right, lets get away from this bickering, and give some actual feed back.
i really like the staff here, and i appreciate you guys putting in the time and effort to create these events for us, but in my professional opinion as a qualified games designer, and a 9(ish) year demise veteran, there are some simple tweaks that should be done to make them much more fun and to give access to the content you have created to a much wider audience.
1. either the clues are too difficult to figure out, are not apparent enough, or the entrances to the areas are too well hidden.
- call me a dumbass, call me impatient, whatever, i don't care, the fact of the matter is that most of your players are not finding most of your content. use bread crumbing, use funneling, use sign posting.
your job as a content designer is not to make the content as hard to find as possible, but to lead the player to it covertly. they should be effectively led down a path, but not realize they are being led. exactly the same as a good film or book will show you things about characters, but should never state them directly, they are telling you important plot information, they're just doing it covertly. failing this (because i know it actually is difficult to do effectively, that's why people are paid to do it in the industry), put up some kind of guide, the place is years old now, there are people who have fully explored it and have profited greatly from it, there is no benefit in keeping the content exclusive to them anymore, when the incentive to explore it through trial and error has decayed, and the difficulty has increased.
2. create scaling difficulty of monsters and appropriate drops. you could have used the same items as are gained from trick of treating for the lower level monsters. that is enough incentive for people to farm low monsters, and they have the OPTION of how they wish to gain those items. meanwhile further into the dungeons, better items drop, this should have at least 4 tiers of difficulty and item drops, different item drops for each tier. players can fight at their appropriate level, and get items which they can use, keep, or sell.
3. use monsters that are food for various classes. as many players as possible should be able to take part in the event, regardless of what class they are, there should be something for them to kill, and something they should avoid/have some challenge with.
(i even took my fisher through and tried fishing the lake, to no avail)
4. TEST TEST TEST. if you're using puzzles, get a staff member that hasn't taken part in building the puzzle to then have a go at it, see how long it takes them to figure it out. if it's too long, add some breadcrumbs, change the intractable object to something more prominent, make the clue clearer, or the monsters harder/weaker, or the spawn faster/slower. it's a fine balance to make things fun and work as desired; games companies hire about 10 times as many quality assurance testers as they do designers and programmers because this is an extremely important part of the design process.
5. the drop rates were reduced this year, and tbh i didn't mind that so much, i like the rarity of items to be kept intact. but when people are losing hope of ever getting anything, and are leaving... that's too much :/
again something which can be fine tuned with testing.