Event Raffle

This is not a suggestion that can be implemented for this event, but I think it's something I'd like for future events to make it more bearable.

The cost for each roll is too high with a high chance of no payout, which makes rolling actively painful and creates negative enjoyment for playing the event. I think it would be a lot more fun to be able to roll a lot more even if the payouts are equally worthless.

I played the entire month long event and saved up enough for only 5 rolls today, 3 days before the end of the event (I have enough pearls to exchange for more rolls later, but I assume many casual players will also have as much trouble as I did reaching that amount). I received 3 hats, firecrackers, and a 1% CSS. This is probably expected, but since the cost of the rolls was so high it made me feel like I just got slapped in the face after working all month to accumulate enough cubes for the measly 5 rolls.

If the cost of rolling was just let's say...5 ice cubes, with a 70% chance of getting something in the same tier as ice cream pops, 25% chance of getting something like teleport cokes, 4.99% chance of getting something like capes and chairs, and 0.01% chance of getting something legendary (or scaled to whatever the existing chances are because I have no idea how to balance things), I think it wouldn't feel as bad to roll. Rolling a couple times every few days and getting mostly things on the ice cream pops and teleport cokes tier items just feels unlucky, it doesn't feel like you saved up a months worth of resources just to get a couple NX hats you'll never wear and immediately recycle for -40 ice cubes.

I get the event is just added fun and you're not supposed to be guaranteed to get something valuable out of it or the game market would crash, but the current difficulty of accumulating ice cubes for a player who doesn't grind 50 hours a week along with the cost of a roll makes it negatively fun to play the event. I don't care if I get nothing, just adjust the roll costs so that it doesn't feel like I'm wasting my entire life savings.

For comparison, Gach tickets are fun to use. (The following drop rates are somewhat made up, I do not track the amount of items I pick up, but you should get the point.) I can just spend an hour grinding somewhere casually for some cards or quests and I can get like 1-2 gach tickets. Most of these tickets yield a weapon I immediately npc for like 50k mesos or a scroll I just toss on the floor, but it doesn't actively hurt to roll. I've never gotten an item worth more than a few mil from my 4 months of playing ML, but that's fine. On the other for hand, grinding an hour in non efficient ways yields me maybe 25 ice boxes which seem to give 2 cubes at a ~10% rate, so an estimated average of 10 hours of grinding monsters to get the chance to roll ONCE!, where I'll probably just get a NX hat I toss straight into the recycler. This is demoralizing to say the least...

As an extra plus, allowing more rolls normalizes the tiers of items people get. It becomes less likely that a user gets only the lowest tier of items and they're more likely to be able to get a few of the uncommon items, which pads out the feeling of only getting hot garbage.

I can see the possibility that making the rolls cheaper will make it harder for the large population of hard core grinders who will accumulate thousands of ice cubes to exchange for rolls. A possible fix for this is to make it easy to exchange it for 10x, 50x, 100x or however many increments of boxes that they can just bind to a key and hold down to open. Presumably they're likely to get the same small set of (stackable) worthless items, so they don't have to clear out their inventories too often.

I don't know...perhaps there are reasons for keeping it how it is now, I'm not a game designer. I just wanted to point out that the current system is incredibly frustrating for the more casual players.

 

1) That doesn't give that many ice cubes either. It takes 100 trees to get 6 rolls. With 10 minutes minimum per tree, it takes 16 hours of the community constantly spamming trees to reach that point and no one has the sunshine to maintain that.
2) What's the point of playing if all you do is afk at tree? I don't think that's the point of the event either.
3) I never said I was actively grinding the event. I was saying that the suggesting that the only way to get any reasonable number of rolls is by grinding the boxes for the ice cubes. Relying solely on trees won't get you very far either. The point is regardless of the method of getting cubes (boxes, dailies, trees), they're all incredibly tedious for very few rolls. And I'm not even complaining about the contents of the roll, I'm just saying that having a month's worth of effort wiped in 3 seconds feels like a slap in the face.

 

I see your point. I do agree it was way better than the previous event where it was an actual chore to participate. This one felt way more relaxed. It was definitely a great event for those who wanted to kick back and chill out after the previous event.

And don't get me wrong, I think this was a pretty good event. I enjoyed the boss rush party quest. My friends and I started off the event dying to Manon and ended it timing how fast we could clear Leviathan. We had a lot of fun screaming at each other in Discord to log on for the tree. I even managed to lower the amount of time it took me to complete the jump quest from 15 min to 3 min.

The only part I'm complaining about is the ending. The results of everyone's month long work was probably a measly single digit number if rolls unless you grinded for cubes or lived in Maple. All that effort resulted in just 3 seconds of disappointment. I ended up getting something good from the raffle, and so did a lot of my friends. They probably had the probabilities turned up, but I still stand by my opinion that it would've felt better for the probabilities to be turned further down and to get to roll more. The end result may be that I might not have gotten that valuable item, but I think I would've left satisfied.

Outside of this summer event and the last anniversary event, the only other event I played was the previous summer event briefly. I remember the boxes dropped everywhere. We got so much bait and my friends and I would sit together and just roll for 10 min every now and then, laughing about the trash we got. I recall I got so many duck tubes that event, but the duck tubes I got didn't feel like burdens like the NX hats from this event. I just tossed them out without a care and happily played on. I enjoyed that feeling and perhaps you may not agree, which is fine. I just needed to share my opinion somewhere so perhaps the GMs can take it into account for future events. I enjoy the community they have built and hope they can continue making it better.