Cosmo
Oh! Thanks! I was thinking it ran until the 7th because that’s when the shop opened (and I didn’t bother looking at the header lol). I’ll prob get to 950 then :D

I’m just gonna butt in and add my two cents.
Right from the beginning it was a bit shocking that prices were so high, particularly on the coats. Given that the poses are so different for both event pets, there are a lot of people who are going to want one of each (because it’s almost like we had 4 event coats this time). I see that some people are averaging 200+ charms a day, which is great! But others don’t have time or executive agency to be neurotically managing a timer every day, who are crawling in at ~200 charms total.

A lot of people are going to have to shell out lots of cash (on-site or otherwise) to get the things they want. Which is great, it’ll hopefully jumpstart the lagging economy here? But given that nearly everyone will -only- sell things for PP right now, that’s gonna end up with a lot of people feeling short-changed. Almost certainly people will need to choose between items or (a) coat. For example, if the coat someone wants is the Twelfth Hour dras, to guarantee getting one is nearly 2400 charms (and we all remember how bad the RNG was towards players wanting the moon phase last year). To guarantee one copy of that coat, you need to be averaging ~170 charms a day. If you want both upright and active, you need over 300 each day. And you need that much to walk away from this event just with a coat or two, nevermind any items you might want.

I’m guessing the prices are to encourage trading between users for event things, since it’s nearly impossible for a single person to gather everything from the event - which is a great idea, I’m not saying it’s bad - but like I said earlier, PP is the premium right now and many people don’t have access to that. It’s a good fix but for the wrong problem.

Anyway that’s my two cents, feel free to poke me with any thoughts or further discussion o:

Is there anything special about sending to the same Mycenan or different ones, or collecting words among your own?
It’s just… I’m kind of floundering on to whom I should want to send words… Wasn’t sure if there were any particulars for which I should be trying.

Thanks!

Trelweny

If you’re stuck on who to send words to and you’d like some variety, the “Give a Word, Get a Word” thread on the main event forum is very active. You don’t even need to post. Sometimes I just send to random people I see on the board. ^^

I notice a lot of us, myself included, will search for a pet with the same name as the word we’re sending (among my pets, Jay, Quail, and Rose seem pretty popular for their respective words) or a bit of clever wordplay. I’ve received “jaw” and “jaws” for my placeholder pet named Shark, Hush and Whisper have both received “quiet”, Dusk has received “noon”, and Rose has received “thorn”.

Really, just have fun with your word, you never know who might pop up in the name selection. ^^

Trelweny
From my very first word event (I think this will be my third) I’ve sent to the same pet. Almost every word I’ve ever sent has gone to that one pet. I just stick to the one because then I only have to remember one name. I don’t have to go looking and it has become a ritual. I don’t have to think about it. You could always try that. Just find a pet you like and send to it, if that makes things simpler for you.

Hey everyone!

I see there’s some discussion about the event prize prices, so I figured I’d pop in and explain the rationale. There are a couple factors at play here:

First factor: like all grab-bag events, this event is tuned towards the bag prices and not item prices. Being able to buy individual items is a relatively recent addition to events, and previously only the bags were available as prizes, but feedback on events indicated that some players find complete reliance on random grabs as stressful. As a response to this feedback, you can purchase the contents directly if you really want to, but this will come at a steep extra cost which is explicitly not factored in. If you want “expected” rewards from the event, your best bet is to buy bags and trade with other players, possibly buying one or two items directly to fill out the final items that you aren’t able to find for trade. Primarily buying the items directly will mean you will be able to acquire much less, which is intentional, in part because it means that fewer trade items will be available to other players who buy bags as intended.

Second factor: the prices are indeed higher than last year. These events are tuned towards the “average” player being able to afford as many of each bag as there are items in the bag — last year there were 5 items in each item bag and 3 mushrooms in the mushroom bag, whereas this year there are only two mushrooms in the mushroom bag, and the prices have been adjusted accordingly. We decided to “spread out” the price increase over the item bags / items as well to make the mushroom-bag price increase less steep, but whether that was the correct way to do it remains to be seen (submitting feedback about this this on the post-event feedback form after the event will be very much appreciated). Word-creating event prize prices are tuned for the average player earning about 2600 charms over 14 days, or about 185 charms per day, which has in the past been (and is also currently for this event) a good average. Many players of course will earn significantly less, and many players earn significantly more. For this event so far, some players are averaging fewer than one charm per day, and others are averaging more than 440. Where you find yourself in this spectrum depends largely on your involvement and how much time you put in, though the point-values of your letters do of course play a role as well.

Third factor: this is the first time we’ve offered the actual pets for purchase in the event shop, so how to sell them is a bit of an experiment. Since you can’t “open” a pet, they aren’t random and thus are priced equivalent to the individual mushrooms (and not the mushroom bag to which the event price is tuned). We initially planned to sell the pets at a higher price than the mushrooms, but then we figured that the individual mushrooms were already pretty expensive, and spending event points in order to save yourself gems is arguably a “bad move” (because event points are limited and gems are always available), so we thought we’d try offering them at the same price and see how that goes.

Good luck everyone! I hope you’re able to get whichever prizes you’re after :)

EDIT: all right wise guys, who did that to my avatar?

i will probably reply about the prices after i read it all BUT MR BEAN…............. thats my main question!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it was like that last night TOO

edit: thanks to glitch for explaining… i’m glad that the balance for items for the event is being experimented with. i think people just get nervous because in the past its been fairly easy to get one of everything. now that we know i think that puts me more at ease. i still havent decided what all are my MUST HAVES this time around heh

Thanks for the super detailed response! :D
fwiw, I’m interested in the way these kinds of changes are implemented on these events and to see how the site changes and adapts based on player feedback (and more overarcing/meta conditions). But I can say this from a(n armchair) position where I’m not really going to get stressed out about it either way.

1. a+ bean. good job shenaniganner.

2. The explanation about turning it to bag prices (so the average player can buy as many bags as there are items in each bag) doesn’t account for the rarity difference between the items. If the average number of charms is around 2600, it means the event is set up so that lots of players have to choose between the dras pet or anything else, and that many players won’t be able to get that pet at all. Because you can’t purchase charms from multiple players, the option of buying the dras pet outright is even less feasible.

Consider the situation where a player wants the dras pet but only manages to collect 2200 charms by the end of the event. They’re outta luck three ways because; they can’t buy the last 175 charms outright to buy the pet; they won’t be able to “Trade up”, as the items are inherently less valuable / more numerous and; EVEN IF they take their chances on a toad bag, and EVEN IF they get lucky, they’re still out the price of fodder.
(That situation seems similar to the “Scholarcrow Smasher” thing a few years ago, in terms of how the “lots of effort, but not quite enough” plays out).

3. While it makes sense to tune the event to the bags from a dev perspective, from a player perspective the balance is almost always going to be in consideration of the most expensive item within that bag, and the odds of attaining that item.

4. As a couple of people have already mentioned, this event feels like it has more pets on offer, because of the difference between coats. So this is a place where balancing based on the number of mushrooms (rather than the number of “unique” pets)  might have been a misstep.

Sidenote: A few months back, China introduced regulations whereby companies like Blizzard (polygon link) had to be up front about the rarity of finding certain items within the loot boxes. While the individual pricing of each item give you a small clue about the relative rarity, I personally wouldn’t mind seeing that made more transparent. (especially knowing that the prices were intentionally hand-tweaked to spread the rise over multiple items).

While the individual pricing of each item give you a small clue about the relative rarity, I personally wouldn’t mind seeing that made more transparentJacq

With all event grab-bags, we set the individual item prices to be precisely defined by their probabilities: something that costs twice as much is half as likely. As an example, lets work through the cat pouch:

Thanks so much for that, glitch! I realize now that you’ve broken it down that the price spread was over the bags /all items (seems obvious lol) and not just tweaked after the fact. Seeing the probability of the dras compared to the ineki coat is around 40/60 (if I have my math right) certainly mitigates some of the concerns I had about the toad bag.

I also appreciate the transparency just in general. Y’all’ve always been really good about explaining the systems used and reasoning behind them, and I appreciate that a lot. Especially with the way the current climate in gaming wrt loot boxes. (or have I been watching too much Jim Sterling).

(I’ve been valiantly resisting the urge so far to use mycena events to get some extra practice with R and I’m not sure if this is helping or not lmao).

Madara There aren’t many I’m afraid.

Based on feedback from last time we’re using the Spellstones dictionary for the event — looking through it quickly, the only entry with a Q and without a U that I can find is “qwerty”.

OregonCoast Just the two mushrooms. But since event points seem to be valued at about 40 nuggets each, it would cost about the same amount (or more in the case of Twelfth Hour) to buy fodder for a shroom as it would to buy the coat straight from the shop.

I also have a question…are the fangs on the DotN (active and/or upright) toggleable? :O

Could I make a small suggestion to add a note to Griselda’s shop soonish, that the Toad Bag does not contain pets? Or maybe move the put purchases to the same “level” as the bags, rather than nesting it inside the toad bag?

The question has come up a few times, and I know it was answered in this thread, but not everyone reads through the recent posts and it’s a pretty expensive mistake to make (that you might not even know about if you just assume the pets are rare drops!)

The other items, when you click them, list the contents of the bags, but the toad bag lists its contents, plus the two pets (which are impossible to find inside).

(jic - glitch Myla)

Cosmo

The fangs are not toggleable on either pose for the Dead of the Night!

Cosmo  Thank you for the reply!  I had read through the thread, but I wasn’t finding my answer.

Jacq I rather like Jacq’s idea of separating the images of the coat purchases from the Toad Pouch if there’s no way the pouch drops them.  You don’t want bad feelings over this…..false advertisement and all that c=

Oxton  Thank you for letting us know the fangs aren’t toggeable for the Dead of the Night coats.  I think my character will still work with the fangs, but it would have been great to have the option to toggle them as well to add to the diversity of the coat. 

Can the feather boa on the upright cat ineki be toggled off? I love how you overlayered a bow on yours c=

OregonCoast

The feather boa can indeed be turned off! c:

I’ll actually list the layers that can be toggled underneath!

Active Toggle Layers
-Body Smoke
-Eye Smoke
-Rings
-Bat Caravat

Upright Toggle Layers
-Bat Bow
-Shawl 1 (this is the foreground of the web shawl)
-Fluff (this is the boa)
-Shawl 2 (this is the background of the web shawl)

And thank you so much Oregon, I really enjoyed dressing them up! :D

Regarding the toad pouch, that’s a fair point — we have some new players participating who may not know that openables only contain items. I’ll update the shop page accordingly this evening.

EDIT: the shop has been updated to clarify that the Toad Pouch contains only mushrooms.

Question! 

On the Bone Monster’s page, the full view upright version of Twelfth Hour has a flower crown, but my pet does not have the option to put one on. Is that a mistake?

Myla

glitch
Quick question, could you clarify what you mean by “average” player? Are you guys taking the mean # of charms earned across active players, or is it an approximation of the median values? o:

*glances at the Toad bag* *glances at current number of shrooms* Aaaand here I was thinking I was doing pretty good at this event.

Time to convince myself I’m not interested in any of the coats ‘cause there’s no way I’m going to have enough charms to buy even one of those bags, especially when I want to collect one of each of the smaller bags! (Not even the items in them…the bags are just so cute!)

I greatly appreciate the clarification that that you cannot get a random pet from the Toad bag.

Also, going to try to remember this for the post-event feedback form, but I really wish my event notifications told me the name of a pet that sent me a charm, rather than the user themselves (considering how I have to then click on them to find a pet’s name to send to, since I like sending back to anyone who sends to me)

Kind of curious about what the ‘average’ player would be as well, and whether or not you counted it out to be sure people could get each of the items at the end. Especially given the different costs/rarities affecting trade (oof I have to try to trade up twice. ;~; ) and the stark difference between positions of the two coats.

By the by, thanks for the warning that the pets can’t drop from the bag. I’d forgotten that actually. Almost oops’d into getting bags instead of the pets directly. <3

Bit of a non sequitur I suppose, but I’d like to suggest a word suggestion thread for future events (and Spellstones too, if it pulls from the same site dictionary), for words we find surprising having not been accepted.

I was just informed “jicama” isn’t considered a word, which made me a little sad given the awesome letter distribution. It is a word if you’re a foodie. XD

“Mycena” is not a valid word :(

...I just found out that Mycena doesn’t count, either. Such a tragedy.

So unless I had someone already that for lore reasons I wanted to transform into an event coat, which personally I wouldn’t do but maybe someone else might, there’s no real reason for me to not get them explicitly. Except, perhaps, if I got them cheaper through the bag.polygone

I can see where you’re coming from, but taking into account the potential of trading with other players, particularly regarding pets, might change those numbers a bit.