I don't believe I ever used the word "assign" but if that meaning came across it's not my intention. Mainly just don't allow someone to join a team at a given moment if it has more members than the other. You aren't forced onto any which team, since you could come back later and see if you can join the team you prefer. I know a few people don't like this idea, which is fine since it was just a suggestion to combat everyone piling onto one team. A sign-up period sounds like a nice alternative to this!

But if you aren't allowing someone to freely choose, you are assigning them...you are assigning them to the team with less members. Sure they have a limited choice, they can allow themselves to be assigned to the team with less members, or they can wait to start participating until their team of choice becomes available. Sounds like assigning to me. At best its giving them a "choice" with a lot of pressure to "choose" correctly. A lot of us are "go-getters" and we want to start playing right now! Being forced to wait is taking away our choice.

Sure, its just a suggestion, but you did ask those who disagreed why they didn't like the suggestion. There were several different suggestions made to deal with this problem, one I really liked (pre-event signup), some I'm ambivalent about, this one in particular I outright object to, and thought it was important to say so.

Mmm i see your point. I haven't gone through the entirety of the thread still so I haven't seen more detailed posts of other suggestions. I need to go back and take a look at those you've mentioned. I'm pretty interested in the pre-event sign up suggestion particularly

Yeah, I really like that one for several reasons. It means people have no way to determine which side is more "popular" - i.e. pick the winning side with the intent of freeloading. They can't join the winning team at the last second. It gives advance warning that an event is going to be happening, so you can plan your RL around it a little better. It gives time for excitement about the event to build.

The main drawbacks to the plan is the need of making sure to fully explain what's happening. Subeta has a tendency to fall down at the explaining bit, combined with people who fail to read explanations, can cause some bellyaching (witness how many were disappointed at the prizes for this event when it was laid out very clearly at the beginning). The other is signing up for a short/mini event. LOL it would be weird to have a 5 day sign up for a 2 day event.

There are a few people who suggested a pre-event signup in slightly different ways.

and all of 's ideas too. Overall, I liked the first day of the snowball fight, but if it ever comes back as well as this goes for all future events, big and small, please consider all factors, such as ARing, event duration, prize rewards, etc.

I'd rather have fewer events if it means giving the creative team enough time to properly plan and design with these factors in mind.

And I'm briefly gonna put my two cents about boss battles here as well, cause since it's been brought up, why the hell not.

There has got to be another way to go about doing this without everyone wanting to kill themselves over getting the top prize. It's not healthy, and it actually promotes sitting for hours upon hours, unmoving, which is potentially and incredibly dangerous for the body to endure (deep vein thrombosis anyone?). Heaven forbid a user actually die from something like DVT, because it could result in deep trouble for Subeta.

If and when the BAs are ready to propose a solution to this particular problem, we'll be more than happy to help in refining it to make it a much more enjoyable experience. Til then, that's all I wanted to add to the discussion.

Posting my thoughts without reading the other posts...

This event was a complete and utter disappointment, however from the get go I didn't expect much. I didn't spend a cent, only threw snowballs I had saved up/got from the DC. I spent the majority of the time this mini event took place on a different pet site because frankly Subeta was beyond boring even with an event going on. How sad is that?

What bothers me the most about the snowball fight (well other than the very obvious lack of organization by staff, which has become expected as of late) is that in terms of Subeta lore it was just illogical. From the Subetapedia:

Eh. Hallmark tells us the same thing about the holiday season, but that's never stopped my family from fighting on Christmas morning. :P

Yes, users would still have their bitching and moaning and whatnot regardless. That's on them (just as your family's bickering around the holidays is on them and not due to anything Hallmark did or did not do) My point was that for a site that is supposed to be working on it's lore, this event was a big of fail in terms of lore

I'm not really seeing where a couple of kids having a silly snowball fights over which presents they think people like more is "illogical" or somehow against the holiday spirit. That sounds a lot like something children would do, and they weren't being spoiled and bratty and hateful about it. They're kids.

And Subeta can work on the lore without having every single event (or mini-event in this case) tie into it. They're building up lore with stuff like the Subetapedia entries and bigger events. Getting salty about something that's not even a major plot that boils down to kids having fun is what's really not in Luminaire spirit, imo.

On the topic of the event itself, I thought it was okay. I got discouraged after about three days, ~350 snowballs, and Dolly obviously not catching up to Tobias anytime soon. I don't have any other feedback to add that hasn't been covered better by someone else, but I wouldn't mind having another event like this in the future if it gets polished up a bit to make things more fair and fun for everyone.

- My comment was more tongue-in-cheek that anything.

But really, I don't think a snowball fight in winter is a violation of site lore. We've always had the snowtapault.

It's not like Melody holding a toy drive after we've been told she has a magical sack with an endless supply of goodies. That wouldn't make any sense at all.

And users have always complained about the snowtapault. And I get that in staff's mind this was a way for users to "opt out" of getting hit with snowballs, but it really didn't seem like a good way of doing that in my opinion.

I simply think that staff could have planned an event that was both better suited for the ' Warmth... giving... enjoying each others company' part of Lumi, AND had more for users to do/enjoy, AND that wasn't going to have as many issues regarding fairness that this event had.

I really enjoyed the random button. I also enjoyed getting snow balls thrown at me by random people.

It made me smile. I would look up, see the event and say oh man, that's gonna leave a mark and just laugh. Then I'd go look at my HA and laugh even more. :)

A pre-event signup of some sort would be nice.

My biggest annoyance with the event - the prizes for participating were old Melody items. Now we've got the Free Shop going on and we're all getting endless supplies of old Melody items.

If you're going to hold another snowball fight event next year, please award prizes which aren't worthless Melody junk.

I agree with what and said. I really enjoyed it. Let people join teams then close them before the event starts. Have it last only a few days, and do it well before or after Christmas, a lot of people have other things to do in Christmas week besides throw virtual snowballs. Set everything in place before the event starts, like the timers. Have a points per snowball thrown and a prize shop at the end so we can choose what we want. I had a shield I used it out of vanity sometimes, so I could see what new cw looked like, it never entered my head it would affect the snowball throwing event, I thought it would stop me seeing the snowballs not actually stop them hitting me. Lessons can be learnt from battle of the bands, there are a lot of strong determined people on Subeta,and they throw themselves wholeheartedly into these events, I am amazed and proud to see them work so hard. On a side note, I am sad to see that some people didn't get their Tree gifts, it wasn't very clear how to get to your tree.

It should be made clear that staff have never said ARers are totally okay to use. They've said they don't have the means to track who is actually using one so they can't do anything about it.

Meaning if they COULD find solid proof that someone is using one, it would be against the rules.

That's basically like littering. It's illegal but unless someone sees someone do it nothing can be done about it, but does that mean they should liter? No. Because it kills nature, just like ARing kills the site.

It is cheating because you're gaining an advantage over others by using one, just like autobuyers and autoclickers (I thinktthose exist, don't they?).

Also, I don't think we need yet-another-prize-shop-to-clutter-the-currency-list. Better tiered prizes, absolutely. But, I'm pretty lukewarm on another prize shop.

I mean, Morostide miniplot did amazing without a prize shop, imo

Often in ticket responses, staff has simply said they are okay. Probably because they don't want to get into the whole debate but the user asking doesn't know that. They simply get the go ahead. It is gaining an advantage but there are many ways to do that. Different people have different advantages and are always looking for/finding new ones. For example if I ran out of sP during the snowball fight and wanted to skip the work/time of questing/earning sP I could just throw $5 at the site and sell 500csc for 20mil! THROW ALL THE SNOWBALLS!!!! Not everyone is able to do that. :D Yay commerce! Autorefreshers are available to anyone and freely talked about on forums during various events. As they were not against the rules (whereas littering is against the law) it isn't cheating.

I think autoclickers are a thing, but the difference between those and ARs is, you need human decision making to decide where/when to click on a page. If I was cool enough to have a wireless keyboard I could just carry it around with me holding down f5 and do what the AR does, but I couldn't walk away from my computer with my wireless mouse and still figure out where/when to click. I guess I could take both, and alternate pressing f5 and clicking the mouse having left it in the same spot where floaters pop up if you have the coding, but there wouldn't always be one there, so again, human decision making necessary.

But I'm not really defending ARs as a thing we should be using, so all that is moot. I'm saying those of us who have used one are not cheaters. We made sure they were allowed and then we used them. Doing something not against the rules =/= cheating.

Just like littering, staff definitely could say, these are now against the rules, even though they can't catch and punish those using without them openly admitting it. It would cut back on a lot simply because most of us, are NOT cheaters.

If and when staff outlaws them, my AR will be coming off my browser because I have no other use for it. There will still be people using them, and they will stand out for having crazy amounts of event currency, but they will say they just spend an inordinate amount of time on the site. (As I honestly suspect many people are already doing to stay under the radar.) I figure then staff can investigate those ones, and it will be more apparent than they think simply because, when you are there, (for the most part) you are using multiple tabs doing more than one thing with whatever tab you are autorefreshing in the bg. And then when you leave, only the tabs that are using AR will still be going. SO maybe not 100% of the time, but maybe they can find people out? I think they're mostly worried about false accusations because they don't want to end up like the nightmare that is neo that many of us remember. We shall see we shall see.

That's a really good point. I don't know if there's any overlap between the event prizes and free shop stock, but if there is then that's really unfortunate.

That's a really good point. I don't know if there's any overlap between the event prizes and free shop stock, but if there is then that's really unfortunate.

There is, I got the Cardinal thing or whatever for a prize and I have gotten 2 of them from the free shop. Basically my prize for the fight was useless and now I'm being beaten over the head with it repeatedly while someone laughs at me.