Feedback:User/Seryu/Holiday Events with Player Participation

Having noticed the rather high occurence rate of the holiday event endings being frequently celebrated 'away from keyboard', I think it may be time to re-evaluate and revise them in a way that more players could consider fun and which would better fit into their schedules.

One of the common foundations of a game is that it is fun because of the interactive elements to it, which is defeated by players just logging on for the span of a whole day just to farm some items without putting any effort in. While one event seems to especially take this into account (Halloween), the rest are mostly reliable for whole districts to be filled with approximately 3-5 active players and the rest asleep standing yet still reaping full rewards.

The suggestions I have to changing this and making them fun again are as follows:


 * Allow players to enter a holiday event ending instance where their actions determine the outcome and rewards.
 * Instance may require an entry fee of holiday collectible tokens.
 * Have players take a final action in the instance with which the rewards are collected and the event becomes 'finished', making it a one-time run once successfully completed.
 * Have amount of small rewards, such as gift boxes or bags, be determined by the player's level of performance.
 * Eight player teams could easily work together or players could perform individually.
 * If a 'finished' instance wouldn't work out in the coding, it could just be a one-time run and have a collectibles trader offer the high-end reward. Though the player will still miss out on getting the smaller rewards due to failiure, they can still attain the major reward at a higher cost of holiday collectible tokens.
 * A repeatable instance could also be applied if the entry fee option is enforced, though the cost of just buying the gift boxes/bags would probably be better with a collector than repeating runs for them (the instance should be about the high-end reward and Lore-entailing ending segment).
 * The availability of the event ending could be expanded upon to the whole of the weekend, freeing up potential for it being run by more casual or busy players.
 * Creating an accompanying PvP variant of holiday event ending instances, making it available to PvP-motivated and PvP only players.
 * This variant would likely discard a gift box/bag reward scheme for Balthazar faction reward scheme (no sense rewarding PvE items to PvP players).
 * Collectible token entry fees wouldn't be required and repeatable instance would be encouraged.
 * Some holidays already have what would serve this purpose (Wintersday and Dragon Festival).

Reasoning for such changes:


 * Improve the fun element of holiday events (actual participation and game interaction)
 * Decrease the encouragement of reaping rewards without efforts
 * Common complaints and problems during holiday events include the following:
 * Gripes of event taking too long (partially due to players doing nothing but standing around waiting)
 * Frequency of players having to ask when the event's going to start or start again
 * Lack of enjoyment for many players due to chat channel spam often involving profanity, offensive remarks, and 'vocalized' (in text) player complaints in abundance
 * Players have effectively metagamed the victory conditions through district assignment, eliminating the affect of most player participation anyway
 * Community-based celebrations can still be arranged without having to revolve around metagaming event ending victories
 * Less reliance on a massive player array reward parsing system (likely less bug reports about missed high-end rewards, too).