- That would be good. Like throw x snowballs (team average or something?) to earn credit for a day you missed.

Or make the check-in a part of the fight itself. It could be a daily thing, like sabotaging the other team's catapult, or starting an avalanche... something huge. It would give you a large sum of points (like 500) that would give early entrants an edge, but the points could be made up if you enter late or miss a day and throw enough snowballs.

Just a side question... Did you ever apply that "special sauce" to the score calculations, because it doesn't seem like you did. :c

I'm genuinely curious why you think this is a bad idea since it's something I think could combat everyone piling onto one team which is a very large issue within these types of events. Saying you'd rather not wait to participate until the teams are even, so you can be on the specific side you prefer seems a little shitty to be honest?

This system is used fairly often in other games, first person shooters come to mind to keep the teams even and the whole game actually fair. As we've seen from this event we had 800-900 people on one team and everyone else was left to pick up their slack after they'd thrown 2 snowballs.

I'm also gonna ping because I'm curious why you're not big on this either c:

forgive me if it's been brought up within the last few pages, i'm yet to catch up on the thread

FPS's are a very different type of game, so I don't think that's a fair comparison. If a team is full, you end up in another match altogether.

Dolly might have had more slackers, but they should have also had more active participants to pick up that slack. That's how averages work. I think it may have been a little more heavily skewed because it came out that the necklace was edible, but that could have been avoided with better planning. I think in in general the system is sound.

I do wonder though if having a third team would help. I got the impression that some of Dolly's team members gave up early on when they saw they were slipping behind. A third team might make it a little less certain, and might keep people fighting.

I'm not sure about getting pushed into another match completely but I'm not 100% sure on the whole thing. I feel like Dolly did have more active participants, you're right, but it apparently wasn't enough to pick up the slack hahaha. I only stopped throwing things around the last day when I logged on and there was about an 80 point difference? It really did seem futile to keep going at that point. I think someone mentioned an "opt-out" option somewhere, probably again on this thread that could be considered too. That could also help with free-loading

A third team would be a fun aspect to think about actually! Have more people spread out over another team who could scoop up a late win. That would be fun

Good: Trophy. Prize, liked knowing how many to throw to get it.

Bad: Auto refreshers. Tad too many days.

If you do a prize shop, it would be great to know the prizes and the amount you have to do to get that item. That is an incentive to throw enough snowballs to get the items you want. Then you can't get any complaints that they didn't know they needed so many points to get that item. Everything is upfront. That way you can carry over snowball currencies for the next time this event comes about.

And instead of December where you have a lot going on, you can have it in January. It also snows in that month too.

Had a lot of fun and wish I threw more snowballs. Now I know better and can be better prepared.

Wow, really? You think it's shitty that I don't want to miss part of an event? Or that I want to be part of a team I'm interested in? I…really don't get that at all. I've never joined a team because of who was winning when I signed up. The theme (and in this case, prize) for each team is what I base my decision on. I prefer toys to candy as presents. I like card and board games and have never really played video games at all. And it was only in the last couple of days that Tobias pulled ahead so much. Dolly was in the lead more than once. If this event had been shorter (I think three days is plenty if literally all we're doing is throwing snowballs), it would probably have been close the whole time.

I don't care for competitive/team events in general, to be honest. That said, if it was just generic "Team 1" and "Team 2", I wouldn't have as much of a problem with people getting assigned to whichever team has less members. But if they're going to try to add a story to it (toys vs candy! tabletop games vs video games!), I want to be able to join whichever team I identify with the most. And if they persist in doing prizes for the top X%, or have a high upper limit on tiered prizes, waiting until the team I wanted is open kind of screws my chances. And events should have some kind of story to them, most of the time.

There are other ways to make things fair. Having more than two teams sounds okay. I like Speiro's suggestion of reduced prizes if you sign up later. I'm also not opposed to not counting people's scores as part of the team average until they've achieved a certain (reasonable) amount—in this particular case, maybe the amount needed to qualify for the team prize.

I think that overall the event was a clever way to address the complains of people regarding snowballs. however since it went on too long we did expect a little more then what was given.

there is another matter too. at first there was no wait time between throws so a few people managed to throw a large number (a few posted that they reached 40K thrown within the first 5 hours of launch!) the rest of us were pretty much playing catch up at that point.

my suggestion is to make this an official annual event with a prize shop that has a point system, that way you get whatever you put into the event and since the shop will be there year round like the book drive artists and programs won't have to start from scratch with the items every time but build on what's already there.

I threw 42.5K snowballs and since I didn't know that auto-refreshers were allowed at first at least 15K of those snowballs were thrown manually, it's a very tedious task and to know that not only were my efforts in vain (team dolly) but that the person who threw just one snowball will get the same prize as me after all that effort and sp spent was discouraging to say the least.

I like the general idea of such an event. Team vs team was pretty fun.

Sadly, it took way too long (two days would have been fine - I know not everyone wanted to spend their Christmas throwing snowballs) and the auto-refresh issue really was bothersome. I mean, sure, people do auto-refresh and go overboard and I wouldn't forbid them to do so - but in the beginning there wasn't a time limit and some people were already finished throwing thousands of snowballs, so it was hard to catch up.

I just wished the title and achievement would have been distributed to the users who threw more snowballs than the overall average. This way, only users who didn't participate wouldn't get a thing and everyone who spent several hours and millions of sP on snowballs would have been rewarded.

I honestly thought I could make it to the top percentage of users with my poor 500 snowballs or something, considering so many people complained about the 'dead-weight' users dragging the teams down. I would have continued throwing more snowballs, but with everyone stating that they passed the thousands already it was clear it was impossible to catch up - especially when it's Christmas holidays. I didn't expect the score to be around 38k, which is like nuts! But I guess it was to be expected.

Let's go outside and have a real snow-fight! You won't stand a chance, dear auto-refreshers! ;)

I think it would be a good idea for all events to be able to see a leaderboard of some sorts. For instance, for the battling events, where a certain amount of damage done gets you a certain tier of items, it would be incredibly nice to be able to know /what the amount is/, rather than just guessing. I know it might lead people to do the bare minimum, but for someone like me, I'm always left wondering if I've done enough. During Tempest, I just stopped after 1500 or so, because I had no way to know how much I had to do. As an item/achievement hunter, I care mostly about that than anything else. I would've done MORE had I known the tiers. Same goes for this event. I had to rely on estimated math rather than actual numbers. If I had the actual numbers, I would know what I was getting into and could either work a little bit harder or give up entirely because what's the point. Either way, no one ends up disappointed, because they knew up front.

Basically, transparency about the numbers. Nothing wrong with that.

I mentioned in my first post a suggestion along the lines of "to encourage people to go onto the team with less people, make it so the joining prize is even" or something like that. I completely agree with you in that for things to actually be even, the joining prize should be the same. I think a lot of people really prefered Candy to Toys in this and that's why they joined, (not to mention the joining prize was food and the other prize was just a toy if I'm not mistaken. One has a use and the other doesn't which was pretty unfair in the first place. Of course people are gonna join the team that gives out the more useful item.) Subeta should definitely consider this next time they're going to have an event like this.

I'd really just like for people to be happy in whichever team, but there needs to be a way to regulate how many people can actually join each team. It's unfair that one team always ends up with WAY more people than the other and are essentially punished for it.

This way you don't have to try and guess how much will be done, instead the tiers will be representative of what was done.

i like that we got random melody items. probably not so much duplicates but that's just me. i felt it was a lot fairer than getting tiered prizes. :)

A small thing: I would have liked to have seen what team a person has chosen outside of the luminaire forums.

I would have loved to have pelted some of my friends but since I couldn't figure out what team they were on, or if they even joined I opted to go with the fully automated random user button.

"A throw snowball" option on lookups with an icon for the chosen team would have been nice.

I still think a lot of the problems stemmed from this not being a short and sweet thing and instead being drawn on so long. Because of that, I think the tiers/prize shops would have been a big slap in the face since from the get go we were told exactly what was on the table.

Had staff changed that halfway through, then it would have just a) further supported ARing because wow people threw so many snowballs thanks to those I have to go get one too just to catch up FML and b) been a case of a longstanding issue users have with subeta going back on what they said. I totally understand why users thought there might be more, because it lasted for soo long, but I really appreciate us knowing what was on the table from day one.

That said, I think the tier system was how the original restock wars went? I'm on the fence about that, because blindly trying to gauge where you are is so much of a gamble-- source: see every single boss battle ever. Having an unknown tier system will automatically result in people calling out from life and devoting every waking moment to subeta to do the thing. Now, if it wasn't a BLIND tier system that's another thing.

Something like: Throw 0-5 snowballs: X prize Throw 5-250 snowballs: X prizes + a thing THrow 250-750 snowballs: x prizes + 2 things Throw 750 - 1,500 snowballs: x prizes + 3 things Throw 1,500+ snowballs: all the prizes and all the things!

Then people will know that hey, I don't have to throw more than that. Then there wouldn't be any massive siteslaughtering and there wouldn't be any point in ARing because hey we already know what the prize tiers are.

I know that wouldn't work quite so well with the snowball war due to trying to be the winning team and all, not to mention the 10% BUT at the same time it kinda would? Like if I knew I'd get all that and a bag of chips for throwing 1,501 then maybe I'd throw at least that which would increase my teams score. OR instead of 10% why not, set the bar at 15k? Throw 15k and you get to be an overachiever.

Also in regards to the cut off period-- instead of that y'know what would probably really help?

If you haven't joined a team yet, you can't see how many users have joined each team already NOR can you see either teams overall scores. Then, even if you join late you'll have to make your judgement call on the knowledge of which team you can join and what their prize is, it'd cut out users ability to join based entirely on the judgement of who they think is winning.

I get the bit about doing a thing over and over is boring and why not just refresh but it's not fair and it basically tells you to get an AR or don't bother. Would it be possible to use Vending Machine(esque) coding for something like this in future cases?

Basically how the page itself isn't refreshed-- and you just click a button? So ARing wouldn't serve any purpose and if you bought, say, 500 snowballs and went to the "Snowtapult 2.0 Launching Machine" and just clicked the button to launch a snowball at random? Then you could just sit there and press the big red button over and over and over until you're out of snowballs?

PS: I think one of my favorite parts about this little snowball event was the random option. I would really really love to see that utilized for Vesnali especially, but possibly ToTing and Kissing and Dancing too. Like y'know "give flower/kiss to a random user!" or "Dance with a random user!" or "Kiss a random user!" Not that I don't like my friends and all, but sometimes it gets boring or they've already got all the stuff they need and maybe I"d just like to bother random people xD! It could also be handy for anyone who doesn't have friends to directly harass/don't have the means of making boards to bribe others for things.

I'd think that making it so one couldn't see what the member numbers or score is until they join would be good. One thing though, if one would do the work you'd be able to get the numbers by checking the threads for the teams. Should stop those who don't do much work anyway. I'd hate to only be on a team because, "oh no! The team you want to join has too many users! Wait until it evens back out again!" because what if that takes a day to even out? I'd be missing a day of the event through no fault of mine. Really wouldn't make me want to help out the team I got shunted into beyond the minimum to get the basic prize.

Making the prize amount go down with how long it takes you to join in a good idea as well. Just don't start docking right after the first day of the event/sign up. You'd be making those who weren't on when it was announced, or in the event of the site crashing/lagging, a bit peeved. I've had a few times I've missed the start day of an event because it started like an hour after I logged off for the day.

Oh, oh, I totally agree with this. I really miss that handy site Keith made to randomly Kiss users. If we could have something like that onsite I'd be so happy. I loved that you were guaranteed Kisses back as long as you Kissed as well. No being skipped by those just out for themselves on the "user above boards".

Seconding all of the things Andrea said!

One of the things I really liked was the random throw button. It made throwing snowballs seem a lot more fun and even, you could rack up as many points as you wanted.

Please keep it to five days, anything more just encourages the subeta hive mind to go overboard. We're very very good at that :D

I think most people would not have been so upset if it was only past Melody items, even though some from this year are a touch pricier than "normal".

Unrelated, I miss the free shop that's all.

Overall, I enjoyed the event...at the beginning at least. It was definitely too long!

I was extremely happy that all info was laid out clearly at the beginning of the event (except the end date).

I also felt using averages for scoring was completely fair.

Problems that happened that shouldn't have - I don't know how many times lately the stupid free beer has been mentioned, but its been a lot! Based on that fact alone staff should have known better than to make unlimited buying and throwing of snowballs possible. Keith himself has said that many site problems we have now were due to making things unlimited when the site was first created. Now, ten years down the line, you're still making things unlimited!

As for ARs I'm not going to get in on that discussion except to say please stop calling people using one cheaters! They are NOT cheating since its been confirmed again and again that it isn't against the rules. (And even though it isn't anyone's business, this statement is coming from someone who does NOT use one)

I'm also one of those who strongly disagrees with "assigning" people to a team. You either have teams, with a story, background, different prizes/achievements, etc and let people choose which they prefer, or you simply don't bother with teams. A far better solution (that has already been suggested) is to have a signup period two-five days before the start of the event. Or even Speiro's suggestion of keeping signup open, but having diminishing returns.

I find custom CSS nearly essential for me to use the site because of vision problems and other personal issues. Without it I wouldn't be able to play and that makes me very, very sad!