Honestly I don't mind things soft retiring. I think event items being more difficult but not impossible to collect in the future adds a fun kind of challenge to gameplay. I agree with a lot of others it seems though that the prices are pretty high for how many items there are that will soft retire. There are many items I would like to have multiple copies of for personal use (multiple of the very cool new apparels and also the darling frostspinner companions, I want like so many of them haha), and whether the items retire in any way or not, I would still like to be able to grind for extra copies to sell later. It isn't very far into the event yet and its the first one so I guess I don't know this for sure, but it seems it will be almost unreasonably hard to collect one of each soft retire item before the event ends, let alone as many as I would like to make a goal of getting. I think at least one of the following needs to happen:
- lower soft retire item prices
- make soft retire items available for more festival cycles before retiring
- if the only way to get the items after the event is lootboxes, it shouldn't be too hard to get multiple per fest cycle through casual gameplay. but I would prefer if at least one of the above two points happened in conjunction with this
As far as the idea of lootboxes goes in general, I personally like it as I like chance type games and the surprise aspect of it is really fun to me. I do think it needs to be like, balanced to not make getting retired event items an almost unreachable goal. I think that making the boxes available in the event shop for pebbles or event tickets would be good, and more importantly, I would like to see them available as drops for doing activities. And each person have a chance of getting more than one per fest. While the chances of getting exactly what you want when opening a box aren't high, the new items spawned from the crates would probably help keep the costs of soft retired items down as people would buy/sell/trade the items between eachother so they would be a source of income even if people get an item they don't want and help make it easier to save up for items they do want.
I also think there are a couple ways to go about the lootbox pool if they go the lootbox direction. One would be all soft retired items in it, making the chance of getting a particular one harder each year as more items are added to the pool. The benefits of this is its more chaotic which can be fun I think and it is more satisfying to a gameplay style focused on collecting and/or selling rare items.
The other option I can think of is year specific lootboxes. This one I think I prefer personally because I think its a better compromise between multiple gameplay styles. In this option, all of this events soft retire items would be available in a year 1 lootbox. All of next years in a year two lootbox, etc. This could be especially good if the lootboxes could be bought in the event shop because each years could be listed and people could buy whichever years lootboxes they want (and hopefully be able to grind for random dropped ones too). This wouldn't destroy the point of collecting soft retire items, or even collecting them to just sell them higher later. But it would also make it a little easier to obtain the specific items people want to have just for fun and not because of their value, and make it easier for new players over the years to collect the earlier event's items because they could still focus their grinding on getting them if they wanted, without having to worry about not having the chance again next year since the lootboxes could all be available every year. And if this were combined with more reasonable ticket prices for soft retiring items, it could work well I think.
