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Pie Hard Postmortem
Hey everyone, been a bit since my last update. icon_sweatdrop.gif For this one I wanted to give everyone an update on the first half of our summer event what worked and what didn't and provide some info on what to expect for part two. So first the stats:

Participants: 46,769
Gold Sunk: 512,377,600 Gg

Participants are measured as people who bought at least one pie. So as a gold sink this event was not great. We knew this first half wouldn't appeal to the largest audience, it had a lot of characters that many newer users wouldn't know about and of course not everyone has a lot of gold. In addition we lacked a strong motivator for people to continue participating. We thought the characters and competition element would be enough of a driver however clearly not xp

Overall I'd say this event was "OK", by far not our best, not our worst either. Major complaints we (the events team) saw were things like you guys not feeling the items were up to par for the cost, achievements to hard, losing the link to the event in the header. For those that felt that the achievements were to difficult or unfair to obtain... This is a hard one to measure since achievements are very much subjective. Personally I'm of the opinion they should be difficult and not all should necessarily be known from the onset. (hidden achievements) For me achievements are as much about striving for something as they are about being at the right place at the right time. I understand not everyone will agree with this, and I will always have easier achievements for people to achieve in events, however don't be surprised to find hidden or rare achievements as well in the future. Regarding the items, the events team watched the feedback closely and will bear it in mind for future gold sink events. This will always be a bit of a hit or miss process though as we don't always know how items will be received.

We had some bumps in the road with the header icon. We expected to lose the header image but not the icon that linked to the event. Sadly we had to remove it for a time for other header elements. At the time of removal I was too busy with other projects to add a new link to the event in the header, eventually I was able to squeeze it in to the World navigation. In the future we plan to fix this whole problem by simply adding all future events to the top level site navigation. (ex. "Home", "My Gaia", "Shops" )

The emotes seemed universally liked, which is great as this update was something we had been wanting to do for a while. At the end of the second half of the event they will be opened up to all forums, and hopefully down the line into PMs and guilds.

Narumi Misuhara
Sponsorships & Events Lead

Even Rina's apron was more workable than the event items. There really wasn't any incentive to participate unless you were a die hard NPC fan like we are. The stats don't surprise me.