Miku
vocaloid
Now basically there's the good and the bad of everything, and I'd been thinking about this and wanted to state my opinion but not hijack the main thread about this. Now all of this is going to be strictly from a power-seeker's point of view. As in, nothing matters but getting as strong as possible as efficiently as possible.
Let's start with the bad first.
Bad 1 - what to spend badges on. Almost everything other than addslots, item tickets, TP mats, heart key, and photon sphere seems just dreadfully overcost and not worth getting unless you really want one of the costmetics. I haven't even looked for the scavenger but I think the anniv topic said they removed him, but he'd pretty much be a waste of badges at this point anyways as there are tons of good scavenger weapons out there already anyway. I also didn't know about coins the first like 200 times I did a PW quest so I've always been way behind on TP mats so I sat there trading almost all my badges for TP mats and it also kinda sucks you can only do 1 at a time as getting a few hundred is quite tedious.
Bad 2 - the piggybackers. Now, I don't even think these are a thing, but in theory, it may actualy be best to play other quests for a lot of the hunts and not even do the MAE quests and just let the players of the MAE quests build up the boosts for you to get your rares just in other quests that aren't even adding to the killcount. Now why is this? Well, TE still has a lot more hildes than MAE Forest, so if you want a HP or FS from the forest, TE is still going to be a better option. Sure you won't get the hbr dar boost but it doesn't even do anything there anyways. Similarly, Maximum Attack 4th stage is still better for cave lilies, Cal's still better for temple lilies, and rare lilies not affected by the dar boost either. So a true item seeker of these rares might still be best off not even playing the MAE quests at all, which could really hurt the killcount for everyone. Oh and even going for lame or HS I believe you can still get the most per minute if you do PoD during the rare enemy week of the event rather than doing any of the MAE quests but it'll depend on what the rest of the milestone bonuses are. Now again the good news is few to no people seem to be doing this but it could be a thing but all in all not really that bad. But I do wonder why we get the boosts even outside of the MAE quests.
Bad 3 - the depressingness of seeing that the event gives fewer rewards each year. Stuff like photon sphere and heart key keep costing more, and gold badges seem far rarer than they used to be as well. However, it seems the drop rate not being reduced the more players you have like it was in the old days along with just a lot more people being stronger than back then allowing you to beat stuff more quickly does kinda counterbalance this and it also fights inflation so that maybe it's not even that bad, but it has bothered me before and is kinda a mind**** sometimes. But eventually I come to realize that I don't even really need more PDs that much as I already have my best weapons maxed out anyway, and it's far more important to get even better weapons than to give only slightly useful power ups to my existing weapons so at the end of the day, getting lower photon drop value isn't the end of the world as it's mainly about dar, rdr, and rare enemy rate to me now. It also feels like gold badges have been downgraded into simply slightly worse clones of PDs, just causing stupid trades until they're in groups of 99 to be turned into photon spheres and serve little other purpose. They could almost just be removed and replaced with PDs at this point.
Bad 4 - Losing hurts more than gaining. As in, when the event ends, the game is going to feel like a waste of time then as you'll gain stuff way slower than you were gaining stuff during the event. People can also be burned out and having a party with randoms may just be infeasible for a while after the event.
Bad 5 - the quests are somewhat too short and easy tbh. You can spend too long searching for teammates to the point where it'd have been faster to just solo the quest. I've found I can solo MAE Forest in only 6 minutes (given you use a RAmarl with zerk needle and good 100 native hs, could probably be even faster if I were higher level) but with a party it takes 5 minutes. So you better be able to get a party quick or it'd have been faster to just solo. If hunting anything like FS or HP it doesn't even lower your chances to solo given your teammates probably have no rdr boost anyways. It also doesn't lower your badge or PD chances as those don't seem to be affected by drop rate, either. So honestly I'm probably going to solo the Forest like 100 times once we get to rare enemy week and I'm not that excited about it but I'd really like a better FS.
Bad 6 - Quests still seemingly completely unchanged from 2nd anniv and are just reused again. Don't feel new at all anymore.
Bad 7 - So many quests with different IDs being the best it can force you to change characters a whole lot if you always want to play quests on their best IDs.
Alright I think that about covers the bad side of this, so let's get to the good side:
Good 1 - People generally join rooms pretty fast and even creating a new room it's only at most like 2 minutes to get a party unless you pick a really bad ID for what you're making or something, and people are joining close to 24/7 as well but of course somewhat faster at some times of the day than others.
Good 2 - Feels rewarding gaining lots of stuff really fast, and is very helpful for making progress and getting lots of good items and experience.
Good 3 - Quests do promote good coordination and just a good time working together to defeat the enemies.
Good 4 - No ways to fail quests/anyone is capable of playing all the quests at least.
Good 5 - Honestly the quests are just pretty feel-good and fun for the most part.
Good 6 - It's a much more fun way to hunt Vivienne than normal. Now, this might seem like a weird point, but I really wanted one and the way to hunt them without this is to just do the first room of RT or LSR on A10 and scare the rappies and hope they drop one, and it can get one about every 4 hours which is far faster than any other method I've seen outside of this event. And it was just so boring and terrible doing that all day, but this event has enough rappies per minute to not need to do that. And now that I have a good Vivienne I'll probably never bother with that tedious method again, so it should make the game playable by me in a more enjoyable way even after the event ends as I won't have to bother with that anymore.
What I'd like to see in the future of the event (some ideas, not necessarily like must haves or anything)
Idea 1 - add the bosses. Like how in the non-anniv months you get to fight the bosses, they could be added to the ends of their areas during the event as well. Although that'd put a big slowdown on reaching milestones (although they could be tuned to account for this), and it'd take forever to build up the hbr boost (although that could also be tuned special just for this event).
Idea 2 - adjust the quests a bit. Right now they're just overly nice and just spawn enemies in large groups where you can easily kill each group, and has no traps or anything even attempting to slow you down. So what if there were a few traps here and there? They could be another thing to work around by having a Lieutenant Mantle on the team or an android or whatever. If handled properly they don't even really slow a team down, but you can kinda tell they're not really likely official quests or anything given there's not even 1 trap anywhere in any of them. But honestly it's just an idea and I don't really care to see it happen but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
Idea 3 - If you really want a way to prevent people from just holding out until more milestones, this would be it. Add a minimum kill count or hbr rank necessary to be affected by the milestones. As in like you personally need 250 kills per milestone or you don't benefit from it or something. Then you'd at least have to play enough to keep up with the milestone or they wouldn't affect you, so you might as well start working on your kill counter. Only drawback here is a lot of them are part of the party, not just you individually, so like rare enemy rate or that kind of thing or if playing on the classic drop style it wouldn't make any sense for them to only affect part of the party, but it could go by party total killcount or something idk, I'm sure there's probably some good way to do it. Or milestones could just not be any of the things that don't work and just make it stuff like your dar boost, your rdr boost, your exp boost, your meseta boost, or your photon sphere.
Idea 4 - to combat the aforementioned bad about it being easier to get stuff from lilies, torrs, or Kondrieu outside of the MAE, what if you built up the RDR first in this hbr instead of the DAR so that it at least helped with everything? Right now DAR boost does literally nothing on enemies that already always drop something (as far as I know, could be wrong), and making it so you started with at least some RDR would guarantee at least that you'd have a good chance of getting what you were hunting somewhere in the MAE (except boss items and few other things) rather than looking at finding outside quests to hunt them. Arguably even all hbr should work this way is dar scales really weirdly with only boosting some enemies and even then, some can only be boosted a little if they have high drop rates. It seems unbalanced to me that with the current crazy high dar, you see tons of items like Daylight Scar drop as ep2 Baranz only has 25 base dar so it has some gigantic boost, but a lot of other rares aren't boosted nearly as much. So it's just a ridiculously good time to be hunting your daylight scars so if you want one you better go for it now.
Overall/conclusion
I find this to be a pretty good event for the most part. Honestly most of the negatives aren't that big of a deal and it seems people have been playing pretty heavily and consistently ever day of the event thus far so barely anyone seems to be holding out until the end of the event or discovering they should just do non-MAE quests or anything. And actually, those other quests might take so long to get joiners that they'd likely end up being worse anyways. A very solid event, but of course still not perfect. I'd rate it a 4 out of 5.
Let's start with the bad first.
Bad 1 - what to spend badges on. Almost everything other than addslots, item tickets, TP mats, heart key, and photon sphere seems just dreadfully overcost and not worth getting unless you really want one of the costmetics. I haven't even looked for the scavenger but I think the anniv topic said they removed him, but he'd pretty much be a waste of badges at this point anyways as there are tons of good scavenger weapons out there already anyway. I also didn't know about coins the first like 200 times I did a PW quest so I've always been way behind on TP mats so I sat there trading almost all my badges for TP mats and it also kinda sucks you can only do 1 at a time as getting a few hundred is quite tedious.
Bad 2 - the piggybackers. Now, I don't even think these are a thing, but in theory, it may actualy be best to play other quests for a lot of the hunts and not even do the MAE quests and just let the players of the MAE quests build up the boosts for you to get your rares just in other quests that aren't even adding to the killcount. Now why is this? Well, TE still has a lot more hildes than MAE Forest, so if you want a HP or FS from the forest, TE is still going to be a better option. Sure you won't get the hbr dar boost but it doesn't even do anything there anyways. Similarly, Maximum Attack 4th stage is still better for cave lilies, Cal's still better for temple lilies, and rare lilies not affected by the dar boost either. So a true item seeker of these rares might still be best off not even playing the MAE quests at all, which could really hurt the killcount for everyone. Oh and even going for lame or HS I believe you can still get the most per minute if you do PoD during the rare enemy week of the event rather than doing any of the MAE quests but it'll depend on what the rest of the milestone bonuses are. Now again the good news is few to no people seem to be doing this but it could be a thing but all in all not really that bad. But I do wonder why we get the boosts even outside of the MAE quests.
Bad 3 - the depressingness of seeing that the event gives fewer rewards each year. Stuff like photon sphere and heart key keep costing more, and gold badges seem far rarer than they used to be as well. However, it seems the drop rate not being reduced the more players you have like it was in the old days along with just a lot more people being stronger than back then allowing you to beat stuff more quickly does kinda counterbalance this and it also fights inflation so that maybe it's not even that bad, but it has bothered me before and is kinda a mind**** sometimes. But eventually I come to realize that I don't even really need more PDs that much as I already have my best weapons maxed out anyway, and it's far more important to get even better weapons than to give only slightly useful power ups to my existing weapons so at the end of the day, getting lower photon drop value isn't the end of the world as it's mainly about dar, rdr, and rare enemy rate to me now. It also feels like gold badges have been downgraded into simply slightly worse clones of PDs, just causing stupid trades until they're in groups of 99 to be turned into photon spheres and serve little other purpose. They could almost just be removed and replaced with PDs at this point.
Bad 4 - Losing hurts more than gaining. As in, when the event ends, the game is going to feel like a waste of time then as you'll gain stuff way slower than you were gaining stuff during the event. People can also be burned out and having a party with randoms may just be infeasible for a while after the event.
Bad 5 - the quests are somewhat too short and easy tbh. You can spend too long searching for teammates to the point where it'd have been faster to just solo the quest. I've found I can solo MAE Forest in only 6 minutes (given you use a RAmarl with zerk needle and good 100 native hs, could probably be even faster if I were higher level) but with a party it takes 5 minutes. So you better be able to get a party quick or it'd have been faster to just solo. If hunting anything like FS or HP it doesn't even lower your chances to solo given your teammates probably have no rdr boost anyways. It also doesn't lower your badge or PD chances as those don't seem to be affected by drop rate, either. So honestly I'm probably going to solo the Forest like 100 times once we get to rare enemy week and I'm not that excited about it but I'd really like a better FS.
Bad 6 - Quests still seemingly completely unchanged from 2nd anniv and are just reused again. Don't feel new at all anymore.
Bad 7 - So many quests with different IDs being the best it can force you to change characters a whole lot if you always want to play quests on their best IDs.
Alright I think that about covers the bad side of this, so let's get to the good side:
Good 1 - People generally join rooms pretty fast and even creating a new room it's only at most like 2 minutes to get a party unless you pick a really bad ID for what you're making or something, and people are joining close to 24/7 as well but of course somewhat faster at some times of the day than others.
Good 2 - Feels rewarding gaining lots of stuff really fast, and is very helpful for making progress and getting lots of good items and experience.
Good 3 - Quests do promote good coordination and just a good time working together to defeat the enemies.
Good 4 - No ways to fail quests/anyone is capable of playing all the quests at least.
Good 5 - Honestly the quests are just pretty feel-good and fun for the most part.
Good 6 - It's a much more fun way to hunt Vivienne than normal. Now, this might seem like a weird point, but I really wanted one and the way to hunt them without this is to just do the first room of RT or LSR on A10 and scare the rappies and hope they drop one, and it can get one about every 4 hours which is far faster than any other method I've seen outside of this event. And it was just so boring and terrible doing that all day, but this event has enough rappies per minute to not need to do that. And now that I have a good Vivienne I'll probably never bother with that tedious method again, so it should make the game playable by me in a more enjoyable way even after the event ends as I won't have to bother with that anymore.
What I'd like to see in the future of the event (some ideas, not necessarily like must haves or anything)
Idea 1 - add the bosses. Like how in the non-anniv months you get to fight the bosses, they could be added to the ends of their areas during the event as well. Although that'd put a big slowdown on reaching milestones (although they could be tuned to account for this), and it'd take forever to build up the hbr boost (although that could also be tuned special just for this event).
Idea 2 - adjust the quests a bit. Right now they're just overly nice and just spawn enemies in large groups where you can easily kill each group, and has no traps or anything even attempting to slow you down. So what if there were a few traps here and there? They could be another thing to work around by having a Lieutenant Mantle on the team or an android or whatever. If handled properly they don't even really slow a team down, but you can kinda tell they're not really likely official quests or anything given there's not even 1 trap anywhere in any of them. But honestly it's just an idea and I don't really care to see it happen but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
Idea 3 - If you really want a way to prevent people from just holding out until more milestones, this would be it. Add a minimum kill count or hbr rank necessary to be affected by the milestones. As in like you personally need 250 kills per milestone or you don't benefit from it or something. Then you'd at least have to play enough to keep up with the milestone or they wouldn't affect you, so you might as well start working on your kill counter. Only drawback here is a lot of them are part of the party, not just you individually, so like rare enemy rate or that kind of thing or if playing on the classic drop style it wouldn't make any sense for them to only affect part of the party, but it could go by party total killcount or something idk, I'm sure there's probably some good way to do it. Or milestones could just not be any of the things that don't work and just make it stuff like your dar boost, your rdr boost, your exp boost, your meseta boost, or your photon sphere.
Idea 4 - to combat the aforementioned bad about it being easier to get stuff from lilies, torrs, or Kondrieu outside of the MAE, what if you built up the RDR first in this hbr instead of the DAR so that it at least helped with everything? Right now DAR boost does literally nothing on enemies that already always drop something (as far as I know, could be wrong), and making it so you started with at least some RDR would guarantee at least that you'd have a good chance of getting what you were hunting somewhere in the MAE (except boss items and few other things) rather than looking at finding outside quests to hunt them. Arguably even all hbr should work this way is dar scales really weirdly with only boosting some enemies and even then, some can only be boosted a little if they have high drop rates. It seems unbalanced to me that with the current crazy high dar, you see tons of items like Daylight Scar drop as ep2 Baranz only has 25 base dar so it has some gigantic boost, but a lot of other rares aren't boosted nearly as much. So it's just a ridiculously good time to be hunting your daylight scars so if you want one you better go for it now.
Overall/conclusion
I find this to be a pretty good event for the most part. Honestly most of the negatives aren't that big of a deal and it seems people have been playing pretty heavily and consistently ever day of the event thus far so barely anyone seems to be holding out until the end of the event or discovering they should just do non-MAE quests or anything. And actually, those other quests might take so long to get joiners that they'd likely end up being worse anyways. A very solid event, but of course still not perfect. I'd rate it a 4 out of 5.
