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trying to balance enjoyment and accessibility for both old and new players has always been a major challenge on sites like this, its an especially expected flaw with fr considering the welcome weeks that made the initial userbase quite small. i understand that staff doesn't want to cut off newbies from the biggest event of the year and allow them to easily obtain older items, but this ends up weighing on the older players (like me lol) which is why these negative comments keep rolling in.

i think trying to incorporate something like festive favors as Canisa said into notn wud take a lot of load off the people who are unable to access the site much during the holidays. being unable to access the coli takes away a massive chance to obtain chests and baldwin's is slow and resource intensive (the single chest brew even requires materials from the coli so you'll be needing to dump familiars like mad in to brew enough mucks for the double). allowing the powder to be collected during gathering and traded for older items or familiars wud make this event much more manageable satisfying the newbies and people with little time as well as hardcore players who want to make a profit with chests possibly being rarer but with better drop rates for newer or rarer items.

nocturnes are a very meh breed to me and i've never been into the fr lore that heavily so im only commenting on the gameplay aspects here that Canisa and Lilian have brought up. i've also been feeling less and less excited for this event as the years go on and i'm surprised that even 4 years and drop rates are still an issue here (i wasn't around for 2018's noth but it sounds like things were decent there which confuses me even more the ball was dropped this year). the same disappointment i got from pulling the buttrocks or yet another mimic bear is returning when i manage to pull the same apparel i've had in my vault since 2014. i hope anything i've said was useful, i might've just started rambling instead.

@Canisa
Very good points. It looks like we can at least agree that, one way or another, NotN really needs a big revamp in order to keep going. I definitely see what you mean about it celebrating the winter solstice, because back in the day NotN had way fewer prizes besides the noc scrolls and eggs, meaning they were the main attraction of the whole thing. With much more content being added I guess they got the spotlight dimmed a little.

Speaking as someone who has had experience planning events in adoptable sites, NotN still seems to be structured and executed as an introductory festival to a new species, though, instead of a regular yearly event. I don't think that was ever changed... which isn't good. Part of what's damaging it so much is how the staff doesn't seem to have ever structured NotN with a bigger picture than "one time event" in mind. I'd guess there was very little planning on the unsustainable aspect of the event's snowballing content, and they just kept shoving more and more stuff every year to make up for the previous festival's criticism. If they finally addressed this issue and took time to rework the whole event, maybe we'd have a much less stressful/frustrating experience.

@voidbeast
In my opinion the unbalanced drop rates haven't changed in the slightest since 2017. It used to be way worse, sure, but it's still really bad. I tried coligrinding in the best venues and I still only got an average of 2 chests per hour, which is abysmal. The unbalanced drop rates are always the most criticized aspect of NotN and yet it's completely ignored every.single.year. ¬¬

@Lilian

Agreed. The Event does need some changes to continue to be fun, without the frustration overwhelming everything. But I think it can be done, without abandoning the Event in its entirety. (And I would miss the familiars in particular, if the Event vanished never to return.) I like @voidbeast's suggestion that Mimic Powder could be made available as a Gathering item, and used to acquire things from previous years. That might work better than some of the things I was suggesting, as it is on par with the Festival Currency.

I also agree that there is a slight problem with the announcement of the Event each year. I think of it as a celebration of the Winter Solstice, but I admit that the introductory paragraph, talking about the "emergence" of the Ncoturne dragons, does make it seem to be a bit more focused on them. Perhaps if they altered that paragraph to emphasize the darkest night of the year more, and deemphasized the Nocturnes, it would work better, and be less jarring to the overall Lore.

And yes, I think the staff never did completely make the transition. I suspect that they only intended to have the Event once, and never again, but a lot of people kept asking them if it was coming back, so they decided to try it out for another year...and then it just became a tradition, so to speak, and a means to enable newer people to the site to acquire things they might not otherwise be able to get.

@Lilian what rly confuses me about this whole mess is a lot of things staff did to smooth things over like retiring the mimic bears and allowing the mimics you fight in the coli to drop their respective familiars were completely abandoned. we've gone from 5 chests a minute to one chest every 5 hours instead of just going with a nice happy middle ground. although now that i think about it, it might be possible drop rates are so screwy in order to keep nocturne eggs hovering around the same price as other eggs?? its obviously more likely staff is just ignoring complaints and criticisms but there might be some sort of internal logic *shrugs*

Thought I would put my opinion out here and say how my notn went.

The days I was free I had great success in coli, I would say about 12 chests an hour if I was dedicated to it, it was pretty good. I think increasing the drop rate in coli would hurt the economy, it would make people who dedicate themselves to coli have thousands of chests where as people who can't and are too busy miss out.

I do think drop rate should be increased for gathering though, it can't break anything because there is a limit to gathering turns. It would also help out people who are really busy this holiday period and only have time to gather and no coli. I was pretty busy most days with family things/work and was only able to gather sometimes but it was disappointing where I would get no chests in 15 turns.

I think the design of the new familiars where really great and I had fun getting them from chests and fighting them. I had a lot of fun this Notn and with only the small hiccup of lag at launch it was fixed pretty quickly and it ran great.

Fun event! I got a breed change, a lot of familiars and apparel! looking forward to the next event!

@JellyRaven
Unfortunately the drop rates seem very unbalanced, so you either get lots of chests, or get close to none, regardless of how dedicated you are. You seem to have been a lucky one, but in my case I'd get at most 3-4 chests per hour of coligrinding. It really sucked.

amazing event. got all the things out of it i wanted, plus extra. minus a couple familiars but ill get them eventually lmao.

How did others get so many chests in coli? o.O I grinded for hours over the two weeks fighting many mimics but got no chests at all from the coli. Only got a total of 3 chests from gathering over the 2 weeks and those 3 gave me things I already had ;-; Really hoping others put their duplicates in AH for not too much and I'll just have to buy everything

[quote name="ShadowWolfDeath" date="2020-01-06 06:48:50" ] How did others get so many chests in coli? o.O I grinded for hours over the two weeks fighting many mimics but got no chests at all from the coli. Only got a total of 3 chests from gathering over the 2 weeks and those 3 gave me things I already had ;-; Really hoping others put their duplicates in AH for not too much and I'll just have to buy everything [/quote] e x a c t l y. most i got was 3 and i just quit lmao