Some great points here, certainly a shorter event would have been useful, also the timing was a little near to Xmas for me - I had family commitments 24 & 25 and couldn't contribute any more to this on those dates. Having teams was fun, throwing achievements are always good, the team prizes were cute.
I have a slow internet connection, but was able to throw over 5000 just by doing this inbetween questing and the like, so this was do-able.
Multi-buy snowballs? Great!
Average throw scoring? Made for a lot of complaining/sense of unfairness. Liked the idea suggested above, 1 'event point' per X thrown with a shop for spending points. But maybe your team prize should not be a 'buyable'?

I had fun with this and the snow hits on the HAs do make me smile. :)

things that i suggest being changed:

1. Preparation for the actual event. "We're having an event where people throw thousands, even millions of snowballs at each other. Oops we didn't realise people would be throwing thousands, even millions of snowballs at each other." lmao

2. Do not have sign ups open until the end to prevent people just signing up to the team that is quite obviously going to win.

3. Only allow people to sign up to a team if it has less members than the other. This prevents everyone piling onto the team with the most members. This happens everytime we have an event like this. Included within this, don't have different sign up prizes depending on which team you join. Make it even for everyone just as the numbers of people on each team is kept even. If someone really wants to be on a specific team THEN THEY WAIT UNTIL IT LETS THEM WOW.

4. If you extend the event so it lasts longer, increase the prizes so people are not disappointed that they spent a week doing something only to be given fuck all. There's a reason people put a lot of effort into events, because subeta is inconsistent in the prizes they give out. Sometimes you say there will be lots of prizes, sometimes few, sometimes none. We literally put effort into EVERYTHING because we don't know what's going to be given and we don't want to take that chance.

5. Don't allow autorefreshing as in like. Make an event where autorefreshing does nothing for you. Maybe every 2 minutes you have to click an interactive part of a picture to gain points, just one of many possible ideas that staff are capable of coming up with to combat autorefreshing. It makes it more fair and less boring wow imagine that. Use a flash game so you have to be there, you have to be present and click/hit/lick/whatever to get points

ill read the rest of this thread when its not 1:13am

this whole thing so eloquently explains how i think 99% of the users who are upset feel. i hope the staff really reads this post. so true, !

I just logged on to find this event.

Was this because we complained, or because there was a legitimate error that someone corrected? I really hope it's the latter because I don't want staff doing something because they think I'm whining and just want to shut me up. :x

Trophies were brought back -- at least temporarily -- because there was enough negative feedback during Peka Boo. I think that's actually good because it shows the staff are listening to what players want.

I hadn't heard that about custom CSS. I hope that's not phased out anytime soon, because that's sometimes the only way I can use the site, considering how inconsistent and buggy the actual CSS is. D: I do try to use as little custom CSS as possible because I'm sure it slows things down, but sometimes there's really no other choice.

Ahh, thanks for the clarification. This is what I get for being out of the Subetean loop for months on end... XD;

I don't adult very well.

My main qualm is that the snowball fight went on for way too long. with an event like this, where the main activity is super repetitive, anything longer than a couple of days is just overkill. even the 5 days you guys originally planned was overkill. also, I've seen more than a few people whose prizes included melody items from this year and last year - that's just.. really disappointing.

Um…no. If there are teams for thing X and thing Y, and I like thing X better, I shouldn't have to join team Y—or sit by the computer waiting to catch an opening when the numbers even up—if I want to participate.

Another complaint: I don't understand any of the maths involved/nothing adds up with the top 10% vs total scores.

Please show us numbers/leaderboards/something so that we KNOW what's going on behind the scenes.

No. Nooooo.

Just no.

So I am pretty much going to just say "ditto" to what most people commented (I only read one page though) especially re: length and repetition. I have never felt compelled to use an AR before, but this event... ugh. I am happy to see that the top 10% was fixed (Holy crap is that one VERY skewed data range for the numbers to change so drastically) and I also agree with people who mentioned the timers should have been set up at the VERY beginning of the event. I saw people with 40k snowballs before the timers were even started, and that explains a LOT of the skewing.

All of that aside, there is one other comment I have: I bought a TON of snowballs because it was hinted that a mass add system was going to be setup to ease some of the strain on the servers.

As others have said, you really underestimate your user base! WE ARE HARD ON SERVERS EVEN WITHOUT EVENTS. YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THAT WE WOULD BE OVERZEALOUS LIKE ALWAYS. This reminds me of free beer... but more expensive.

I agree with most of the comments; It was too long, shouldn't have been so close to Christmas. Three days would have been fine. There should have been times and no auto refreshers ever! I do like picking a team based on the basic team participation prize. I would hate to be forced on a team to keep things even. The prizes were not impressive but, I realize you did what you could. I did really like the big old pile of snowballs background though. For this event I think it would be hard and too much work to have a point system and another special shop. I like just getting the prizes. I really like the idea of cutting off the entrance into the event after a bit, keeping people from joining the obvious winning team at the very end.

Pros: prizes were stated upfront, nice idea to make snowballs more relevant, being in teams were fun

Cons: unfairness with the lack of timer at the beginning, unfairness with joining times (should have been a cut-off to prevent last minute joining), wish there was some way to figure out the approximate 10% cutoff during the event

Overall: I actually rather enjoyed this event. I went in wanting the achievement and the title, and I got what I want. This was very much 'how much time and energy are you willing to dedicate to this', which I think is perfectly fine for a mini-event. It's nice to have a balance of both skill-based and just time/sp-sink events.

I don't like the idea of a strict cut-off as some people are suggesting. That kind of sucks for anyone that genuinely missed the first few days of the event and wants to join in later.

Instead, you could allow signups throughout the entire event, but reduce the prizes as the event progresses. So for example, say the winning team's prize package is five retired melody items and the event goes for five days:

Day 1 signups: Eligible for team prize (sled/necklace), five melody items, and bonus prize (background) Day 2: Team prize, four melody items, and bonus prize Day 3: Team prize, three melody items, and bonus prize Day 4: Team prize, two melody items Day 5 (final day): Team prize, one melody item

That way you can still join late and receive something for participation, but you can't bandwagon the winning team and expect to get all the prizes.

It makes things a more complicated though, so there will need to be a very clear way to explain it. Maybe something like a daily check-in that displays your progress?

i don't know how much this would matter, but i think stopping people from purchasing more snowballs when they have 100 items in their inventory might help. i know some areas of the site do this, where it stops you from getting more items due to inventory space, so it's possible, right?

that way people wouldn't be able to just auto-refresh AS MUCH (with benefit) and it would cut down on the leftover snowballs. i mean there's thousands in the donation corner right now.. ;( (or maybe use the currency idea. that's probably better, huh)

i don't think i really like "team" events, because it doesn't feel like a "working together" sort of thing, more like a "working alongside each other." i mean it just seems like you have to guess at which team is the "right" team, and then participate as normal. i prefer rewarding individual participation. >___<

^^ With this, maybe make it so you can only buy so many snowballs in a minute that you can throw in that same minute. You could buy 25 snowballs every thirty seconds, but in those 30 seconds, only throw six. That's a lot of left over snowballs.

Here's some things that I'm thinking about:

1. Reduce the length OR vary the event a little throughout the days.
2. Reduce the need for ARs, disincentive the use of them, and make it so that there will be no reward for using them.
3. Tell us how the math breaks down when it comes to the top 10% - it's interesting!
4. Put more blocks on how many snowballs you can purchase, like mentioned.

I liked:

1. The theory behind the averaging system
2. Being able to buy multiple snowballs at once
3. The throw at a random user feature

Please don't make it so that you have to join whichever team has fewer members, though. The whole point of having an averaging system is that so no matter the size of the team, you can still participate. Now, the problem of the freeloaders on both teams needs to be addressed, but not in that fashion.

But I had a lot of fun!

Please stop making incentives for things that are detrimental to the site and its users like hoarding and auto-refreshing.

I enjoyed this mini event other than that and thought it was really cute. The upfront manner of the first news post was great in terms of the end prizes. I'm still dying over how adorable the sled wearable for Team Tobias is.

From Auto-Refresh