Turn in X amount of snow for a present. Solves the ridiculous lag issues. Eliminates frustration. Promotes activity rather than camping. Easy to implement.
The lag has been happening even without the snowblower...and we've been doing what we can to try and fix that. I wouldn't mind trading in snow for presents, but it's ridiculously easy for farming classes to get more snow than non. There'd have to be some reasonable limit or solution to that.
I'm against turning in <x> snow for a present because it gives farming jobs like mages a great advantage. What I suggest is having one present a day or every 12 hours, simply for logging on and the minimum level to turn in that present will be 50.
Truth be told, most of the presents are obtained not by people who actively donate snow, but mostly by campers. Considering the amount of presents that are given out per snowman, it's like 50-60? (not too sure) per 1000 snow, this is very minimal, and is in a mathematical sense about 20 snow per present. But most of the presents are just leeched off by the campers. It would be nice if we could trade in 100 snow per present, but lower the rates of expensive goods and add some power elixars/etc. in there.
I've suggested every 6 hours because as it is we get at least 4 snowblowers average per day, sometimes a bit more depending. I'd want to make it at least equal to what it is now, equal chance to get the items.
As soon as the presents drop, the server dies. I don't know why or how, but for two-three minutes after the presents drop (probably until they expire) the server is completely unusable. A snowman spawned during our zak run, and as soon as it died our entire squad d/ced as well (I had a couple of characters in the event map at the time to confirm).
We did a handful of "ninja runs" last night when there were only 200-ish people online, and only ~50 people in the event map. The server handled that just fine, but when it comes to prime time (when most of the snowmen are up anyway) it's just goes to hell. +1 to sila/christine/Ty's suggestion.
Totally cool with 1 present a day, or any other number. Right now I'm getting 0 because I CBA to deal with this snowman shit. But pls don't take our mittens and snowballs away because they're awesome. New suggestion: X amount of snow takes you to a solo map with a snowman that drops 1 present.
The single boss map is a good idea, IMO. It would at least require some effort from the player's side, as opposed to the idea of @Sila to just give people presents every 6 hours or so.
We have still been trying different things. Our latest attempt was to disable all skills on the snowman map to try and prevent users from d/c'ing because of client sided lag, which in turn would mean that there are less players relogging so should cause less server lag. We have also noticed that there is a lot of server lag that occurs even when there is not a snowman spawned, and sometimes the snowman spawns and gets killed without there being any lag whatsoever, therefore the snowman event is likely not the main cause of the lag. So we are still looking into other options at the moment without having to change the event drastically.
Hopefully we will find a solution to the lag that doesn't include getting rid of the snowman & snowblower. My own impression so far is that the snowman/snowblower event is contributing to the lag rather than being the root cause of it. However, if we do have to disable this event because of its contribution to the lag, I have a suggestion to make the event as fair as possible to as many people as possible. Obviously we need some kind of level limit to avoid people attempting to use mules to mass-farm red presents, but at the same time, the snowblower event was intended to be fun for all. What I'd like to propose as a possible compromise, should the snowblower have to be disabled, is that the event is tiered. 1) Anyone who is level 30 or over would be able to gain one Red Present per day from turning the ingredients for the festive feast into Mom and Dad. This would be simple to code, we'd just need to add the red presents to the rewards given by Mom and Dad. This would be automatically set to a minimum level of 30 anyway, that being the level you need to be to do the Mom and Dad festive feast quest. 2) Additionally, anyone level 50 or above would also be able to gain a Red Present every x number of hours from the Maple Admin (for example, once every 8 hours). Whether or not certain items would need to be exchanged in return for the Red Presents is something that could be discussed - no reason why the Maple Admin shouldn't partake of Mom and Dad's rather oddball festive feast too, I guess! Anyway, this is just one possible solution, should it become absolutely necessary to disable the snowblower.
Even if the snow blower isn't necessarily the only cause of the lag it obviously contributes a lot. I'm in favor of making x amount of snow exchangeable for a red present and have it repeatable every x hours. From a game design standpoint collecting snow and working together to get a reward is much more interesting but in reality it's just a bunch of mule accounts standing afk on the snow blower map waiting for presents and a lot of people cc-ing and overloading the server. The server isn't entirely stable without the snow blower but it certainly is in an even worse state with it.
I've been around for two snowblower explosions today and there was much less lag when it went off. In fact, I only d/ced once in the very beginning. I've d/ced three or four times outside of it though, when the snowblower was only at 500 snow or so for a few hours.
I'm no longer having any dcs and only a tolerable degree of lag due to the blower. I've done 7 snowmen since the last restart. @Kaizoku the standing afk thing isn't really a problem anymore since pets are disabled in the map. I'm generally against a "hand in x amount of snow for a presen." I would hate to see snow, which is really a community thing even despite the criticisms devolve into just another event etc that is bought and sold. I don't hate the idea that turning in the etcs would become a gamble, though. Perhaps that could be used in the next event to roll around.
Have the snowblower event minus the snow monster. The people that donate snow get put on a ranked list of people who donated the most snow. When it gets to capacity, the top 50 (or whatever) people get prizes, and the blower resets. Make it work for people offline. Problem solved? I'll even code it for you.
As seen above, the snowblower is not the cause of the lag. Why disable it instead of finding the root cause of the lag?
