You will have received a “loot” notification :)

• First, if you had at least 8 unusual stones, you auto-bought an Enchanted Stone Mushroom
• Any remaining unused stones were used to randomly auto-buy non-mushroom items from the event shop, until you ran out of stones.

:| See, what really gets me about the event this time around is that it was possible to end up with an odd number of stones, but all prizes required an even number, and nothing cost 1 stone. *kicks one remaining stone around*

glitch

Yay for loot :D I’m super happy thank you!

Excellent tweak to the system!!! I didn’t need it, but I’m glad for those that did! This is one of the reasons I love Mycena!!

Raja  that happened to me for the Shimmers Event!  The singular bugged me to no end.  Nothing to buy with it, but I just couldn’t walk away from doing the activity that would grant me the single event point either xD

glitch  Thank you for taking the time to explain the reasoning behind wanting the finite timeframe for the event shops.  I like the idea of the loot turning into randomly picked items.  It seems a fair solution.

I am given to understand that Neopets keeps their event shops open for a very long time, and this has generally resulted in people hoarding their points for as long as possible to see which items end up being most “valuable” down the line. We don’t particularly want to see that here, so we’re unlikely to make a drastic change in how long our event shops are availableglitch

 

In my honest view, you are not giving that system enough credit.  I have played Neopets since 2001 and you’re not really painting an accurate picture here.  When an event ends and the prize shop opens, people don’t just not redeem prizes for years deviously plotting how best to profit.  Yes, some people do hold off for a while but they are not the majority. 

Something to consider is that on Neopets it is not even safe to spend a long time not redeeming your prizes.  One prize, the Altador Strength Potion, did actually appreciate nicely over a couple years.  (But tons were redeemed right off the bat and over several months, to the point where appreciation was slow and people greatly benefited from the mass amount that were initially available.)  However they began depreciating rapidly because of things Neopets was doing to depreciate battle pets, and in turn this affected items like ASP which was a stat increaser for your pet.

It’s not accurate that people playing the speculation game hurts their prize shop system.  In fact, I would say it helps keep prices low.  Let me explain.

Say 1000 people complete an event here.  But woops, 100 of them fell asleep or lost internet for a week or were sick for a few months and couldn’t get back to the prize shop in time.  900 get into the prize shop and grab their items.  You have effectively locked the item generation for the prizes of this event.  Barring activity on your part, no more of these items will ever enter the economy. 

Now 1000 people complete an event on Neopets.  Those 100 people who would have been locked out of the prize redemption come back, often at different times, and are able to redeem prizes and help keep inflation in check over time.

I’m really curious to know how you think the prize redemption waiting game goes on neopets.  It’s always balanced out by other sellers and what buyers are willing to pay.  And very often people could redeem dozens of the good items, so they ended up super plentiful.

Of all the things wrong with the neopets economy, I’d argue that it was actually never the prize shops’ fault.  That was one of the few things they got right.

Edit:  A couple thoughts about Mycena Cave prize shops

1)  Items generally don’t vanish from the economy on MC.  Either it’s a permanent item or, in the cases where it’s a shroom, the item becomes “a pet.”  And as we know, shrooms actually sell harder than pets anyway.  Appreciation is inherently slower than any comparison you could make to Neopets. 
2) We don’t really have to pick and choose our item investments anyway if we complete the event, so there’s no real reason to wait.  It’s generally some choice like “another full set of all the items or a second mushroom” etc.  Lost Desert Plot on Neopets, for example, you needed to spend something like 75% of maximum possible prize points to get the top item. 
3) If you really wanted some sort of system that encourages getting to the prize shop as quickly as possible, just change prices.  Have it be one price the first few days or weeks, then make everything more expensive.  For example, add the cost of 1 unusual stone per item.  In this manner, you can keep the prize shop open forever because you’ve incentivized early redemption.

glitch Ooh, I was wondering where the loot messages came from! I read up on the pervious posts in this thread, and I’m a bit surprised that there were quite a few people for whom the shop closed too early too. Thank you for going out of your way and still granting us (random) loot!

glitch OMG, I’m so happy! Even without being able to choose, it feels so good to get something for my points when I thought I’d missed my chance. Thank you so much!

We had 261 surveys submitted, 243 of which included usernames. This means that 13 prizes have been raffled off! Winners are mentioned below:

• 41% of players who responded to the survey did not participate in Shimmers in the Water - it would seem our population has grown quite a bit over the last year!
• Of those of you who participated in both events, 54% of you expressed a preference for Into the Caves.
• 77% of you felt that this event was the perfect duration - awesome! Of the remainder, 14% felt it was too short.
• 73% of you felt that this event required the ideal amount of effort in order to obtain all prizes. Of the remainder, 20% believed too much effort was required.
• 85% of players managed to obtain the prizes they most valued from this event.
• 66% of players believed the event was at the ideal level of difficulty. Of the remainder, 24% found that the difficulty level was too high.
• 64% of players believed there was an ideal balance between activity & community days. Of the remainder, 28% believed there were too many community days.
• Players held divided opinions as to the usefulness of the event items: 46% of players indicated that they found the items useful to them or their characters, while 22% of players were neutral on the usefulness of the items.
• 70% of players found the event coat applicable to a current character or inspiring towards a new character.
• 69% of players found the instructions to be clear, with 14% feeling neutral. From player comments, we believe that this may have been affected by an increase of new players to the site. This is something staff will continue to improve upon!
• 80.5% of players enjoyed the story, with 18% of players expressing no opinion.
• 76% of players expressed interest in seeing more story-driven events in the future. Staff will certainly keep this in consideration!

• Players felt that more time to exchange their unusual rocks for prizes would be beneficial.  In response to comments indicating that players did not have enough time to exchange their unusual rocks for prizes, we have implemented a new system for ensuring that there is no unused or wasted event currency in the future. Players with unspent event currency received a random selection of items from the prize shop equalling out to the amount of currency they had left over. This is something that we will continue to do for future events.
• Overall, it appears as though Spellstones was the most difficult day for many of our players. Many of those who commented on this indicated that they felt the required score was too high. To expand on how the target score of 500 points was figured, an average of player scores for 5 and 10 minute games was calculated, followed by asking staff members to play a handful of 10 minute games and report their scores back to us. The suggested range for the required score was between 500 and 750 points, so that it would take the average player approximately 10 minutes to complete, but may have taken more than one board to achieve. Feedback indicated that it generally took players longer than we had calculated — this could be due to many players being unfamiliar with Spellstones which was not factored in!
• The bonus incentive for completing all 14 days of the activity was well-received!

• Players appeared to enjoy the community feel fostered in the player-run help threads. We received several positive notes about the community coming together to help each other out!

  Overall, it would appear this event was well-received, with few common trends in critical feedback.. We’re happy that it was an enjoyable experience for most of you!

  In closing, we’d like to thank everyone for filling out our survey! Your feedback is highly appreciated, and will be helpful in improving aspects of our future events. 

Re: Spellstones, did it stack over multiple boards? I’m pretty sure I did well over 500 points collectively that day, but it only counted the objective completed when I got it all on one board. Which took ages, I average 150ish on a good board, iirc.

*screms cause this is the first time I’ve ever won a raffle*

That’s some very interesting statistics, thank you for sharing!

Regarding the Spellstones activity:
I play it fairly often (not as often as Cave In but still), and while I acknowledge that I’m not a native speaker and thus have limited vocabulary, I usually get around 150-200 on a -for me- good board. So yes, this was a bit frustrating, because I couldn’t believe one would even be able to get 500+ words in one board. I actually first misunderstood that you could use multiple boards to get to the desired amount, so with that detour the whole activity certainly took me longer than the time you projected.

I’m a bit sad that my feedback, which I felt was really, really important, apparently wasn’t mentioned by a good amount of other people. I mentioned my frustration with the coat yet again not being shown until later. I thought this would have stopped after the huge amount of discontent during the Scholarcrow event. But I guess not. >: I’m a person who plays primarily for the coats. But at this point I feel like a small minority. I know I’ve said it before, but this site feels more and more like a dress up the customs game. Anyone else in my boat feel the same?

On the subject of spellstones, would you believe that it actually got me better at the game? Also damn you people are efficient. It usually takes me half an hour to get 500+ points. Ten minutes? Am I just bad at all the games? I was really slow at cave in, too. It always takes me about one to two hours to max out my nuggets in a day. Which is why I find myself not doing it often.

Shima

I like to play for coats! A lot of them are so pretty. I didn’t mind this one being a surprise, but the only really frustrating bit for me was wondering if the coat would be the shopkeeper/the one in the banner or something else. And we had the opportunity to do everything after seeing the coat, if we wanted to wait and see, so I think it was pretty fair! I don’t really see a point in keeping it a surprise, but I was not very frustrated by it.

Woot! Won the raffle. Gotta love random stuff like that. I’m just glad you all learned a lot from the survey’s results!

Ahhh survery results! Neato! :D Also wowee 10 min average for Spellstones? Ya’ll are good!! Anyway, I can’t wait to see what future events staff has for us in the future! ^0^

Raffles prizes have been sent out! :)

Hello!

I’m plopping in here to say that while we do have to balance directions towards a large audience with very varying wants while keeping things fresh and trying new things, we do listen to individual player feedback and take it into account (even if a particular opinion isn’t widespread). When we write out summaries, we aggregate them to the more widespread opinions simply to keep the length reasonable, but we do think about and consider singly-voiced opinions and thoughts :)

We’re always working to make Mycena Cave better for our players, and so we very much appreciate your willingness to share your thoughts in official surveys, discussions in the forums, and echos that we receive. If there are things you want to discuss but maybe don’t want to do so publicly, please do feel free to talk to us by echo too!