Yeah, now it's pointless, get rid of it.

There is no question that going through the Arcade rather than missions has been lacking since the mission update, especially the Vanaduke one; people only go through the Arcade to get recipes or as a break from missions if they can afford to do so. Without completing the tiers for a specific gate, there is a price on tiers not cleared for free access. This means you have to go through the whole thing before you can unlock all tier access for free in that gate. When the gate disappears in a week or so that ticket for free tier clearance is gone and you have to do all the floors again to get free tier access for another gate. However, this feature is not necessarily a major issue; it is designed to push people into doing the previous tier(s) to get what they want, to skip the earlier floors. Would removing this tax suddenly spark more Arcade population? A little bit, but 4*+ recipes would be more common and boss recipes may decrease in value slightly. As seen here, there could be rare enemies exclusively encountered by going through the Arcade which may drop untradable tokens to obtain exclusive equipment, meaning if you want the fancy-new-whatever you have to go through the Arcade and truck through those floors. Whether the equipment would be bindable or not would be up to Three Rings, but if they were not unbindable then anyone who wants it would be forced to do several dozen floors to get one of the several items they want. It would remove pay-to-win from the formula entirely, meaning if you want the fancy-new-whatever mentioned earlier you would have to play through several days worth of floors to obtain a few things. Since they would not be bosses they would not have a standard Arcade system, meaning there will not always be one in an active gate; there could be a wide variety of non-boss stratum they may appear in, but to implement them as formal bosses would mean having more than four gates active at once and the gate life cycle would be extended or further inflame the issue which we began with: the payment before skipping T1/T2, avoidable by completing the previous tier(s). If the week a gate would normally last were reduced to a couple days no one would bother going through the floors.

Little by little we can make the Arcade useful again. Yes, I have to make a large post for everything I have thought about and the subject comes up again or is revived. It is the law.