I really loved the whole concept of the festival, but like you said I think you need to improve the door to door and prize wheel. I also think that you should make the boss drop more items because I was desperate to have the ice queen armour, I battled her loads and only ever got swirling snow. So maybe you could set it so you don't always get the same item twice? I couldn't battle so much towards the end because I had school so in the end I never got my ice queen armour. D:

You really don't have to ping me on these replies. I will read them all, don't worry. =P

I've been pinged like 5 times already lol.

Ebily pings Krin repeatedly >:) (not)

Here I go writing novels again as usual... sorry D:

Ehm Festival..... Frustrating lol. But in a good way? Not as many festival pets popping up which made a lot of people go batty. Buuuuut..... In the end, I wanna point out something.

I only capture the tagged pets if I think someone will want them later. And in the other festivals that has been the case. However, when the FF festival rolled into town, I was catching pets left and right and so was everyone else. To the point that there was way too much of a surplus and I couldn't get rid of even some of the more popular ones. I ended up with so many spooky ryori (like 9 or more that I captured).... people were selling them for only 100 or 200k. I still have em sitting in my stable and if I offer em to anyone now, no one wants them.

Now let's talk about the AS Griffi and Festive Griffi.

Those things were and still are selling for diamonds. hundreds of diamonds. I sold an un-mutated festive griffi for 1000 diamonds. (Yeah, I was really surprised) Even the AS offspring are going for 100k or more and only carrying 1 trait.

Also, I only found and caught 2 AS griffi the whole festival vs the like... 11-13 ryori I saw total in the FF festival.

My point? The rarity of the winter festival pets is very, very obvious and so for that reason, I think it was a much better thing to do for the winter festival and should be continued in future festivals.

Trap rates on the other hand..... Just wish if they were gonna fail so much..... they didn't cost 7.5k per trap.. Because it's really frustrating when you really, really want that rare blue starred pet so your throwing epic traps at it and it eats 4 or 5 then flees...

I really liked the item boxes, (I like the surprise of opening them) but I collected almost every drop from the festival and I only actually got one or maybe two of those drops from the named, making them kinda pointless to fight. Also, the items from the boxes are in no short supply and I think maybe the rarity of them should have been held back a little more? Not a ton but yeah, I have like...3 or 4 duplicates of several of those items from the treasure boxes.

And like you said, the wheel prizes could use a bit of an upgrade =D so many mutators... so many presents....

Caroling/trick or treating: It would be really cool if caroling had an option to only visit the people you can actually carol/trick or treat. Does that make sense?? Ok, so when your going through your carolers/treaters, if the person still has an open request, it skips them instead of going through every person who has been on sylestia in the last day or two regardless of if they have answered their door or not.

Loved all the new items... loved the way the dynamic event was implemented so that we could opt out. As for the ice queen drops, I think if the dynamic event had of been implemented earlier into the game, rarity/ drop rate wouldn't need to be lowered. I dunno if it's accurate or not, but I kinda just figured that next year when the WF comes back, those things will already be programmed and therefore implemented earlier on so I don't really see a reason to complain about it. I mean... there are/have been a decent amount of wings and armor floating around the broker and item forum...

All in all, I think you guys did a great job for the WF and thank you!! So many features, so much work that went in to it!

*impatiently waits for Friday and the new mutations*

Opinions~!

I really enjoy when sites have little holiday things, so thank you so much for getting into the spirit of things. All over, it was an incredibly fun experience as a new player.

The Caroling -

Easily the part that I had the biggest issue with. I really, really dislike when there is a competition that doesn't have a level playing field for everyone involved. As someone earlier pointed out; I understand that diamonds support the site and you need ways to encourage people to purchase diamonds and thus support the site, but I don't agree that you should then put a competition item into the shop. While I'm honestly not a competitive person, it doesn't help me even want to try when I know people can just buy their way to a win.

To off-set this, I would have liked to see different categories put into place. "Top Thanking" vs. "Top Givers" with the tippy-top 3 or 5 of those lists getting something incredibly special (a custom item/pet or whatever) atop the other prizes. The people who get incredibly lucky or have money to burn for those super special treats (via the wrapped gifts) can do so, while still giving those who can't but would like to have a chance the actual chance.

Essentially, rewarding direct participation instead of point-buying. There was honestly nothing more disheartening to clear my list of carolers for the first three days, then look at the leader board and see people already in the thousands. There was always the chance that people wouldn't carol at your door, evidenced by how I had 25 people one day, and 130 another, then 50 the next.

There was no real easy way to find carolers. Carolees? I think the easiest way for me was to just go to the leader board and carol at them. If I wanted to carol at anyone not on the leader board, I had to hope they either had already caroled at me, or pick through the forums and click the people who posted, then input the id into the search bar of the caroler page... it would have been nice to have a small "Carol List" that would show 5 - 10 random members who were available to be caroled. Perhaps those who were lowest on the total participation to encourage them to interact.

Which... was another issue. Three clicks per person got tiring, fast. I would have loved a "Thank All" button, which would have saved me time. Instead, I had to "open the door" for the knocker, choose a gift or thanks, then get the "receipt." It felt excessive after five days and seven hundred people.

Winter Festival Zone -

I had fun, all in all. I liked the little gifts set out, I liked that they respawned fairly quickly. I sorta didn't like not being able to turn in reindeer when the next part of the event went up, and I really disliked getting caught in pet battle chains; one step after another, pet battles.

I never defeated the Ice Queen. Not for lack of trying! I went in with my low level pets (13 or so), I went in with my high level pets. It didn't matter if they were properly geared or not, I'd spend upwards of 20 minutes carefully slaving through only to lose.

I have a lot of patience. Oodles of it. It comes from raising children, teaching, and leading large amounts of people in video games. Because of the length of the battles (people were happy when they hit 70 turns!), it was absolutely crushing and felt like a waste of time when I'd lose after 40 minutes of trying one battle. When the 'trash' ranged from super easy to fairly difficult, and then the boss encounter would go ten or twenty turns without even a noticeable health drop on the encounter's part... it was just too much.

I don't have anything against huge health pools, but this was huge health pool plus negation of damage and the capability of nasty crits. Eventually, I just gave up and did the first two parts of the event, and hoped the boxes and mini-bosses might have something nice for me.

I ran into three Winter pets in all the time I played. That felt fairly low... and I wasn't really looking for the uber-rare ones with all vis or anything. I agree about the traps. As a new player, money is really hard to come by... and tossing 5 or 6 expensive traps just to have the pet run away was like getting kicked while I was down.

I would have loved to see "Holiday Nets" that had a higher catch chance, but were only useable in the zone, perhaps bought with snowballs or something. Something that would "melt" after the event was over, but could be easily gotten during the event with a little time spent or a couple mobs killed.

Wheel of Cheer -

Enjoyed it and honestly didn't care that I got more than a few scanners and test kits. Those are handy for me, and it's a chance game so I expected it would be... chancy.

Wrapped Gifts -

This is more a personal complaint than anything else. I really, really disliked opening a wrapped gift only to get a snowflake. Not a handful or a group, but one. All but one of the wrapped gifts I received were snowflakes, and I got quite a few from gift trades there at the end because I got a few lucky drops.

It could have just been luck, but it didn't really make me feel an urge to do much. I was happier when I got a scanner out of a box than a wrapped gift, and I feel like that... shouldn't feel that way.



I realize that a lot of what got under my skin with the event was more RNG related, but there has to be a balance there somewhere that can be found, right? I eagerly look forward to the next event!

While I'd bet most everyone has said this already, the only thing I had a 'problem' with was indeed the boss fight. The fact that there were so many rounds when all I could do was sit there, waiting for that cooldown on her to end or hope I did enough damage to knock one of her guardians out of it was at times annoying.

Biggest peeve, those danged scanners. Some may need them, some may not. This easily could be remedied by dropping them from box and wheel (I paid 75 each ticket with all the diamonds I had left after buying a scanner to get... scanners...) and putting them in the holiday shop. If people need them, they can buy them there!

Holiday pet scarcity. I don't know if it was just me, but I spotted very few even themed pets, let alone the fabled AS Griffi (saw 5 caught 3, other two ran after one trap) and never even saw a festive, and I played till I ended up ill for the last two days and couldn't play. Themed pets in the fall event were much easier to find, even with three different varieties to hunt down.

Loved everything else, queen was a challenge till I realised what to do, then just a grind lol. DID enjoy this one!

I loved all of the festival; the avatar items were amazing, the event was good and the zone itself was alright. The only thing I didn't like at all was the Caroling. I don't like having 100 people at my door and clicking seperately for each one, it takes a very long time and they all come back soon after. I didn't enjoy it at all so I started ignoring it. The improvement I'd state is putting an option to answer a chunk of visitors at once to save clicking everybody each consecutive time.

I apologize to others if I repeat what others have said... I was gonna read everything first, but when I saw there were 4 pages of comments already, I don't have time for that, sorry.

OK, so here are my thoughts in no particular order;

Overall, I loved the Winter Festival! I loved the griffi being released, I liked the Winter Zone much better than the Fall Zone, Caroling worked better than Trick or Treating, and the Wheel was a very nice touch. I had frustrations with each, but overall I think the whole festival went better.

On the battling zone- You may have done it because it was rushed, but I actually really liked having the "grace period" where you could go in and explore without having to deal with the named and the "event" going on. I actually in many ways enjoyed that time better than once the event actually started. I liked the event as well, but it added a pressure that honestly, before and during the hollidays I really didn't want or need. Having it come later after Christmas I thought was really nice. Also, having the event in different areas for different things worked really, really well, so you could opt out by simply avoiding the area where the bandits, especially, were spawning. The reindeer were cute, and I didn't mind running into and collecting them while searching for AS Griffs, but the bandits were, like the zombies, rather annoying. At least this time I was strong enough and knew enough what to do with them that they didn't constantly knock me out, which was what made the Fall Festival Zone, for a newbie at least, almost unplayable.

The one thing that bugged me here was the spawning of the special themed pets, not just the new Griffs, but all the other holiday themed pets too. It seemed to me that they were way too rare. Part of me liked that they ALL were at least green stars when they did show up, but come on, one of the big reasons most of us were in there was to find various themed pets, and they were wayyyyy too rare, as far as I was concerned. If they at least spawned as no color commons so we could at least see them more often, and given the choice to catch even though they didn't carry any genes to breed with, that would have made things a lot more fun. Still, it often seemed like I was fighting for hours and not getting ANY of the festive or themed Sylesti of ANY kind, let alone the ones everyone really wanted. I never did encounter a Festive Griffi at all, not even once. Even some of the more common ones like Coal Drael, I only found one, and he ran. I only found a handful of festive pets at all, partially because i had other commitments at that time, and partially because I was spending lots more time fighting the queen... so again, I would like to have seen more of these spawning, and at least add in the common ones so we see lots more even if we don't want to actually catch them.

On the named and bosses- Personally, I liked these being fairly easy to kill, even the queen though she took so long, I liked that pretty much anyone who wanted to take the time could kill her fairly easily. Yes it was tedious at times, especially the first couple battles, but then it became kind of a game to "beat your record" of number of turns it took. So I didn't mind that so much. Her drops... well, lets say I think if your gonna spend that much time, they should drop more often, and you shouldn't get the same thing each and every time. I killed her a dozen or so times, I think I only got her special stuff three of those times. Personally I think you should get one of them each time, but maybe I'm just being greedy. But two out of the three times, I got snow. Most other people seemed to as well, from reading the comments in the chat as they went by.

I LOVED getting wheel tickets for this though, please keep that! Despite my frustrations with the wheel, the tickets were the main reason I kept going back to the queen. More on the wheel later though. The presents were a nice touch as well, though I was surprised to see how many dropped each time.

I would like to see the spectres have their own drops though, especially if we have to kill a bunch of them to get the named guys to show up. Plus, they are part of the battles, so why not let them drop stuff too? Even the bandits were dropping their gear, so why are the spectres exempt?

The other tweak I would add to this zone... ok, so it was really cool looking for the presents in place of crates, and the occasional egg nest in the zone. The problem with the presents, I kept getting coins from them, which seemed like a nerfed drop to me, and if I didn't get coins I got a mountain of pretty much the same thing- scanners and test kits. I would have been happier, honestly, to get a mountain of dyes, but even better would have been to add in dyes and mutation potions to this, maybe slightly rarer than the test kits and the scanners, so that 1) we weren't getting a glut of one thing, and 2) to round out the usefulness of all of these, since we were basically in the zone to look for pets to use these four things on in the first place. I would also LOVE to see traps, even if just the common ones, added to these boxes.

Especially since there was no NPC there to buy the traps from, so that when you needed them you had to go out of the zone to get them. Not difficult to do, I know, but really it would have been nice if from the beginning, way before the named arrived in the zone, we had at least the merchant somewhere, and even better if she had a special Holiday Trap or something that would catch all the pets in the zone, without having to spend diamonds. I was lucky enough to find a Orange Star pet, but couldn't catch it because none of my traps were strong enough, but it wasn't worth going getting a trap for diamonds. You can't buy a trap for that level yet, except for the diamond trap, which i think is an oversight. Let the zone be special, and offer a trap that will work for those as well.

Back to the nests though... I was really hoping to get at least one cool pet out of these, but honestly even though they all carry at least one trait, every single one of dozen or so eggs hatched from the eggs in the zone nests, is going to be released if no one buys them. I didn't get ONE griffi, and they were almost all cute but nothing I wanted to keep. Why aren't these eggs more commonly griffi? Supposedly the griffs are there to breed, I would have expected more griffi eggs to be in the nests. Aside from that, I would propose that the eggs in these nests be mostly if not all festive or winter themed pets. These nests weren't all that common, but I would be ecstatic to find them if I knew most or all of them were festive/winter themed. As it was, when I found an egg it was a "hey cool!" and then the letdown when yet another one ended up being something common I don't want. And then feel guilty for having to release because they aren't what I want and no one bought them.

The Wheel- I loved, and loved to hate, this wheel. I was more than a little upset to see the drops be so terribly skewed to getting the same thing over and over and over. I like that you are talking about putting more pets up, that would be good. But really, if this is a "random chance" then I should be able to spin a dozen times and get a fair chance at ALL the prizes, including the big ones. Instead I got mostly the same three things over and over. At least for me, one of those was the mutation potions, which I will definitely use, but i was really bummed to not get one of the 3-vis pets, even after buying a few more tickets with frost tokens. Ended up feeling like that was a waste, and very glad I didn't spend real money for it. At least the tickets for this dropped regularly enough that we could find them fairly easily, especially from the Queen. I would have liked getting more tickets from the crates in the zone, that would have been nice, but the drops for the tickets was pretty good overall.

Caroling- like the Trick or Treating, I find this a mindless slog. It's cool seeing everyone's avatar the first few times, and the presents break things up a bit, but I keep hoping for a button I can push that says "accept carols and send em back" all in one go, so I can get on with it and not have to spend an hour answering the 40+ people at my door each morning. I HATE that there is a leaderboard for something like this. I think if you want to award prizes for caroling, do it in a more egalitarian way, especially if one of the prizes is the title. Why should you have to get on a leaderboard of only 40 people to call yourself a caroler? Personally, I think if you carol more than 100 times, you should be able to use the title. At least it wasn't as cut throat as the Trick or Treating. That was really bad, being tricked sometimes with in essence a penalty for it. Caroling was better, and I liked that it was so simple. I would like this much better if it didn't have a leaderboard, but did have the rare chance at an interesting drop or two, maybe a cookie you could give to your pet to make him "festive" colored for a month, or avi items specific to caroling. Then the slog would have a purpose other than to get a few obsessed people up on a leaderboard.

Ok, that sounds more negative than I actually feel about the caroling, but it does express my frustration with the whole leaderboard thing, and why I think the door to door activity seems kind of mindless and pointless for most of us. Please realize that the comments are in the vein of constructive criticism. I wouldn't have participated in it if i hated it so much, lol.


Kudos to you all for all the hard work and the really nicely done new colorings of the pets and stuff! I liked them all, especially the festive colorings, which I really wish i could have found more festive pets. I really hope these come back next year! I'll look forward to seeing what you do both for the next festival coming up, and how much of this you bring back next year for the next Winter Festival! Great job!

"But really, if this is a "random chance" then I should be able to spin a dozen times and get a fair chance at ALL the prizes, including the big ones. Instead I got mostly the same three things over and over."

If "big" prizes means high monetary value prizes (as opposed to just useful versus unuseful, or another criteria): if games give out highly valued prizes at the same rate as lower valued prizes, the highly valued prizes become more common and therefore less expensive, so it's hard to have it both ways.

Feedback: I didn't participate in the zone but I still felt engaged due to the variety of activities. The caroling was a bit tedious, but I didn't mind as I at least got to see people's avatars (and I got used to really tedious stuff from Gaia Online so this really didn't seem too bad, but then I didn't spend that huge of an amount of time caroling either) - although I do echo the suggestions to not have the points box pop-up, and to be able to directly gift/answer certain people. I didn't participate in a ton of forum games but I did do some, and I liked having the option to do more if I wanted (and I love the separate forum for official games). I liked how with at least one of the forum games there was a participation prize for all entrants, but I definitely don't mind that they weren't all like that (in fact I think having the variety was nicely balanced).

Was thinking instead of the current layout for ToT/Carol/Door to Door activities, it could have a layout like the Mission page.
Clicking something that accepts the person is only one click (no need for multiple clicks nor image loading), while if you want to make sure of something like giving away a gift, it needs only one additional checkpoint click.
Maybe even a "load more visitors" link if you want to sift through single out a certain person or certain type of visitor? Like get to all gifted people first.
And this can be a toggle-able thing! If you wanna switch from one layout to another. c:

Also, the best part about slow internet connections or slow responses is that on layouts like this, you can click multiple buttons at once down the list, and by the time the refreshed page comes around, you could be done with 6+ visitors.
(i.e. when I have 6 completed missions on my screen, I quickly click all of them at rapid fire, and by the time the screen reloads, all 6 are cleared c: )

Pinging people who talked about Carol layout in their feedback. c: