So there have been a lot of suggestions about how to do this and I admit that this needs to be done somehow.
Some people say "increase arcade profits"
Others say "Keep them from being replayable"
etc. etc.
Those ideas are just silly and don't make any sense.
The answer is very simple.
After you beat a mission the first time, the elevator costs are then doubled to 20. Or maybe just increased to 15.
That way, you can still play the mission if you want to, but it doesn't make sense if you are going for profit. Thus, you make the arcade more profitable than the missions without actually changing the arcade. But they are still just as profitable for your first run-through.
If you just want to go through all the missions once, you can still do it with no change in pricing.
If you want to play it again for fun, you can. It still would only cost 45-60 energy. It's not profitable for sure, but it's easily affordable, even for F2P players.
If you want to grind tokens, you can. Nobody is saying that once you do it once you can never do it again. It just costs more money, so some people can afford it and will still grind boss levels. However, the vast majority of players will find it much simpler to play through the arcade.
One other alternative is to increase the rate of drops in the arcade, but since I have no idea really how drops work than I don't want to comment on it.
Makes sense, but you gotta remember there's the people with elevator passes. I'm guessing the elevator cost increase for replaying the mission could override them maybe.