Rant - Holiday Monopoly

Holidays are nice. Your everyday routine of daily life gets spruced up for a day with something eventful and usually something pleasant. These events are usually held within a community of people to partake in traditional activities that is supposed to be fun. However, there have been greedy communities out there that seems to try to monopolize the holidays to themselves by competing with other communities for people's participation, and these greedy communities tend to be online, avatar forum sites, like Gaia Online.

Sure, there may be other communities out there that are worse about this, but from my experience, a lot of these sites have been degrading the holidays from some pleasant surprises, to mind-numbingly tedious activities designed to take a long time to complete, over the past few years. Why change things from something perhaps fun and pleasant, to something so time-consuming, yet boring? Well, perhaps the developers wanted to try something different to keep the event interesting and not just the same thing as previous years. Maybe it was done to balance the supply and demand of the items given in these events for a reasonable market for them in the economy. But the end result of all this is people spending most of their time on the site, working towards a goal of getting some items with limited availability.

For some people, this might not be a problem. Perhaps a too-easy-to-complete event would leave people unsatisfied. However, there are certainly people who may be too busy to spend hours on some tedious activity for an item. Some people may think that they can just give up on the item if they don't wish to put time and effort into getting them, but is that how a holiday event should be handled? Whether if you have the time to sink for a reward, or to have fun as a community? It certainly wouldn't be fair to those that may be too busy to simply not have a holiday event because it demanded several of their hours that they didn't have.

That's several colors too many...

From the site's side, there are advantages of having a tedious event like that of Gaia Online's Easter 2012 (and previous years') event. This is an easy way to boost artificial site hits by having people refresh their pages and posting spam many times for items. Provided people aren't running script or ad blockers, each load will get a few ad views on the site as well. On top of this, they would also be reducing the amount of time people spend on other sites by monopolizing people's time on their own site as well, if competition is even considered to be a problem. But what does that say about the site? That's just trading away the quality of entertainment of the users for its own, economic growth. Way to turn holidays into businesses.

So what would be the best way to handle holiday events? Who knows what would be the BEST best way, but here are some suggestions that may be a better solution for things I've talked about that I've highlighted.

• The developers and coders may want to do something new if they care to design something new and different. If so, that's cool. If there are ideas, let them do some interesting things. Just have them design it with something that's completable in a single sitting if possible. Otherwise, it goes beyond the holiday fun territory to the tedious bullshit territory.
• If the economy of the item is an issue, set a max limit to how many you can get, while following the tip above about something that's do-able in a single sitting. That way, anyone participating will have enough for themselves, and with a set limit, the item won't flood the markets as badly. Be wary of mule accounts though... 
• With the above two tips shortening the activity and with a max limit, it would definitely make it easier for people to "complete" the event by reaching the max, if people wish to. So what should people do if they feel like they don't have enough activities to do? Give them an optional, side activity with no limit, but with a smaller scale reward... or a slower method of getting more of the items as an alternative method of getting the event items.
• There are plenty of ways of artificially boosting site hits. A holiday event may be a good opportunity to do so, but don't milk the holiday to the point where people have to reload the page nearly a thousand times to find what they need.
• Monopolization of people's time and attention is another thing you shouldn't have to do through the abuse of holiday events. If you honestly want to keep people on your site, either lure them with good content or entertainment, and maintain a high quality community, and not through addiction. That's what MMORPGs are for. ... Not that I agree with MMORPGs doing that either, but.. yeah.

The above summarized would be to have a main event that is short, with a limit to how many times you can participate in for the full reward, while running an optional, side event that is slower as an alternative way to get more of the event rewards. Otherwise, stay true to what the site is about, and polish on what it focuses on, unless you don't care about people's quality of entertainment they have on your site.

That is a good guideline of how I would run a holiday event. There are many ways of how this can be implemented, as the guideline is fairly flexible. The important part is how the rewarding system is handled.

I wonder how well this guideline would affect certain MMOs, and... I don't think I can see it working very well with Team Fortress 2, honestly. >_> But with MMORPGs, implementing simple quests following the guideline wouldn't be too bad.