Only participated in one day so far. My initial impressions...

I like the idea of NPC Melody participating with us. :D That's really neat. I like the randomness of which gifts you get from the pool and also seeing the items at the end. The way it is set up, I think, encourages item participation unlike MM where when I joined, majority of people were silent or sent random, cheap, low effort quest items as item spam. It was hard to catch your MM at the same time apart from the beginning unless you were on for a good chunk of the day, and there was this pressure to make a nice experience for the other person (for me, at least). It was a stressful experience, generally speaking. This is easy by comparison AND fun without being draining (the item limit is GREAT, otherwise omg it would be a black hole :'D). And I look forward to personalising or any small interactions that will be added. :D

I am trying again, I signed up the first time and found no place to actually send the gift. I asked about it on boards... I still can't find the link to DONATE, on the kudos site (the old one is "closed") Can someone explain how to contribute?

Everything you need should be on https://kumos.subeta.net/explore/arctic/mysterious-melody">this page.

You have to first join a group. After a few minutes, you’ll get a notification saying you joined a group and then you can put in up to 5 items.

This is the first time I'm participating in MM so I have no preset ideas about how it SHOULD work, ha ha, so not much insight from here sorry.

1 user didn't add presents this time around, I wonder if they still get some gifts? It's kinda sucks but at least I can know that someone didn't particiapte

I really like this feature, there's no pressure or fear of sending the "wrong" gifts.

They get one thing from Melody, I think.

I got a pretty lucky haul today, with an old Collection box and 100 CSC. It's really, really chill and I love the fact I can just drop five items in the morning and move on with my day

I think this model of MM is a huge improvement and a lot of fun. A few suggestions based on my experience:

1. Allow users to select a "tier" when signing up to be grouped. This way everyone can be paired based on what they can / want to contribute vs taking a consistent risk of putting in 1 - 5m items and getting back 100 - 500k items. It's part of the risk, sure. But it's also discouraging! This also helps folks to feel like they're not going to let others down if they can only participate to a certain price point!

2. Require folks to select their items when signing up, and have a "are you sure" kind of confirmation to protect folks from accidentally putting in incorrect items. This way (1) people can't not put anything in, but get things back (for example yesterday one person put in 4 items and one person put in 0), (2) it can be confirmed (I think) that the items are within the price range selected.

Alternative to 2 as a solution to the people seemingly "scamming" by signing up and not contributing would be that users get back as much as they put in + items from Melody, except if you put in nothing Melody gives you nothing.

Is it possible to make an event with reminder after 12 hours and for the last hour?

I believe that most of the people who didn't contribute, simply forgot and it's not intentional, so if the user still didn't add items, maybe a reminder would help.

It might just be bad luck on my end but in two of my groups now I've ended up with almost half of my items being very low-value items (as in under 25k where I'm throwing in a mixture of items that tend to be at least 100k-200k in value, with very few exceptions sometimes up to 3mill MP.) My other 4 groups have been wonderful and I've gotten a gotten a good mix of items worth more or less what I have contributed (including wishlist items. <3)

But I wanted to detail my experience anyway since I know of one other user who had a similar experience in one of their groups already.

Yesterday I ended up with 4 lower valued items. ranging from 1.9k to 25k. With two of my items falling within the range of what I actually contributed value-wise (one was 200k and the other was 2.9mill and a wishlist item.) I myself contributed items worth anywhere between 135k to 1.9mill and even a CW item last time. Everything else in my group fell somewhere between 100k to a couple million SP.

And two days before that (December 12th) I ended up with 3 lower valued items worth 7.5k to 26k and there were only six items total in the poll that were under 70k. Most of the other items fell within the 100k-500k range which was similar to what I contributed with a couple of really big hitters.

I presume in both cases that most of these items were from the same user as there were only six items total in the poll that were worth 25k or less this last time and as mentioned above, six items under 70k the first time around.

Granted I ended up with some really decent items around 1-3million both times and even got a WL item in the one group to help make it more worthwhile but it's a little frustrating when a majority of the lower items in my poll ends up going to me. Lol.

I do really like being able to see what the other items in the poll are worth since it gives me an idea of whether I overshot or undershot the overall general value of my gifts compared to the others, and I like the idea that a newer user without as much SP can receive rarer/more expensive items that would otherwise be hard to come by so this isn't a complaint about lower-valued items in the least.

I know the rules state that Melody is doing her best to divide things fairly, but seeing as another user mentioned having a similar problem I'm thinking the balancing system could use some work? Assuming my theory proves correct...my suggestion would be maybe give every user (minus the one who contributed said lower value items of course) one of the lower value items in their gifts so that they're spread out amongst the other group members to ensure that half of the low value in a single poll don't all go to the same person? Especially if those items are making end up half of their daily gift grabs from the poll?

And if there are "excess" lower valued ones and a user has to receive 2 lower valued ones, maybe make sure they get one of the extra gifts that day to balance things out? (Assuming they actually contributed to their group of course.)

All of this is assuming my theory is correct of course. Again, it could just be bad luck.

This year is the first time I'm actually participating in MM multiple times. Other years I maybe done 1-2 times but this actually gets me motivated to participate ^^ Also very happy that the MM link on Melody's page is working better now. Last time I clicked on it, the page told me that it's over for the season and was very confused lol

I enjoy this setup better than the pairs from before. I like how it tells the categories that have been added to the pool as well as how we can change up the items we give if we want. It also seems to be pairing up quicker now than it was when this format first rolled out, so that's good as well.

What happens if only one user contributes items?

That's a great idea!

I would love this!

Wondering if it would be possible to put something in the code to prevent getting the same item more than once? For example, I ended up randomly receiving two of the exact same item after MM reset.

It is a little frustrating to end up with two of the exact same items when there is a pool full of other items that could have been better distributed. Maybe something that could check the item id. This way no one could get multiple copies of the exact same items like subq invites that are common in a lot of the exchanges I have been in. Like the distribution tries as much as possible not to give you duplicates.

And add if you can still add items. I had MM get funny on my fifth item and it didn't take the last one after all.

can we exclude mage amulets from this? I'm enjoying getting duplicates and even a 3rd the other day lol

Happened to me yesterday. Melody bought eight items, but none of the four people in my 'cohort' contributed anything. My five items and four of Melody's items got distributed to them, and I got the other four Melody items.

:P if they are different types of mage amulets that's fine, but I think it an unfair distribution if something like all three dark mage amulets went to the same person when it could have been split among three others. Most of the duplicate items I have been seeing though are subq invites (probably a good chunk coming from melody), 50 point wizard tokens and snow fairies. It is always disappointing to see a snow fairy in the MM exchange, let alone multiple.