The good things: I am glad that you can just buy the snowballs and didn't have to restock them. I remember when the snowball achievements first came out, snowballs were so expensive! (like 10K - 40K sP just for one snowball)

The hit random person on other team feature is awesome. I also like that when you get hit by a snowball, the event is separate from other events, so that it doesn't clog your events.

What can be improved I think the problem is that because it's team vs team, even if it's meant to small, people (including me) get competitive and end up throwing a lot more snowballs than they would otherwise, and thus end up expecting more for the prizes because they put in the extra effort.

I don't hate the team vs team, since I had a lot of fun hanging out in the team thread and met some awesome people. But I think maybe it would be good to have more tiered prize system other than just one for the winning team and one for the top 10%. (For example, a prize for throwing 10K snowballs, 20K snowballs etc, can even be rolled into achievements)

I personally was on the winning team and made it to the top 10%, but I feel bad for people on the other team who aren't the top 10%, because they got very little out of this event.

I loved the stats and kept on staring at it, but I guess it would be nice to know if you would be in the top 10% instead of trying to guess? I like that to get the team-specific participation prize, you're shown how many snowballs you need, so maybe one for the to 10% would be nice to see as well.

Also, it would be nice to be able to choose the retired Melody items instead of just given random ones. Some people may value books more, others may want the foods, while others want wearables etc. So I would've liked to have the option to pick from a pool of items or something

ALL OF WHAT SAID. ALL OF HER IDEAS. ALWAYS.

Sign-up period. NPCs (seriously you are always lacking with them in events and it's sad). Consistency. Actually stick to the prizes you are awarding (retired =/= 2014 just like one =/= six, looking at you custom BOTB items)

Well it actually feels better to know I wasn't even close, but man... that really just solidifies my opinion that this event should have been individually scored XD

This was a neat idea for a mini-event, and I appreciate the thought, but the execution just wasn't on point this time. :(

Yeah, I think Andrea summed it up pretty nicely.

The prizes were too poor for the length of the event, the system encouraged people to sign up at the last minute for whoever was winning, people started jumping ship because the gap seemed insurmountable and hardly worth the effort given the lack of a tiered system. Everyone was tired because what seemed to be a weekend-long cute task became a thing for the rest of the event (shortened after many complaints).

I'm not very supportive of the team score being a simple average between totals and players (especially not with signups open until the end), but that's another story. I would have disliked more if the rules of the game had been changed in the middle of it, admittedly.

What's really bothering me here is the lack of attention to both planning and maths. I don't know how staff didn't anticipate thousands of snowballs being thrown, I don't know what made it look like it was a good idea to let people buy 50 snowballs per minute but only be able to throw 12. I don't know what made it look like it was a great idea to implicitly make users believe the 10% achievement was going to be accounted over the 4,768 total participants listed on the event page (based on which our scores were tallied!), when in the end it was going to be some unknown number. Clearly the people who threw 30k+ snowballs were going to feel slighted, especially because several top users probably took advantage of the lack of timer. In fact, that also incentivizes users to go full force on whatever the next event task might be, regardless of the server impact. That's the way to win.

I also wish the Channel 5 reporter kept bringing us random updates about the war and that the closing post had a little interaction between Tobias and Dolly again. Now that she lost, I don't think we'll be seeing her face again?

Small rant time: on top of that, we also have people who didn't get their tree's gifts, people who got last year's gifts, team prizes getting awarded in multiples and then cleared, people who still got their team's prizes glitched... this has been the glitchiest Luminaire I've ever had here. In fact, I feel like since Black Friday absolutely EVERYTHING has glitched for me. Which, btw, was another failure in terms of planning and paying attention to maths.

It's sad. Great and cute ideas keep getting ruined because of the same mistakes. I shall try to come up with some useful thoughts about making it more fun for the future, but I feel it might not be as useful when these ideas may also get the same glitchy execution.

I was one of the people who wished there would've been more to this event. (I just feel like there wasn't much of anything to do during this Luminaire in general.) But I can see the event as just a new way to use snowballs. Does that mean that there will be another war next year?

Alsooo I like the thing where it was supposed to last five days. There was just not enough to do to account for the event being so long. I'm glad some people got so into throwing the snowballs, but I just can't be happy doing that for more than a few days.

Everything else was either fine or doesn't matter to me.

I enjoyed my prizes, though. :D I got a retired book that my bookworm pet hadn't read yet!

Things I loved I loved the random user snowballing. I was afraid at first I was going to have to go off and find the users on the other team.

I also loved that the snowballs were endless. No having to fight everyone else to restock one snowball or paying through the nose out of usershops.

I loved the up front about the main team prize and how to get it.

Things I didn't like I already said this many times before but it went on for way too long. This was way better suited for a weekend. Honestly, two days was about the length of time before I was wishing I never even joined a team.

The first day free for all no timers. Ugh! I didn't even know this happened for a few days so I was still plugging along hoping I'd get into the top 10%. By the time I did find out Team Toys was like neck and neck with Team Candy and I felt like I had to keep on so we wouldn't lose. Really though, I would have stopped at like 1k if I knew there were users who had already thrown 40k+ in like one day.

Neutral on I already figured that the random Melody prizes wouldn't even touch the amount of sp and effort I put into this so I have no problem with them. Though it would have been nice to be able to pick what I wanted.

If this was just supposed to be a way to opt out of snowballing, it probably shouldn't have been turned into a war. You were pretty clear about the prizes up front, but I couldn't help wondering if there was going to be something more, so the (very mild) disappointment at the end was probably mostly my fault.

This didn't help though:

Prizes, plural. Throughout the entire event I kept thinking more prize tiers were going to be released, but they never came.

It really did turn into Autorefresh: The Event as someone else said.

I also want to say that I wasn't really a fan of the "snowball a random person" button. Yeah I used it, and it was convenient, but it made the event that much more automated. It seemed like one of the most successful parts of Peka Boo was the community built up around, and how active people were on the forums. If you had to track people down on the forums to snowball them, it might have been more engaging.

But again, if it was just supposed to be a way to opt in/out of snowballing, it didn't need prizes and teams and all that fancy stuff that made it seem like so much more than it really was.

Well, when I read the news post I realised that this would be a small event. There was only one thing to do and only one (new) prize. The post was pretty clear about the prizes so I wasn't disappointed.

I guess I only have the complaint that it went for too long... I guess other people assumed that with the extended time we may get new prizes.

I think people who threw like 10s of 1000s of snowballs and are disappointed with what they got can't really complain. I thought it was clear what the prizes would be. They can complain about not making the top 10% etc, but about getting Melody items as prizes..? That was clear from the start.

Pretty disappointed with the event, its the first event I've really been here for and it didnt seem very well thought out, the idea of the snowball fight was good but thats about it for me, I get the feeling it was just planned as an SP sink and nothing else which makes me sad.

The getting more prizes for being on the winning team makes me even more sad, I did so much more then well a lot of people on the other team getting 5 items and I still only get 3 and 3 that werent worth jack crap. I see people getting some worth almost 1 mill and all 3 of mine were worth less than 600k so I enjoyed the comment about perhaps being able to pick which items we got instead of it being random or at least having it where the more effort you put in the more your items were worth or something.

I don't think needing 60+ thrown at the end to get the team prize was enough, thats like a few minutes of effort and 2+ to get prizes is kinda sad too and brings down the teams a lot. I think if both were higher then there would be less complaining from the losing team about freeloaders and a lot less giving up.

Maybe the snowballs needed to be cheaper? 250 sp per point really adds up when you've thrown 38k + which was what i've been hearing was top 10% material and only achievement hunters got anything from having spent this much, I was again disappointed here.

I really wish I had some more positive things to say, feeling really bad about this one and as my first experience in subeta events I can't say i'm looking forward to another.

It was "Autorefresh" : The Event.

Why wasn't there anything to stop autorefreshing. Like, after a certain period, the URL would expire and you would have to manually throw a snowball again.

That was added in later, but it was like 10-15 minutes (at least) between hash updates, so you could freely autorefresh during that time. Not having to pick a target yourself made that even easier.

I feel really bad for the people that got last year's gifts. My understanding is that they had to manually delete them all? I said this during the achievement revamp, but I really hate when users are essentially punished for Subeta's mistakes. (The new achievement system is buggy? Too bad. Go sort through all 1500 achievements and figure out which ones you lost, then come tell us.)

There's got to be a better way

[edit]

THE EVENT PRIZES WERE CUTE THOUGH, AND I'M SUPER HAPPY ABOUT THE SNOWBALL BACKGROUND, JSYK.

It wasn't all bad. :P

I thought the event was really fun for the most part. I threw just over 500 and felt like that was a LOT. I kinda wish I'd known we were getting melody gifts though since I already have all the ones I want. Also, it's really disappointing to learn that people were using auto-refreshers D: When you're doing it all by hand, it's like, yeah-this is a lot of effort- I'm doing so well! Yet all that actual time and effort becomes completely irrelevant when you're letting people use programs to get points. :/ not a fan of that.. the overall idea was good though.

For participating: • Team-themed achievement and title
 • 3 retired Melody’s Cottage items
 • Trow Trophy for your profile!


In addition to the participant prizes, the winning team will receive: 
 • 2 retired Melody’s cottage items
 • A special winter themed wearable

That was in the original newspost.

Definitely in agreement about the time/reward ratio, and that % top achievers is not a good idea for 'small' events.

For future war type events (snowball, BotB style) where there are two teams, I think having themed prize shops would be far more appropriate than giving the winning team double the items of the runners up.

For example, if this event was done again, everyone would accumulate points based on how many snowballs they threw, and then at the end, the winning team would get one item (not 1 item +2 bonus items) and have points to spend in their team's shop. Potentially, the toy team could have chosen from retired toys, and the candy team could have chosen from retired food, with overlap between the teams for misc, minions, wears, etc. If the goal is to randomly distribute items from a pool of retired items, perhaps a roulette system could be considered? For every X points earned, the player gets a roulette spin for different types of prizes (roulette for food, roulette for clothing, etc)

Redistributing retired items is 100% ok for small events like these--there are so many rare and hard to obtain older items, that them being brought back through an event is actually pretty cool. This would take the burden from artists who are often overloaded during the holidays, and would be more interesting than TS or Crystal Shop restocks.

[edit] Also, the hash should have changed way more often than every couple hours for an event that allowed you to do an action every 5 seconds. For other events, where the wait time is 5-10 minutes, it's not such a big deal, but for this, it gave people who used autorefreshers an ENORMOUS advantage over players doing it by hand.

I don't really feel like this event wasn't thought out (outside of the fact that no one on staff seemed to foresee the... tenacity of the userbase's competitiveness), and overall I think a lot of the problems came from the extended period of time it went on. I feel x days sign up/x days throwing or just a 48 hour short event would have 1. saved a lot of users from over-achieving 2. not really needed a sign up cutoff 3. not lead users to believe more would be coming due to the extended duration 4. kept more users dedicated because it's only a few days we can do this.

I never really thought about the autorefresher thing, that.. yuck. That's all I have to say about that, anyone who did that just-- may karma get ya, that is all n___n. In fact, that in mind I'd really love to see "everyone who tossed more than 10k and overachieved!" get the achievement or wearable or whatever the price was for the top 10% since I do imagine a fair amount of those users autorefreshed their way to the top.

I really wish the coding for the Mystery Box would be used for anything that could be potentially autofreshed on (this, candy hearts, ToTing, dancing, etc). Ie: Each link works once and doesn't work at all after 5 minutes.

If staff can't fight autorefreshers via warning/freezing, then they need to stop making the site cater to using them. End of story :I

PS: God I really feel for anyone effected by the trees this year ;; Thankfully I was distracted making the best from scratch lemon bundt cake with so for once I wasn't one of the first wave of guinea pigsusers who clicked a thing and the thing blew up in my face instead. That really puts a damper on your festivities ;; ❤️

oh, i didn't mean that they didn't say that's what the gifts were, just that I didn't realize it.

I feel like if there were going to be timers put in then it should have happened right away to make it fair or the scores should have at least been reset once they were implemented.

Also the whole auto refresher deal killed it for me,Once I found out people were using auto refreshers I quit participating because why bother at that point?

No one is supposed to have an unfair advantage but yet people did and that's also probably where such a large number of snowballs getting thrown came from. I could throw 100k snowballs too with an auto refresher but I choose to do things the old fashioned way and actually earn my prizes.

But apparently working for things is a concept that got lost on the user base eons ago /shrugs

Things could definitely be done better in the future if this were to be done again,I feel like it wasn't planned out the best before being put into place.

I think Maple Rose chose the right words regarding this event. And I refer to wordless: cheaper snowballs would be cool.

What else? Well the bloody snowballs... Just... I never liked them and even if it is on screen they make me very uncomfortable and I feel sick directly.

Otherwise: Cool idea and I loved that you didn't have to wait for items to restock. Snowball fights are cool. Looking forward to next year and improvements. ;)

Yep, my complaint is simply . If it had been kept short, it would have been fine. I feel like since the time was expanded, the prizes should have been too, to match the effort. It was fun and unexpected, it just went on far too long and ruined the ending.