It wasn't in the news post specifically, but in the comments underneath it Keith recommended doing both mystery dances and regular ones. So yeah, kind of easy to miss.

Wouldn't mind if mystery dances came back next year :D Maybe just the last few days, to keep them from being too broken.

OK, something important like that should not be buried in the comments...

I agree, especially since it was a new feature. And I don't blame anyone for being cautious since people can get frozen for abusing glitches or otherwise trying to cheat. But what's done is done, and I don't want to stray into another discussion about staff and communication; this thread started positive and I'd like to keep it that way.

But if it makes you feel any better, personally I pretty much just stuck to the Mystery Dances until the end of Masq anyway, because they were a lot less of a hassle than trying to keep up with dance threads or trying to remember which people I'd already danced with (I didn't want to spam people with requests since the site was laggy as hell). Not to mention the rewards were better.

I also felt bad about not being able to return nearly as many dances this year. I got one of those 10K billboards from the Bathhouse and decided to try that this year since a lot of my friends aren't active anymore - got a good number of dances that way, but loading the forums to find people to return dances became such a pain in the ass that unless the person had a dance link as their status, I just didn't bother. (If any of y'all are reading this, I'm really sorry! Hopefully it'll be better next year!) With the Mystery Dances I didn't have to worry about any of that, plus the other person got a reward regardless of what I did.

Anyway, my point was, if you did just Mystery Dances without doing the regular dances too, you didn't miss out on much.

I commented this on the original news post but I’m glad I found this thread to reiterate: I would love if the random dances came back next year, perhaps with something like, “Would you like to use (some number) Wizard Tokens to participate in a random dance?”