Presents.... (you'll understand)

[Lime]

Hey! So if there is to be any sort of like xmas island or xmas event this year with the same presents for all players who get like a cane or whatever systems have been used in the past...

I can kind of remember on one of my first christmas islands / present events on cv, that either being 2018>2019 or 2019>2020 that there was a system where you deposited say, a stack of named items made by you, with a message on ; something like 'Merry Christmas from <name>', and other nice presents like diamonds and cool items amongst the 'Christmas List' system where you wrote down the top items that you would want for Christmas - I noticed that in the christmas events in following years though, the system was with set boxes and lists instead of the system where you could donate anything to be distributed across the chests.

If we have an event like this in the current year, I would really like to see the old system come back as it gave a great community feel to receiving gifts here at christmas, and it made for an amazing player-to-player experience. Especially like in 2018 when it was combined with the systems like the most recent ones where we got items that were set or in a wish list along with player given items.

Just a lil suggestion if we do an island or xmas event this yr! ^.^

[BandNerdMama]

I remember that too and it was great! In the following years we did have set options for gifts based on favorite color and like mob type or whatever, but you could still donate named items to specific people.

The old system of giving people specific things they asked for was extremely difficult to sort through and to make sure everyone got roughly the same monetary value worth of stuff (a polar bear egg and an elytra are much more expensive than diamonds or netherite, for example). It was also very time-consuming and stressful.

[WallyDonkey]

BNM already gave a good reply there but I'll just follow up to confirm that we have had direct gift giving on Winter Islands still, the only part we got rid of was the way people donated anything and everything and then we tried to fulfil peoples wishes from donations. Whilst that was a nice way of doing things, in the end the quality of items being donated were not enough to come close to meeting peoples wishlists. You had people donating a stack of cooked fish, and then wishing for diamonds and mob spawn eggs...the gift donation area was treated more like a trash can to be honest. And the last year we ran that system myself and several other staff ended up spending around 35,000c on items just to try and balance out the wishlists with reasonable items rather than just giving everyone a shulker box of fish and some dirt lol. The new system ensures that everyone gets decent quality gifts, without a few people having to buy them all, and it involves way less work than sorting out hundreds of thousands of donated items. And people still have the ability to send gifts directly to other players and they appear in their present along with their standard boxes of items.

As to how things are going to work this year, if we do it this year, you'll have to wait and see