The basic concept of the event was sound but the event felt very much "pay to win". During the event I won a total of 12 chests (5 jeweled and 7 silver) and bought an additional 2 jeweled chests to show my support and only ended up with 1 epic piece of gear. Additionally I did not even end up with a full set of rare gear on both of the new crusaders which was extremely frustrating since this was the only time the gear would be available (until next year, hopefully). Even with warp usage and a 40% jeweled chest conversion rate I felt that getting full gear on my new crusaders could only be realistically achieved by buying gambling boxes until I managed to either run out of money or got lucky enough to get the gear I needed.

Suggestions to improve events

1. Reduce cool down. In other Codename games the cool down for event gates are 20 hours, having a gate of 25 hours (3,000) tickets felt excessive. A 2,400 ticket gate would have given more opportunities for repeated attempts to improve gear while being in line with player expectations from other games (to include the game this one evolved from). This would have the advantage of giving newer/more casual players access to gear while still letting power players speed through using warps and/or purchasing chests

2. Adjust the quality of drops. There was nothing more frustrating in a limited timed event as waiting for 25 hours, playing free play and getting a common piece of gear from a silver box or getting an uncommon from a jeweled chest. I would propose eliminating the common gear from the silver event boxes (only drop uncommon and rare) and eliminating the uncommon gear from the jeweled event boxes (only drop rare and epic). This would only apply to the limited time gear, the frequency and type of drops for trinkets and buffs would remain the same.

3. Premium Items. Obviously if the drop rate was adjusted, this would affect the sales of chests, so instead of simply selling chests (which should be continued), add event specific items. This could be something like a Golden Epic "Immaculate Platinum Rubber Chicken" (+150% to gold) or event limited buffs such as Tardis (+16h of gold and XP), Zerg Rush (Monster spawn speed +100%), Midas (Gold Found +50%) or Diablo (75% DPS to all monsters). To help maintain game balance and to prevent hording, buffs should expire 3 - 5 days after the event ends.

That being said, again the overall event was fun despite the flaws I perceived in its basic execution. For a first event it was well managed and with the exception of the database issue about halfway through the event it went very smoothly.

Thank you for your consideration.