This event was amazing, Krin and Faiona. :) Thank you so much for hard work and dedication to the project and your availability for any problems users ran into throughout the event. I unfortunately fell ill toward the end of the festival and could not participate as much,but when I did I enjoyed it thoroughly. I'm looking forward to the Winter Event! The Trick-Or-Treating was an amazing idea and I had so much fun trying to guess what other users were up to!
Thanks again!

The Fall holiday was sort of up and down for me a lot. I loved that the holiday really brought a focus on the community with a lot of ways to participate in suggestions. It was great fun seeing my theme pet suggestions out in the wild, and designing avatar, gene and mutation suggestions. The holiday was huge, and I appreciate all the work that went into it to get it up and running.

Unfortunately, even with all that said.. i've seen 3 holiday festivals on Sylestia so far, and this was by far my least favorite. There were a lot of things I just did not enjoy this holiday. I feel a lot of things could be improved with tweaks and adjustments, such as the concerns already posted about the Dynamic event really interfering with what everyone in the zone is trying to do. Since that's already been pretty well covered, however, i'll move on to other things.

I feel that drop rates were quite unbalanced. The zone drops in the Summer seemed to have a lot better rarity distribution. There were items that were more common, a bit rarer, and then you had the high rare items as the 4th of July stuff.

In this we had the high rare items (Headless Horseman) again, and that's fine. Unfortunately so many of the other drop rates just didn't make this holiday enjoyable. I spent the majority of the holiday farming Banshees and every banshee item I have was traded or purchased from another user in the end. The one i'm wearing, the person who traded it got it out of a diamond basket. I do not feel that nearly every drop in the zone needed to be quite so rare.

The pumpkin vines and wolf outfits became our commons, but everything else seemed a bit overly steep. In the summer holiday there was a lot of fun in trading your extras for other peoples extras that seemed to bring the community together a lot better. This time around there was a lot less of that because we all had extras of the same couple items only, so there wasn't as much community trading except for candy swaps.

Candy swaps were a cool idea.. but I really dislike that so much of gaining the items came from that due to the overdone drop rate rarity. I also feel the zone could have used a bit more dropped items compared to just how many were put into the holiday store. It would be nicer if there was more of a balance in these areas in the future.

Scarecrow items were almost exclusively from candy swaps, due to the rarity of scare crows. I have checked with several other people who all saw 2-3 scarecrows the entire festival. None of those I have checked with got an actual avatar item from the scarecrows.

The main thing that really made this holiday less enjoyable to me than the prior ones, however, was ToT. I've had a lot of fun doing ToT on other games, but this particular ToT amounted to a lot of clicking and repetitive point grinding. Not something I really associate with Fall, Halloween, or fun in general. The leader board was also extremely influenced. You could basically buy your way onto it through several means (candy, raffles for tricks, etc). This isn't a dig at anyone who made it onto the leader boards, or made a raffle, but I really think these outside influences should be considered in the future if there are going to be leader boards for this kind of thing.

Many people did not participate or ceased to participate in ToT period. This could be seen from the number of people simply not answering their ToT door, and either having no statistics, or having statistics but no longer responding to knocks in spite of being online. I participated purely because I felt forced to by the way the holiday was built. Not participating in ToT put you at an extreme coin disadvantage, and robbed you of one of the only current opportunities to earn titles in the game. ToT being rolled out before any other means to receive the coins I feel was a really unfortunate thing to do.

It alarms me to see the admin declaring ToT to be a great success that they want to bring into future festivals, as I really don't want festivals to become a situation where we're forced to do activities we don't find fun if we want to be able to experience all the festival has to offer.

Yes, there were other means to get coins eventually, this is true. However, having done a moderate amount of ToT to get the (non leader board) titles, and some extra coins, I found myself in about 73rd place on the site. I did a fair amount of farming named in the zone. Granted I was killing banshee placeholders who do not give coins a lot too, but I would say I participated in the holiday a fair bit aside from being light on doing the ToT which I thoroughly did not enjoy. I was able to buy less than half of what was in the Holiday Shop with this level of participation. A friend who made it onto the ToT leader board, in comparism, had high hundreds of coins to spare after buying everything. How many coins would I have been down if I had been one of the people who did not do ToT at all?

Personally I don't like the ToT at all. I understand some people did.. and i'm sure some people didn't but don't like giving negative feedback as well. I feel that if this really needs to be thrown into future holidays, that it should not have the severe impact it was allowed to have this time around. It shouldn't significantly effect our ability to enjoy Sylestia's future holidays if we decide we dislike point grinding games.

Oops, I forgot one thing I meant to bring up. Yeah, I know, this is already super long. But I had a lot of feedback. XP

I just want to add that while the zone was available to everyone, the scaling was pretty BAD on a lot of things. While zombies were harsh for me, my friend who was trying the zone as a newbie found Named very very unforgiving! I think there really needs to be more testing of such things in the future. I don't think he ended up being able to beat any named, which kind of curbs the appeal of letting newbies play with the zone in the first place.

I think you did a great job for the fall festival. I'm impressed by all of the work you both put in. Especially the ToT game, fantastic job there, it works beautifully.

Only minor suggestions,
(1) The goals for the titles should have been less. Maybe 300 ToT ea. instead of 500. 500 ToT did not amount to 500 clicks as a lot of people didn't answer their door. So I feel like I wasted a lot of time on this.

(2) The festival map probably should have been more circular. Like in the summer festival, you could hop from named to named without too much trouble. In this festival map it wasn't worth the time/effort to travel through all the named.

(3) The coloring picture. Wayyyy too much line art. I only got roughly 1/3 way done and it took a lot of time. unfinished entry. So I didn't submit anything. Also, since I spent so much time on this, I ended up not participating in the drawing contest either. >.<

(4) It seems strange to have a color-able scarecrow/banshee outfit, and many non-colorable scarecrow/banshee outfits. At least in my mind, there is no point to the non-colorable ones...unless I'm missing something here.

There was a question that was raised (not sure by me or someone else, forgot who) similar to number 4, about the colorable/not colorable monthly outfits for November. For the monthly items, the noncolorable items had a more complex and individual color pattern (ie each set had 3 colors in their palette) than the simple colorable one (which works with only 2 colors). So if someone liked the item but not the colors, they could opt for the colorable one (at a different price), but the colored ones look quite pretty.

The same goes for the glowing wings of autumn/frost, for example. c: I remember looking real close at the leaf tips (to see if there was a difference in getting all 3 types of wings), and there's a tint of yellow/blue on the leaves for the colored wings. For the colorable wings, the leaves are just one solid color.

The difference between the Banshee-dropped outfits and the one in the store is that the monster drops have the designed stripes and the gradient on the skirt, while the store-bought one doesn't. (Tiny, minute details, I guess to make the noncolorable one a bit more appealing than the colorable one to make it worth getting)

Sorry for all the text, I just wanted to interject. xD Since I knew that the monthly set this month was a bit different than the outfits we had before and was relevant.

Yes, thank you for clarifying! That helped me a lot ^___^

LOVED everything but here is my feedback ^.^

This bothered me SO bad......


Same holiday pet....off colors. It makes it difficult for some breeders I just think it would be SO much easier to just keep it all the same hex for each holiday pet.

I LOVED different variations of holiday pets <3

Probably already said...but lower amount of zombies or either easier to kill. Also the whole event I killed the horseman 2-3 times atleast per day for the whole festival. Maybe a slight better chance to get the avi gear?

Loved the amount of currency that dropped from defeating him, made it easier to obtain items from the shop.

How do I get back into the ToT as a host? I still need to finish them off.

You can save the holiday "currency" and use it next year! :D
I still have valentine's envelopes haha.

the currency won't change? :D

At this time. We plan on using the same currency year to year. If we decide to change, we will at least offer a way to convert.