Please do not bring back/bump old suggestion threads of mine without permission!

(previous title: Make Events Difficult Again)
Tldr at bottom!

I fully anticipate this to be an unpopular suggestion, but I feel strongly enough about it that I'm posting it anyways. Please read the entire suggestion before you no-support.

Lioden popularity has skyrocketed exponentially in the past 2 years due to it going viral on TikTok. This is something that the admin team has demonstrably not prepared for, and it is exceedingly obvious with how the event tiers have been going.

The current event tiers feel very unrewarding and provide very little challenge. Previously, the community worked together the entire month to unlock the final tiers and would only unlock the final tiers near the last week of the month. Last month, we had fully unlocked everything by the first week. I get that people enjoy having everything unlocked early, but there isn't any challenge to it. People in chat mentioned that it brought the lioden community together to work to open the tiers this early, but I strongly disagree. There's no challenge to unlock anything when we've already got everything unlocked by day 8. It's not that we're working together on the tiers, it's that the tiers haven't been adjusted to the MASSIVE increase in the active userbase. It's EXCEPTIONALLY bad this month, when the tiers unlock more snuh-based encounters. Previously, the snuh would slowly increase over the month in a reasonable fashion. Now, on day 6 of December, we have already almost unlocked the final snow tier. I understand that people like having access to the event shop, but I feel like it's taking away from the events to have them be so easy nowadays. When I first started playing, we REALLY had to work together to unlock the tiers, even worrying about getting them unlocked by the end of the month. One time, the admins even had to MANUALLY unlock the last tier, because we didn't make it on time! Now they're practically free. There's no challenge, and it's NOT because of our exceptional teamwork skills, it's because the tiers are too easy for the number of active players we have.

I feel that the event tiers going forward should have their numbers readjusted to maintain the challenge of opening them. As it stands, the non-storyline events feel incredibly grindy because we open everything in the first week and spend the rest of the month doing fuckall. Increasing the tier requirements would properly pace the event throughout the ENTIRE month, rather than just getting everything done the first week and twiddling our lion-thumbs for the next three. The storyline events are properly paced throughout the month because they have set times where you unlock the next chapters, not just how fast we can shit out our butts.

Again. I UNDERSTAND that everyone wants the event shop opened as soon as possible. But I feel that it is negatively impacting the fun of the lioden events to have them go by this quickly. I miss the days where we worried about getting the tiers to unlock before the month was over because THAT was when the lioden community really came together, not opening all the tiers in the first week. I feel that adjusting the numbers to give the community a proper challenge would fix how grindy the non-story based events go, and it would also allow the artists more time to work on the mid-month update because they wouldn't need to worry about the tiers already being open.

It's the first week of the event. We don't need all the tiers open yet. Relax and let the event take the entire month rather than being able to grind it out in the first few days.

Another possible solution would be to lock the tiers so they can't be unlocked before a certain day, similar to how the novellas work. Tier 1 can be unlocked at any time, but tier 2 requires it to be at least the second week of the month, for example.

Tl;dr:
The events are no longer paced through the entire month, leaving the rest of the month feeling empty and just about grinding. Event tiers should be increased to account for the massive increase in active users, or a system implemented to pace the tiers across the month more similarly to how novellas work.