must bake 100 items at bakery, that should be the next thing

The next NPC could give a team an instant win and I would still nope the hell out of that one.

BUT BAKING IS SO MUCH FUN. nah if we did baking as a thing, I'm pretty sure users would find a way to like burn that bakery down to the ground

I like it because its not wasted effort. Whether your team wins or loses the NPC, each individual who participates gains something (quest rewards). It makes choosing to play and participate a much easier decision.

Also in the long term it might encourage questing in general. I for one haven't quested a lot lately for several different reasons - one of those reasons was the lack of rewards. But I got 4 amulets from Quentin and that was more than I was expecting from what I'd heard. Also nice to have confirmation of which questers give items and which no longer do. It was a nice chance for me to re-evaluate quests and to see if they are worth it.

I'm sure both teams have members that are just here to profit from everyone else's work but yeah, it's unfortunate that Saggi's team seems to have ended up with a substantially higher percentage of them (I'm mostly basing that off of the quests, it's hard to tell with an item drive). Hypothetically, this challenge could have been won by Team Gold since they have more total members.

I like some of your ideas too! I'm in favor of things that have limits. I have to agree with that it's more fun to know that I've helped my team as much as possible and that now I can focus on my other responsibilities without feeling a twinge of guilt because I'm not dedicating my entire night to clicking Subeta.

It also would have been nice to have some sort of minimum in place. Maybe donate 20 items or do at least ten quests if you want to get points for that day, just to encourage activity.

Absolutely, which is why I think it was a fair challenge. It's just that we can't expect the results to be any different next time around because of the cap. :P

Edit: Or rather, because the cap is so low. I think some capped challenges could work, but you can finish your quests in under an hour so it's extremely limiting. A gelatin type event with a set number of monsters to fight would have an effective cap, but it still allows more active players to contribute more, and the results aren't as predictable.

Perhaps, but like mentioned before there may be more players that are less active... BUT a thing that has not been stressed enough I think is the fact that it was only 6 hours long without any warning. Players in Europe were either already asleep or headed to bed (or stayed up to finish despite falling asleep between every singe quest >.<) and with it being so short and people on average sleeping 8 hours - there was no way for players in those areas to participate. 6 hours will never be fair for all players, there will always be a time zone somewhere that misses out completely.

Now back to talking about teams, yes questing was a nice change but part of being a team is helping cover for teammates when they are sick, when they are injured - or in this case have work, kids, whatever keeping them busy. Questing doesn't allow for helping each other in any way which is not true teamwork - and yes I have played sports and on a team for most of my life so 'team' things to me should feel like an actual team. If questing is going to be an option, it'd be nice to figure out how to let people put in the time to cover for their team mates who need help. Team mates help each other. Period.

This is the biggest benefit for me. I really enjoy not having wall to wall donation drives, this feels like a breath of fresh air and that at least for one day this week, I can focus on RL and know I've done everything I can do. I think it hits a nice balance between "we expect activity" and "we know you have real lives".

I like the idea of a minimum as well.

clawhiss*

What, officer? Oh, it must have been a mysteriously exploding set of ovens. All at once, sure. Completely spontaneous, I assure you, it's just bad luck it caught the flour stores too. I think it was the raisins' fault, they're awfully shifty and super flammable.

As a European, I did make sure to check in before sleep as all the NPCs have went up at 6pm; I wouldn't say no warning is fair as we do have a set schedule. But I get that not everyone has the option to stay up late and might be disappointed they couldn't help their teams individually. Overall, though, the balance of time zones would be roughly equal across teams, give or take a few % points.

I did enjoy the quests and made an effort to do all of mine. But yeah, each NPCs event being different is the ideal to sustain interest. I definitely wouldn't want to see quests again.

I do dislike that people who can be online more often can't pick up the slack for those that can't/don't participate but I do prefer the site to not crash, so I like the quests much more.

Although this time around I was one of the slackers, I had all but one quest giver done last night and then I was offline until about 6:10 today so I only got done the few I had done before work this morning :/ Hopefully I can do better next time~

Its hard when you have to do double the work but like anyways on this I hope it was a one time thing. I feel like doing my quest isn't fun its like a chore i kind of struggled to get it all done and i am lucky I even was able to complete this lol

I liked the quest option better too. I love to hoard, but what exactly happened to the idea that we're not being encouraged to do so? I just came back from a long break as this plot was starting so forgive me if I'm just out of the loop, but last time I was here the site was making efforts to discourage hoarding. In light of that, before this all started I was purging my hoard into Recycle Beast/Fragmentor but the donation drives are making me think twice about that. That said, I really dislike restock wars as well, for some of the same reasons as the donation drives. I'm just not fast enough or even motivated enough to restock all day which leads to the same problem of just a small handful of people carrying the team.

Another thing they could try for the sake of variety is an sP drive (or even a currency drive in general but they'd have to be upfront about how much each type of currency added to the donation pool). Rather than setting it up in a way where you donate sP and get nothing except the plot rewards at the very end, I have an idea: we donate our sP towards a specific desireable update + WIP development updates along the way.

An idea of how I imagine it working:

• Staff compiles a small list of frequently suggested ideas that are possible to implement but have been ignored for years for whatever reason (for example: wishlist quality of life improvements). Each thing on this list would be given a full description of what exactly would be implemented should that choice end up yielding the most donations.
  
• Each person can choose which thing(s) on the list to donate their choice of sP to, but ultimately the team with the most sP donated as a group regardless of each person's personal update choice would win the round.
  
• At the end, the thing on the list with the largest amount of sP in the donation pool would be guaranteed to be implemented within a staff-chosen amount of time + we would get occasional WIP updates along the way.
  
  I am hoarding my sP for art, but I'd personally drop pretty much all of it if it meant that we'd finally get some quality of life stuff for wishlists. shrug That's just me though.

This more or less sums up my feelings. I couldn't get all of my quests done - because sleeping and being in classes chewed up most my time - but even if I could, I would have finished everything and couldn't help anymore. At least with the item drives, I feel like I could always help anytime I could but with a cap limit, not so much. I like mixing it up, I just feel like Quests weren't the way to do it.

I really liked the change of pace; doing quests was a lot less stressful than the donation drives because the cap meant I didn't have to worry about being on to constantly try to restock/buy/donate. However, I feel really bad for Team Gold since it seems that they were saddled with a lot of inactive members compared to Team Steele, and the beginning of the event being so late Subeta time was a little odd. I think it would probably have been more fair if the mini quest-a-thon didn't start until after reset. I wonder if that contributed to Team Steele's advantage.. Honestly though, the more I think about it, the more I'm realizing how ridiculously hard it must be to try to make these events balanced. Not having a cap on what one user can do makes it unfair to people who can't spend a ton of time on Subeta; having a cap makes it unfair to the team with less active members. See this is why we should never have competitive team events ever again, just have us be on teams that work together pls it's so much more fun and less stressful when everyone is working together and it's so cute and it doesn't divide the userbase and you don't have to worry so much about being fair

This too! I spent several tedious hours and 15mil on the second item drive, and it burnt me out. While I'm not necessarily upset about my team losing (Team Gold absolutely earned that win, oh my god, what a comeback), it still really sucks to feel like I basically wasted that time and sP, and makes me even less enthused about the potential of another donation drive. (And I know that 15mil isn't a lot, I'm just super stingy because I've been trying to save up extra sP for my last two pet slots haha)

I'm extremely lazy when it comes to doing quests; far too lazy for someone who wants as many things from the quest shop as I do x) Anything that helps encourage me to do my daily quests is a plus in my book.

Thank you for letting us do something different this time around!

must bake 100 items at bakery, that should be the next thing

WOW THAT IS SUCH A KEITH THING TO SAY WOW

i thought you were better than this

I'm so grateful for the shift to a group questing effort. I was going to quest anyway and it made it feel a lot less demanding that I could do what I was going to do and help out my team at the same time, I didn't have to multitask or spend all day checking to see if I needed to do more.

I meant no warning that it'd be such a short turnaround of 6 hours, the other tasks all were combined efforts over a longer period - so people could sleep and then come contribute, rather sleep then realizing they missed out on a days worth of contributions because they weren't online or couldn't stay on.

I like the idea of quests as an activity, but the time was way too short to complete them. Quests are much more time-intensive than an item drive, and should have had much more time devoted to the step to account for that. I didn't get to even participate in that step at all, because the quest drive finished before I could log on and participate. It's punishing any player who can't be chained to their computer 24/7.

Quests are a lot more appropriate for this than donation drives.

At the very least, I do appreciate some variety in the methods of NPC acquisition. All the activities should have been different from the beginning. Constant item drives would have been soul destroying, and two were bad enough. It was nice that this one was a) something I do anyway, b) something with a finite amount of possible contribution, and c) something which isn't a fight for resources.

However, what I'd really like now is for this plot to actually start going somewhere so we don't have to keep doing the same things over and over and over again for however many days this is going to last. I'm currently feeling bored and frustrated about the whole thing, which is not what I want from a plot. Can we at least have another method of acquiring food for our team? I'm sick to death of the hunting game.

I totally agree then again I'm totally biased because donation drives = me losing monies and quests = me making monies so there's really no comparison haha.