Oh no doubt there. However if the theme of the game was questing, then there could be sinks related to this.

One idea would be what Keith mentioned ^ above:

Perhaps there's going to be a New Quest and they need some backing to get started, and as such we're asked to donate to the cause-- if we collective donate enough, we get the new quest (and if we fail.. no new quest).

It could be promoted like many funding things, in the sense of "Donate 100k = Achievement + ___ Title, Donate 500k = Achievement + ____ Title", etc etc" allowing users to donate once to each "tier" so if they want all of the titles/achievements they're able to do so (otherwise, it's not that great of a sink y'know).

So in the end sP gets off the site, items get off the site, we potentially could get a new quest (that'd hopefully start asking for problematic items), we get a bunch of achievements and themed items and honestly they could do more with it.

Like boons for "if today users collectively do 500 of Saggi's quests he'll do an exclusive interview with Titiana answering quests everyone wants to know" (which idk, there could be a survey sent out to everyone who did his quests that day asking some a/b/c/d styled questions with a few short 100 character question fields and staff randomly select 10 to be 'asked'), or if one day users do 500 Wizard quests he'll load the TS up every 4 hours for 2 days (goodbye tokens).

[500 quests is a random number that should be a lot higher and staff would have to figure that one out, seeing as 500 isonly 50 people doing 10 quests so that's probaaably lowballing it.]

I like loads of these ideas, and just the general theme of collaboration instead of competition - the snowball fight caused a horrible atmosphere, I thought, with sneering at 'freeloaders', rampant autorefreshing and general bitchiness left, right and centre. An event that sidesteps all of that would be lovely.

I have very, very much appreciated the clear guidelines we've had recently that shows what the prizes are and exactly what you need do to get them, that saves so much pointless angst. I also like it when it's possible for every person to have a shot at every prize, and you don't lock yourself out anything by picking a category or team or whatever.

If it's going to be a long event, I do think there should be some sort of reward for sustained participation as well as total achieved, but it would be nice if the thresholds for these are relatively low.