Ephinea Christmas 2019

Presents suck so much that it's not worth to do full run to collect coal, crater fiasco resets is the meta. Last year was an event worth celebrating for, this year not so much unless it is quad boost days, but inconvenient during days should be spent with family. Managed to find lib kit and limiter from regular drops atleast... best present has been x3 pds lol.
 
Was in a game with someone that got a Photon Sphere from a present.

Best I've gotten is 5x Luck Materials.
 
Please tone down the joke weapons from the Present list rate.

Agree. Personally, I’d rather have presents themselves be more rare, or have it so the higher tier rewards are even harder to find if it meant that the joke weapons were taken off the list.

I don’t think that “not printing powerful items” = printing a ton of troll items that either get team pointed, dropped, or end up rotting in a bank.

For me, getting a present drop doesn’t feel exciting—and I’m sure some others feel the same. But I have to imagine there’s a way to adjust the rates and items involved that makes it so presents are meaningful, without reverting to the OPness of previous years.

I’m also confused as to why there are so few boosts compared to the anniversary event. If the presents are supposed to take a back seat to hunting, then at least let us play for the month with all 3 (base) boosts active.

As it is right now, it doesn’t really feel like there’s much more of an incentive to play compared to any normal week. I haven’t kept up with player counts, so maybe that doesn’t reflect my thoughts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I also enjoy events (in general, not just PSO) where kills across the server unlock different rewards. Feeling like the server is progressing and working together towards something is nice, even if the rewards arent the best.
 
The purpose of the event is suppose to be that you have an OP quest available in each episode. Fiasco is an OP quest for hunting *nearly* every enemy that appears in the quest in each episode.

I do 100% agree that presents should be much rarer and slightly better for rates, but this is all in hindsight. In 2016, the rate of a present dropping in a 4p game was 1/2500ish. There were far fewer players on Ephinea back then... This was also before I started playing here, so I don't really know the impact of that event.

In 2017, 2018, and now, it's 1/1500 regardless of numbers of players in a party. The server is also considerably more popular now than it was the past two Christmas events. Two years ago, the 2017 event basically killed the market for some items (FS, SoF in particular) and introduced a couple of ubers. One of those ubers was pretty slope for the time.

In 2018, a number of ubers were introduced that never should have seen the light of day in an event IMO. AFAIK, there were *two* 75 or higher hit Charge Vulcans on the server before Christmas 2018, and one of them was on a dead account. I knew of one 50+ hit Daylight Scar on an active account and one 50+ hit Rambling May. Christmas 2018 didn't completely kill trading lower hit FS and SoF like 2017 did, but it did introduce a number of lower hit ones that were significantly devalued.

It's really, really difficult to balance an event and other servers also have this problem.

Of course if presents were made rare AF next year, people would whine about doing dozens of fiascos and never finding any.. Literally can't win this. But the fact of the matter is that Christmas 2017 was bad for the economy, and Christmas 2018 was bad for the server.
 
I've made a couple of minor changes:

- Joke weapons have been made rarer
- Coal x1 and x5 have been removed from the Ultimate Present list.

The rate of non-commons will not be increased. As far as we're concerned, their rate is fine (we have logs to show this).
 
Updated the OP as well; some of the ??? have been found but not reported (but I'd have to double check exactly what).

I've added one of the Very Rares though -- one player got a 30H Lame d'Argent yesterday.

Edit: Added everything that's actually been found.
 
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Not sure if I'm the only one who thinks this but

Imo 2018 was fine

The duds were frequently in the form of coal rather than something useless

My main complaint here was a huge number of 15-25hit FS and SoFs (which seem to always be the two star items ruining economy during Christmas events)

Other drops like MR and LS were fine though

I can agree that something like 75h charge Vulcan shouldn't have existed but tbh only 2-3 dropped so I wouldn't go as far as to say it hurt the server or anything. The only thing it hurts are the the pockets of the 2-3 people with those 75+h Charge vulx (If they ever wanted to trade them)

One of them probably ended up on a dead account and the other is on someone else. Can't remember atm


It seems like most of the concern surrounds the rarity of Very rare presents and the quantity of lower level presents like SoF 15h

So why not just swap the 70+h weapons with currency based prizes like PH x 2 or 3 that still have a high value but don't interfere with the amount of existing Uber's and remove sof and fs from the present list or put them in a higher rarity
 
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