Introduction

First and foremost, the purpose of this small book is to detail what I would like to see in the arcade, and how I would like to see them. Before I start however, I would like to outline some basic expectations that I feel would define the arcade as it is meant to be:

0. Players should be able to change the arcade depending on how much they play.
1. Players should not be motivated by any outside factors when editing the arcade.
2. There should be motivation to build new levels and hunt minerals, or other items required to edit gates. Specifically, to hunt items, play certain levels, or as part of a guild objective.
3. Players should see their contribution to the arcade when they make it.
4. The arcade should be an interesting, almost infinite, experience.

To fulfill these points, I will split my OP into two distinct parts- ideas for fixing the arcade, and ideas for furthering the arcade.

Ideas for Fixing the Arcade

These ideas could prove to be invaluable to the success of the game as a whole, if randomly generated elements and the concept of a "rogue-like nature" are to be utilized as a major feature. They are both what people come to expect when they see the arcade, and what I believe you the developer have hoped to create.

0. Create An Unbiased Means of Building the Arcade

This means that you should NOT have battle sprites eating the same things that go into creating gates, and that paying the players to deposit into the gates isn't going to get you anywhere either.

Doing either of these things will remove the power from the players, creating gates completely at random and denouncing minerals into nothing but small monetary gain.

A better idea would be to have something like the following, though there could be some kind of variation to suit tastes:
Step One: Collect Minerals (which cannot be used for ANYTHING else)
Step Two: Use Minerals to vote on themes- without receiving ANY crowns; this would be exactly the same as the old construction but without crowns, and clear cut categories to vote for. For instance, deposit purple+red into the "fiend box" to raise its count.
Step Three: If you win the vote, congrats! If you don't, you get your minerals back in the mail. A gate only needs minerals of the winning types.

1. Allow More Control Over Arcade Construction

Allowing additional methods of building gates would be, while not entirely necessary, a huge boon for the game as well. For instance, think of the concept of "world cores", a single level held within a core that would create a level sequence when placed into a gate. Here's how:

Step One: Acquire a world core. These would be hard to acquire and would likely be crafted from a large number of minerals and the likes.
E.G.
Heart Of Ice Core:
2000 crimsonite
2000 valestone
1000 dark matter
1000 moonstone

Step Two: Place the world core into a gate toward the bottom.
Step Three: Players looking to vote on levels would have the original boxes, as well as your special level.
Step Four: If your special level wins the vote, it would be placed into the arcade.

Really, there are many many ways to go about this, and what I've suggested my not be so plausible as I think it would be.

2. Make Certain Items Require Certain Content

In much the same fashion as the items that come from the bosses, it would be much appreciated if we had specific items set aside from normal use. To do this, I would like to see the items divided into two larger groups:

*0. Core Items
These would be things that players use on a common basis, and should be able to purchase with ease. They are things like brandishes, final flourish, haze bombs, alchemers, valiance, things that are the crux of the game. Reliable, sturdy, and over used.

These items would be given out in the hall of heroes as recipes, just as they are currently.

*1. Oddities
These would be things like the graviton bomb, winmillion, iron slug, cautery sword and shard bombs. Things that fewer people use, things that provide a challenge. Things that can prove clutch in certain scenarios, but which make terrible starting weapons.

The game is, to a large extent, already divided up in this manner. What I suggest however, is to deviate much further from the standard formula of "Grind crowns/whatever, craft items, rinse and repeat" that gets dull quickly.

Take these recipes, and make them rarer in the arcade. Make them require special tokens from a particular brand of levels, or make Underworld Drip sell some of them. Make basil offer some of the specialized recipes after danger rooms or add them in as secrets in compounds levels. They shouldn't be impossible to find, but they shouldn't all be sold to you in the hall of heroes. Its just... so dry, to do that.

And this shouldn't stop at this- making a few re-skins of costume armor to place into the arcade would be a great way to kick off a promotion... The event last halloween, prior to the obsidian event, was a grand example of what I'm talking about. Make a new set of costume armor, even a dull re-coloration type thing, and then send it out into the arcade... then make a sold set of boxes to go with it! The new armor could be placed anywhere from inside of random boxes on specific content to the ends of danger missions to only on compounds.

Blatantly reskinned things that would easily sell well:
-Kat-Hats that match popular styles- Surge, cool, shadow etc.
-Halos of any sort- "leafy", "flies", even the normal styles of heavy, fancy, etc.
-Shadowy version of the "guardian" armors sold with the guardians pack
-existing proto gear, doesn't even need reskinning
-groundbreaker- not the traditional gold, but take off the beta sign and you can make it look however you'd like.

...And then, you make a few exclusives. For instance- "Costume expansion!" would have some combination of the above placed into the arcade. Then, special commemorative boxes would be sold for CE, or directly given to players for purchases. These boxes would contain some of the new items in the arcade, but would also contain special event only gear.

This wouldn't be hard at all, and could easily be loved.

3. Provide Incentive For Helping Newer Knights -or- Accelerate Guild Recruitment

One of the most common complaints about the game is that its a ghost town... now, we all know that this isn't true- but the first few levels of the game are often empty and completely void of life. The party finder was a good start, but there are still not enough knights going on the early-game missions- what if you awarded players prestige for going on missions with newer knights, or gave them additional rewards for helping knights through a part of the game for the first time? These rewards would likely be aimed at players that are on the same level as those knights that they would be helping, and would most likely consist of crafting supplies for 2/3* gear.

Another idea would be to accelerate guild recruitment. That is, to induct players into willing guilds early- so as to keep them in the game and give them a group to play with. What could be done, would be to allow a posting board for guilds, and to advertise this board to newer knights. You'd have an area, probably on an interface... if a new knight is having trouble finding people to do say, the first mission involving devilites, then she should see something along the lines of- "Join a guild to-day!", which would pop open the "guild recruitment interface". Doing so would show guilds which the knight could simply click "sign up" on, as well as descriptions of each+links to their guild halls if open. Guild masters would be able to sign their guild up to receive knights, and would provide a description, rules, etc.

On a scale of 1-10, I'd rank this at about an 8 in terms of importance.

4. Freeze Paths in the Arcade.

If there is a randomly generated level, like clockwork tunnels or compounds, then it should have one instance per go around. Currently, the game gets old and we run through every single iteration of clockwork tunnels and compounds every single time we play the game.

The purpose of doing this is to enhance the exploration aspect of the game, allow for reproducible results on runs, and give motivation for the creation of new levels. If I want new levels, I'm going to have to generate them for myself to explore. If there is a cool scenario room on that generation of the level, then we've succeeded, and will come to appreciate such a thing. Levels loaded into missions would also be frozen.

Reproducible results on runs would also allow for things like time trials in the arcade as well as competitive daily missions- rather than being entirely biased towards whomever the RNG chose.

Ideas for Furthering the Arcade

By no means are these necessary- but by all means would they be AWESOME. These are the things that I feel could really be useful when furthering the game as a whole- not just keeping up with expecations, but claiming a spot on the market, putting the spiral knight down as an all star, in Sonic's eyes. Fulfilling what was started. So without further ado-

0. Allow Branching Paths In The Arcade

Currently, if I'm going down, I have to wait for twenty minutes if I want to rotate the arcade gate to a specific point to do a specific level. This is both bad game design, and could be utilized better- certain levels with branching paths could easily incorporate multiple exits and thus multiple paths.

Pivotal parts of the arcade would hold branching paths going down- these would lead to totally separate levels- one side of the CT level I'm on might lead to 2 compounds levels and an arena. The other might lead to a concrete jungle sequence. Both would then conjoin after the same amount of time to either a new level type, or a subtown/midsection.

Under this system, levels would no longer rotate, and outcomes would be statically tied to elevators. It might be challenging to code, but it would allow for many, many, new possibilities within the arcade.

1. True Giants

What I am suggesting is to add in much larger monsters as a sort of danger room type scenario. These larger monsters would have special stats, and would be mostly reworked versions of existing enemies. Each family would likely get one to boot- things like a giant version of the lichen colony or even the jelly green giant, or a larger, blown up version of the griever that would move slowly and cause massive AOE damage. Think vanaduke big, but existing monsters.

They would appear like danger rooms, but would offer an escape. There should be a good chance that knights will not be able to win against them. It would likely cost energy to get to them, and beating them would offer many boxes as a reward- I would place them on compounds, as the "danger room" for that set of levels.

2. Level Variants

Lets say that I'm going down to a bland level, like an ice themed undead clockworks tunnels. In T2 and T3, this would have a chance of being hijacked by phantoms! There are so many variations that could happen, and it would be an awesome addition to elite/advanced modes in particular.

List of potential variations:
-Phantoms would spawn, as if it was a graveyard level. Random bits of graveyard level would be added into the generation.
-All normal blocks become monster cage blocks.
-All pot spawners have a 50% chance of spawning a monster cage instead of a pot.. you'd still be able to get pots out of it, but slowly. +1 to gunners.
-All enemies would be replaced with 2-3 minis (like on compounds) each.. dead gremlins would litter the floor- as if minis took over. Would benefit bombers.
-Two categories of enemies would be switched; for instance, healers and elite enemies would be swapped out.
-The status theme of the level would be split between 2 or more statuses/monsters- shock+fire+construct, Gremlin+beast+fire, something like that.
-The level would be swarm infested, and would contain some elements from the void.

These types of events would occur around 10% of the time in Tier 3, or 5% of the time in T2, so it would be somewhat uncommon to find them... a nice surprise, unless you're scared of phantoms, minis, and large quantities of grievers. I think that it'd be quite exciting to encounter them, and would really add a lot of replay-ability to the game.

Adding additional elements to boss levels, like ice or shock to the royal jelly levels, or changing firestorm citadel to include a portion of shock themed monsters (randomly) in addition to the usual fire would be a welcome change as well- it'd really mix up the strategy, and would fit in with the lore as well as the shadow lairs do. Changes could be specific to the levels being altered- FSC could be made to have half beasts, or even grievers instead of slags at times, while the royal JELLY palace should stick to being JELLY cubes- with ice variants, or blast cube variants. Changing the sub theme of construct on it would be nice, however- jellies+...wolvers or jellies+...gremlins would both be welcome.

Keep in mind that the original bosses in the missions would remain intact.

3. Allow Lower Tiered Bosses To Spawn in T2 and T3

The idea here would be for lower tiered bosses, like the jelly king, to spawn in T3. Higher tiered bosses would NOT spawn before they are due, but lower tiered bosses would have a chance of spawning later on, so while T1 knights couldn't find themselves with fang of vog, T3 players would end up with a brave new challenge to face- the snarbolax.

The levels themselves would not change with the tier whatsoever- except for the difficulty of the mobs within. Shadow lairs would still be challenging beyond normal difficulty, and there would still be one boss per gate. Since players can now challenge bosses at ANY TIME in their correct stratum, this shouldn't be much of an issue.

4. Add a Level Editor

EDIT: I recently had a much better idea than what is written below, found here- http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/108247

A level editor, where players could edit level segments and have them added to the game via some sort of rating system, would drastically increase the amount of replay-abillity in the game as well as reduce the workload on the level designers... in fact, a level editor would probably be the best possible feature to add into the game.

The way I'd see this, would be where players could make "player segments", that would be tested by players and rated on the following:
-[Difficulty]
Which tier is this?
How much should it pay?
-[Style]
How much did I enjoy this?
Was it creative and fun?
-[Length]
Did it take forever?
Was this an entire level?
-[Theme]
Is this a shock level, like it claimed to be?
Or is the level creator a massive troll?
-[play-ability]
Was the level a legitimate level?
Was the level impossible and terrifying?

Players would earn either some trivial amount of currency for testing this, in krogmo coins, crowns, or otherwise, and the level segments would be split into segments based on how they were rated... before being added into a player level segment of the arcade. Player levels in the arcade would be balanced with clockwork tunnels, and would not replace the entire game- not all player levels would be added either. Another option would be to have player made gates.

But really, this could be added in any number of ways. All of which equally amazing.