I've got an average of 350 of each mineral at the moment, but I'm holding on to them right now because their value in the depositorium doesn't impress me, 5 crowns per mineral at most. When can I expect their value to increase?
So how long can I expect to horde my minerals before they go up in value?
"When can I expect their value to increase?"
Never. Nobody's going to boost minerals with the way the system works now, so just go shove them all into a random gate.
BUT THEY LOOK SO PRETTY
Until the system in place meant to give players a way to encourage specific gate development is made more realistic to use (meaning, it's going to have to cost a LOT less crowns ), nobody will ever use it. The other people have told you true. Just dump them.
First, the prices have to be at least 10 times less. Second, they need to allow you to lower the rewards of particular minerals too.
It doesn't even seem like there is really even that much incentive to go for a particular stratum. If there were strictly "better" stratums people would naturally try to get them without pushing by other players. You'd have to have someone with an absolutely preposterous amount of money that just felt like doing it for fun. What could you possibly get from throwing away ~600,000 crowns to slightly influence one stratum (that will be gone in a week) that 600,000 crowns wouldn't get you by themselves?
Also, the sorts of people that might randomly be interested in doing that would in all likelihood want to influence a tier 3 stratum. Generally gates don't seem to be getting filled, so you would have to spend tens of millions of crowns getting the two minerals you wanted to be worth more than lower stratums were, and also invest in ensuring that the third color wasn't the kryptonite of your desired stratum.
As on now Jelly King, and Vanaduke are always available.
However if OOO provided new bosses with better loot; that required rare gate combinations to spawn the correct stratum, perhaps then guilds may be interested in keeping certain stratums available while they are working on farming a particular boss.
There definitely needs to be a lot of work done on making the "type" of strata actually matter more, aside from everyone and their dog in tier 2 spamming jelly king. Drop rates need to increase for certain material types when fighting certain enemies .... especially stuff that almost nobody targets right now.
Hold onto them until the autosell button's removed and a certain alliance is created, since Guild can't do it all on its own anymore. Pity.
Maybe an option could be that the cost to boost minerals is static and the effect is for a certain amount of time.
Better explained:
Pay 2k crowns and boost X mineral for 1 crown (6cr total) for 15 minutes.
That way it would make a boost to crown economy and also enable to boost gate construction.
The problem with gate boosting is that they don't want to make it so you can turn a profit by hoarding minerals and then flipping them all for profit.
I.E. save 10,000 crimsonite, boost crimsonite by +1 for 5,000 crowns, and turn a cool 5k profit.
So, if a stratum has a capacity of 500,000 crystals it costs 500,000 crowns to raise the value of any one crystal by 1 (in case everyone dumps crystals in there). It's 0 sum.
I'm pretty sure the current gate strata crystal volumes are determined by the total number of crystal in play. That's why they've been steadily growing. People are hoarding waiting for someone to boost, all the while making it harder and more expensive for someone to do so.
The change they should make is they should allow you to specify how long you want a boost to be active rather than paying to boost the entire gate.
I.E. deposit 5k crowns and make the next 5,000 crimsonite turned in worth +1.
The problem THEN is that this suddenly becomes a lot harder to track.
With the current system boosts last for the life of the gate-fill cycle. Once they don't the overlaps become problematic.
If someone else is boosting by 10k and I put up a 5k boost, is the price now two higher? Is it +1 for 15k worth of crimsonite? What happens if no one turns in any crimsonite and the gate completes?
Lots of little loose ends.
Still, I'm convinced that this is the only workable system, because as is no one will spend 1M+ crowns to influence a gate, no matter what the outcome.
5 is about as good as it gets. In theory someone could pay millions to raise it more, but you're likely never going to see more than 5 per mineral.