoidable. Either the developers need to force Variety through AutoSelling by some weird coding, or they leave the game up to the people who don't know any better. You also shouldn't expect guilds to be boosting this early in the game when every crown is precious. Remember Beta was pretty much all Beast? Yeah, expect something similar.

We're at the developers' mercy here. Hopefully they come up with something before it's too late.

Would it be too hard to implement a personal or guild gate? One inside the guild hall that you craft by yourself? I don't like seeing all fire or slimes either.

being able to make like all slimes and go in with slime slayer, or just farming bones to your hearts content, but yeah it'd be cool to have less fire. :|

I've been autoselling mostly because I don't know any better.

I read the wiki a little after reading this topic and I sort of understand a bit more, but I don't think its enough to make me vastly change my default autosell trait. I just go in a gate (usually the leftmost one) and play. I don't think much about it. It's strange that with this game I've pretty much ignored the wiki whereas in another game I always read it, but I feel that's because this game is kind of playable without knowing every detail.

It doesn't help that boosting and stuff isn't explained in the game itself last I checked.

In all fairness (and unfairness) to the devs, we have no idea what mineral combos create which levels. Even if a new player DID want to make better levels, they'd have no idea what to do, and no source of documentation.

For that matter, I care about good gates, but even I don't want to click minerals hundreds of times (or dozens, using shift-click to sell groups). The auto-sell button is good UI, but needs some tweaking to make it more consistently useful. (in particular on the backed, ie what minerals spawn, or default level themes that favor one type of mineral)

This
http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Gate_construction#Boosting_Mineral_Types

Is not explained in the game itself last I checked. He goes into all other details but not that. That's what I referred to when I said boosting. I tried to log on to make sure I didn't overlook this as I checked only when I first played but this computer is unable to handle this game so I must settle for memory only.

As far as removing autosell, I wouldn't be too hopeful given what went on here:
http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/1837

Ease of use is one of the big features of this game. And there's nothing easier than selling all your materials at once.

Many newcomers probably wont read the wiki, and will just skip through the tutorial, so I say the autosell function should be removed. And seeing how boosting is pretty expensive, I don't expect much people to be doing it. Maybe put a limit on how much you can deposit at a time or something.

Also, didn't we speak of this already when the stratums were all beast? I noticed that Red minerals were just pretty much switched with yellow.

I didn't post that about the toggling thing. I posted that about the reasons they made that change in the first place, specifically these lines

"There were many reasons for doing this, namely that Spiral Knights uses as much iconographic information as possible: party pads, block colors and shapes, weapon icons, etc. The goal is that anyone can understand how something works or will work in any language and with anybody."

To remove autosell will make people have to go learn about it, but that's the thing, that goes against that last line. Everyone will not be able to understand how that works. At least not the within the game itself since not everything is told to you and even in the wiki all combinations aren't known.

"Along those same lines, we always strive to remove that which would otherwise slow the experience in the Clockworks down in any way."

While autosell is not in the clockworks itself, there is no doubt that removing it would slow down a casual player who is used to autoselling. I thought perhaps adding a autosell for a particular color may help this but not really since anyone who doesn't know will still simply sell everything anyway.

A more complex solution than simply removing autosell would need to come about in order to solve this. See there's a thin line on this game, casual and hardcore. I think its a casual game with hardcore aspects. You don't have to know anything about this game to enjoy it and the first few levels. You can make a passive living without doing anything major. Autosell is one of those things that fits into that casual gameplay type of thing. Not using it by choice and planning out gates, that's your hardcore part.

if someone already said this I apologize, I skimmed the thread.

each strata should not contain any of the crystals that attribute to the same strata type, or at the very least, never have the larger crystals be of those types, and perhaps strongly suited to a different strata type (which could be randomized on a daily basis or something, so fire gates didn't always lead to beast gates down the line, or something). perhaps it already works this way, i have never noticed or paid attention to the types of crystals in each strata. but there should definitely be some conditioning that prevents one strata producing crystals that leads toward the same strata on another gate.

it would be nice if the combos were clearer to us, so we knew what the ratios are. but some measures to prevent us from abusing that knowledge..

it would be nice if they added in pre-determined stratas with the other types (beast, freeze).. more bosses!! or even just a fun set of missions with some additional mechanics, beyond the normal rotating levels.

I've been unable to play since Friday but i have been in gates where I have seen things like almost exclusively yellow rooms. And I remember an arena where there was a lot of red one time.

I've given my thoughts on player-blind gate creation before, and things have improved greatly since then.

The remaining problem is to get people to pick up the desired minerals while they are still in the clockworks. Even if a player boosts a specific mineral out the wazoo, no one checks the going price for minerals before they dive into a gate. By the time you see that a mineral is boosted, you've already chosen the minerals that you're going to deposit.

Here are what I see as possible solutions:

1. Notify players of boosted minerals when they enter the gate or discover a mineral room via popup or chat (i.e. We need more moonstone, and we're paying extra for it!)
2. Make boosted minerals spawn more or larger crystals.
3. Allow conversion from one mineral type to another for a fee (If you have 2 red to sell at 5, it would be better to pay 3, or some stuff to convert them to blue and sell for 10).
4. Allow tanking a specific mineral type (by depositing something, you can drive the buy price of a mineral down to zero, where minerals won't autosell)
5. Add non-colored minerals that fill out a strata without changing the color ratio so you can lock in the desired ratio.

It's allready correcting itself

Just went into the new gate that is allmost all fire.

It was all valestone (green) and dark matter (purple) with some moonstone (blue) and very little crimsonite (red)

there was no luminite (yellow) at all

Hi there.

Knights of Equestria are trying to flood the Silver Knight gate (the second last gate) with Moonstone and Dark Matter. Would be great if you guys pitched in. =)

There's no specific reason, other than that we don't want any more fire and slime and want to figure out what different colors do.

The fix isn't too hard. Just knock the reward for depositing to 0, but still boostable. If players aren't getting rewarded for a color they have no reason to sell it, which means the organized groups have an easier time getting the rest of the population to go along with them, and you could even get bidding wars going on between the guilds.

do gates only launch once they are fuil of minerals? because there is always a countdown, so is there an assumption its going to get filled? will it randomly get filled if it doesnt reach the quotas?

anyways, i would think that if you drop the price to 0, people just would stop bothering collecting minerals at all. would save me time and hassle of wacking those crystals open and figuring out which dropped the biggest.