On Crown Balance and the Arcade-
First of all, OOOs want players in the arcade. Not so much but still occasionally in the missions. The arcade should be the main attraction to playing, as it is mysterious and random and awesome and more importantly, the only way that guilds can really control the game at all. It gives them something to strive for. But I'll get to that later.

People don't play the arcade because of the way that missions give out more crowns and are faster and easier. Want to make a quick predictable 2.5K cr for your mist? Go do jelly king. Everyone knows that odd numbered stratums don't pay well. This made 100% perfect sense before the mission update came out, and was in fact good game design. But it became quite a vestigial feature once I got the ability to go directly to an even stratum- and the odd stratums are represented by the arcade. So here is what must happen- the clockworks and the mission payout must be separated. Don't ditch your old method of payout, but make it profitable. No T2 level should pay less than the first level of jelly king (800 cr), and no T3 level should pay less than the first level of FSC (1000 cr or so). Well, that isn't exactly correct, but it should be balanced based on the following criteria:
-Time to completion
-Tier
-Effort required to get there
-Difficulty to play through
-The alternative levels that I could be playing on
-The price of energy

So if I'm on a random clockworks level at the start of T3, I'm going to need to get paid more than the first level of jelly king palace, but a bit less than the first level of FSC, as FSC levels take a while to complete while clockwork tunnels are much shorter. You, OOO, keep the energy price at about 6.5K per hundred via promotions and sinks. Thus, lets look at some imaginary statistics-

Level____Time_____Difficulty (out of 5)____payout_______Difficulty to get to (out of 5)
JK-1_____5 min__________3____________800 cr_________________1
FSC-1____6 min_________4____________1000 cr________________4
CT-1_____4 min__________3____________900 cr_________________3

Now why on earth would a 4 minute level pay more than a 5 minute one with equal difficulty? Because its harder to get to, and you should be doing boss runs almost solely for the items you get there. Look at ICMF, people have fun with it, and then they move on to occasionally do it again. Its not the biggest part of the game, but it is something, and it lets people have fun for a bit on it. But unlike FSC, it does not become the entire game for people (most of the time). We want Jelly King's prize to be what is of value most to people, and currently, it is not (again with the 'I'll get to it later'). About 3 months ago, it might have been argued that buffing such levels would ruin the game. But now it has been forcefully proven that giving the ability to start out at a specific place in the clockworks will not crash the market any more than it already is crashed.

I just went and played through an entire T3 stratum. I made about 7K, which means that I'm making about 600-700 cr per level if I don't cheat or manipulate the game by waiting on arenas or run nothing but FSC. Needless to say, my mats were OK, but then the same holds true for mats on FSC (for the most part). Oh, and did I mention that I did 2 danger rooms to make that 7K? Also note that the only reason that I made that much was because I did both stratums. The first stratum paid about 3K, and the second about 4K.

I am happy about the changes to RJP's payout as well as the arena-mission's payouts, but I'm going to have to say that all you've done is made the T2 players have to work harder. I'd recommend nerfing mission FSC's payout as well, and raising the amount the clockworks pays to fix this.

From- http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/53465