Note: If you have additional suggestions, I would be more than happy to add them, credited to you, to the main post. Thank you.

The Issue: Fragmented Community, Stressed Staff, Constant Adjustments
Every month, the Lioden community has the same argument: event tiers are messed up or different or too high or too low. Changes are prompted, resulting in malcontent from the community. This displeasure is aimed at the staff, who surely believe that they’re doing the right thing. That’s understandable. Sometimes you have to make changes that are unpopular for the good of the community as a whole.

But, at some point, we’re just making the same mistakes and having the same argument about tier requirements to unlock each shop every month. When the staff feels like shops are being unlocked too quickly, the tiers are increased. It’s hard to estimate the output of the player base, especially pre-empting the month in question, so estimations are often wrong.

When these estimations are wrong (which is often), adjustments are made that often upset a sizeable portion of the players, and for good reason! Players don’t like feeling that their hard work to unlock a tier doesn’t mean anything if the staff don’t want tiers to open before certain dates.

The Fix: Implement Date-Based Tier Unlocking
Currently, tiers are based on player participation. We have to kill a certain number of poachers or donate a certain number of eggs or defeat a certain number of rabid NPCs. It’s not easy to estimate how many players will be playing for any specific month, as interest in certain events and items varies widely, so setting these goals is difficult in the first place.

I would like to propose utilizing date-based tier unlocking instead. Let’s take April for example:
Tier 1 of the Bunny Shop and Egg Den would open on April 7th.
Tier 2 of the Bunny Shop and Egg Den would open on April 14th.
Tier 3 of the Bunny Shop and Egg Den would open on April 21st.

That gives players a full 10 days to enjoy the last tier and prepare for next month’s event, while spacing out tier openings throughout the month, giving everyone something to look forward and removing the anxiety that comes with checking tier progress every morning and wondering if we’ll even get to tier 3 this year.

Retaining Community Engagement and “Earning” Rewards: The Issue
Some opponents of this idea might assert that it is the duty of the community to “earn” their rewards in the shop by participating actively in the event to kill x number of NPCs or gather x number of eggs. Although I do not personally agree with this and would argue that forcing the community to “earn” rewards this way is actually forcing them to earn their rewards twice (communal unlocking of tiers AND earning the currency to purchase items in those tiers as an individual), I have a few suggestions regarding keeping the community engaged and actively interacting with events.

Retaining Community Engagement: Fix Suggestion - Quest Completion
With date-based unlocking implemented, staff members will no longer need to worry about focusing on estimating user activity for the upcoming month. This frees up some time to focus on implementing new quests and storylines for each month. I know I personally love the little quests and stories that come with certain months now, like Wenet in April and Angels vs. Demons in October. I think they’re great!

Rather than forcing players to donate their currency or kill a certain number of NPCs as a community before they can access the shop, force them to complete a certain portion of the event storyline.

For example, in April, players who haven’t completed “Crafting Bones” by April 7th cannot access the first tier of the shop or egg den until they complete “Crafting Bones”. Players who haven’t completed “Crafting Fur” by April 14th cannot access the second tier of the shop or egg den until they complete “Crafting Fur.” Players who haven’t completed “Carving the Future” by April 21st cannot access the third tier of the shop or egg den until they complete “Carving the Future.”

Additionally, this removes the very troublesome prospect of donating your event currency to access event shops, where you have to purchase items with event currency.

It gives casual players a chance to access all the shops as long as they actively engage with an event and its lore. It encourages the staff to add quests and lore to months that do not currently have them, which would be great! For those months, I would currently simply suggest using the “Date-Based Unlocking” system until quests can be added.

Conclusions and Addendums
If anyone has any additional or alternate suggestions or specific suggestions for any month, I’ll gladly add them here with a credit to the user who suggested them! If my suggestion is a little too extreme for you, please consider this suggestion , made by Heda RedBox.

Argryo (84746) on Questing Requirements
"If they'd make all storylines able to be completed within 3-4 days [I think it was like that with Laharu? A few parts you could do in a row, but a couple that require a day's wait] if you roll later in the month, but still not within a single day's time [gotta get a bit of activity, even if it's once a week!], then that'd be a perfect and really cute solution from my point of view! ^^

An extra 'unlocking the shop' series of quests way, way down the line, once every month has its storyline, could be an end goal; help the April rabbit mom find her babies to access her wares! Chart out the flooding to find the Flood Pit otter! Find the shaman lost in visions to access the Shaman Shop! Etc etc etc
And for more Storyline-related ideas, you could, say... Win a series of lil' scuffles with Nirah to access his goods!! Try your best to impress that Groupie who mans the shop with V'Kai's help or Vash's advice! Track down the chimps of the Carrion shop by following Laharu's trail!

I dunno, storyline unlocks could be really, really cute and fun, so long as they don't have too many Rollover requirements. ;D"

Moonie (138561) on Rollover Rewards for More Active Players
"Perhaps daily loggers could get extra perks for completing daily quests consecutively as well? Like the rollover where doing it for so many days in a row earns you a Lucky Foot, Vulture Egg, or a bit of SB? That way there would be more incentive to complete them each day but it wouldn't be a necessity."

Heda Vampiric (56702) on Quest Completion
"To note, on the quests, and Argryo touched on this, but if the quests are required to access the shop when it unlocks, people should be able to do more than one a day if they are behind.

1. So if a user is on every day, and do their daily quest without missing one, they only get one a day (because they are not behind), but if someone didn't start playing until say, day 6, they could do up to 6 quests that day to catch up - this way players who are only able to log once or twice a week aren't barred from features because of things they can't control.

However, this would only be the case if a # of quests are required (ex: Do 7 quests to unlock tier 1), but Finn has mentioned specific quests so this next suggestion fits better:

2. Another solution is to prioritize quests. So if you don't start playing until, say, day 28, you can do all 3 required quests that day to access the features, but you have to wait until the next day to be given a normal (radial) quest. This keeps users from being barred from features but also helps put worth into logging daily for radials."