I'm upset about how most of this event was handled, but the worst is the lack of acknowledgement for even participating. Unless you were on the winning team you get no recognition at all? Why was that a good idea? Prizes can be bought and sold, but trophies are earned and sit on your page forever. I don't care about the prizes anywhere near as much as I'd like an acknowledgement on my profile that I even participated. I say that as someone who only donated about 2.5-2.7k items and mostly donated with sP to team members, so I'm not trying to be impressive.

I have swayed to 'a medal would be nice'. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. The same bronze medal for every losing team, perhaps, just as a simple reminder of the event in years to come. It doesn't take away from the winners at all and there's nothing to show off.

It does feel strange to have a 'record' of basically all other site events I've participated in, but not this one.

Maybe they don't want to reveal the scoring formula because they want to use it for a future event and don't want us to figure it out or something? I at least want to know the team sizes and participation stats if they want to keep the scoring formula secret.

I'm also curious how the communal pile worked into scoring... are they weighted the same as donations by team members?

With team competitions, it's impossible to keep it perfectly fair, no matter what scoring system is used. Totals give advantage to the bigger teams, averages give advantage to the smaller teams. Weighted total gives better balance, but is still not perfect. Plus you can't account for the number of crazy people on each team. And I think staff realize that, which is why they gave so many prizes for participating (team item, skin, pet slot). So I don't mind not winning because it's like 2 things I missed out on.

However, for future reference, I think not having individual prizes is a bad idea. I know the reason they took it out was because so many ppl complained about it from the snowball fight last year. But I feel like individual prizes give more motivation, especially for people on teams that have no chance of catching up. If there was a prize for say "donating over 10k items", people on the smaller teams might not have given up after seeing the scores.

And it doesn't even have to be a big prize. Maybe like a forum title like "Team BFF Supporter" or something. I personally would have liked a trophy recording my personal contribution, like how I have the Snowball Thrower trophy and how many snowballs I threw. Like said, I don't have a 'record' of this event....

I was on Team Mischief.

I'm so against runner-up prizes. Remember the Peka-Boo demands after the fact? No. Just no.

It seems that staff oversight led to a shop that counted for the event staying in the Mystery Box lineup. Like the set schedule was forgotten and wasn't tweaked. I wish details like this would be caught beforehand, but mistakes do and will happen.

However, I would be displeased if having event restockables in the Mystery Box was actually intentional. You say autorefreshers are bad for the site. You say hoarding is bad for the site. Yet you host an event structured like this. Players shouldn't feel that the only way to be competitive is to use an autorefresher.

Team Mischief managed to surpass Team Stick Together after the Mystery Box was patched, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say the whole issue didn't matter numbers-wise as much as people made it out to be.

Staff response on the whole situation was very poor.

People complaining about Team Stick Together chatting on our forum topic really bothered me personally, because no one cared about the same thing happening before the Mystery Box drama, our team had been up in their thread about the problem before they came into ours, and people literally can't tell others where to post in general. Ever. Period. I was embarrassed for some of my fellow team members. The bottom line is that the problem wasn't the other competitors, it was the event organizers that allowed such issues to happen.

I wish cheering would have counted for more than 0.5 since it could only be done hourly.

It was nice to have another Restock War-type event when I had given up on the site ever having one again. The prizes and the beforehand transparency were phenomenal. Thank you for offering a new colorfill!

The people who say that Mischief caught up again after the MB cheat should take into account that if those items were subtracted entirely then the outcome may well have been very different, regardless of who caught up when.

I do see what you're saying but that's a huge if that didn't happen.

I mean, it sucks that some people knew about a glitch and took advantage of it but it's hard to be mad at them when staff were notified and did nothing. The really sad part is that now the whole event is tarnished and I'm squinting at all the scores wondering how legit they are. In the beginning I was pleased enough with how things went, I made an effort to be social (a miracle in and of itself), and I even thought it a vast improvement from the last thing I remember participating in (ugh BotB).

If it couldn't have been fixed immediately then the Mbox should have been temporarily taken down until it was. If it took a while, the event could have extended by a few hours or days or whatever - as many things have been in the past when there was significant downtime (usually the site, but is it really that different?).

I also thought Subeta was trying to discourage hoarding and that's why we didn't have reading drives anymore? My memory is a bit faulty but I seem to recall them getting rid of hoarding achievements, too, so what gives? This whole event screams 'GUYS DON'T SELL ANYTHING. NOT A THING. YOU MIGHT NEED 5000 OF IT LATER.'

Tldr ; Epicon is still my favorite event can we please have more.

I also still want Calico as a color instead of various shades of colors that already exist. D:

Eh, I don't know, maybe it's just because I don't do much restocking as part of my usual Subeta playstyle or because these kinds of repetitive events don't really work well with my uncooperative ADHD brain -- there's no way I could ever donate enough to crack the overall leaderboard, but I can at least struggle towards a set goal, and I find that a lot less discouraging and more fun.

I love that there is still zero staff response to any of this, besides a cheeky gif. Way to go guys.

Abusing a glitch isn't bad. Pointing out the glitch abuse is! It makes you petty, and you don't deserve to win!

Remember that, kids. Also, next time your partner cheats on you, remember that EVERYONE does it! ;D

I'm going to repeat here what I said on our own thread, because I see it keep being brought up about what I said. What I said was, "please stick to your own thread". I was trying to be punny, since the team on the thread at the time apart from us was Team Stick Together and to calm down the excessive lashing out on both sides of the situation. Instead I keep seeing it getting brought up about how I shouldn't "backseat mod" when that was never my intention. I know you can post on whatever thread you like, but please, seeing this being brought up over and over again is just, well, beating a dead horse.

If you have an issue with me, please quietly tell me about it through smail and I will try to correct it. I'm sorry what I said wasn't funny to you and I'm sorry it was taken the wrong way.

[edit] Turns out things weren't directed at me, sorry! I'm still going to leave this here in case I do need to explain myself to anyone.

That gif kinda pissed me off. Like clearly some fishy shit is going on. Staff really needs to be more transparent on this one.

The fact that the top 2 teams had over twice the points of the 3 bottom teams doesn't really add up. If the top 2 teams had 3x the members then something probably should have been done to make it so the teams with the least amount of members at least had a chance.

Autorefreshers are discouraged (lol) but allowed on Subeta fyi. -_-

c: It's not you at all. There are people who took things way too seriously. I even got pinged.

I don't really know what that has to do with my comment haha. But I already knew that.

Any high-scoring teams in an event like this, even without the Mystery Box, are getting such high numbers with the help of autorefreshers.

Also, Team Mischief and Team Stick Together were both smaller than Team Nature.

After reading back posts. I agree with the glitch as being abusive, and should not be tolerated. Could it have affected our team? Maybe, maybe not. It just depends on how the scoring at the end of the event was truly calculated.

What I don't agree with is EVERYONE does it as I am a part of everyone and I would absolutely not cheat period! I have integrity and I would really appreciate if those of you who feel everyone does it, please refrain from making post that you are not 100% sure of, as I do take this seriously ~ Thank you ~ :) ~

EDIT: For the record. I donated 20.4k items in total. Never at anytime did I use some type of auto refresh, or take advantage of the MB glitch, as I wasn't aware of it having an issue, till the next day. Nor did I have thousands of items to begin with. I just devoted a lot of time and sP's into this event. It was just a matter of how much time you were willing or able to spend on here during the event, as many users had other more important things that needed to be done.

I'm sure every team was doing that. I know people on my team were. I just think staff should be more transparent about the stats of the event.

Every team was, but not every member on them was, is how I account for part of it. There's also impact from freeloaders and such in terms of numbers. I don't bother with an autorefresher, but maybe they aren't all created equally? That might be stupid of me, but idk not a techie. There are also people who competitively restock and/or build hoards even without an event going on. [edit] There are also people who restocked like crazy for this event without autorefreshers or the Mystery Box or previous hoards, but I thought that went without saying.

What I'm saying is that the numbers DO add up.

It's really sad that a fun little event turned people against each other the way it did and I'm really sorry you were pinged so negatively. I hope the community can repair itself over time.