I should make it clear that a good amount of people looked at the crafting line for Mandolin and, at first, thought they were looking at a clerical error.

A normal 5* weapon takes something in the ballpark of 85 materials to make (not including orbs), and this one takes 7200 on top of even that.

While *event* weapons are obviously different and acquisition difficulty fluctuates wildly, the closest I'd say we've gotten in pure numbers grind is Apocrea, needing 1470 tokens per weapon, of which 200 per floor is considered pretty low output by players. More than being about 5 times less materials gathered, it's over 6 times less floors run for the same amount of materials. Shroud of the Apocrea is THIRTY TIMES EASIER THAN SPIKES.

To Grey Havens' credit, this isn't a lottery like Kataclysm, and I'm at least glad your first event after reviving this game is one where I can see the finish line. But from what was just teased on the test server, I don't want the possibility of grinding out 36,000 more spikes to manifest, so like the rest of the entire population of this game I do feel the need to say something to someone.

1. Please either lower the crafting requirements severely or multiply the amount that individual spikes give you when collected.

The way this looks to me is that you either lose players the next time this rolls around when every status variant of the Mandolin is still about 30 times more floors than Apocrea was, resulting in 4 more crafting runs of the worst consistent grind in the game today, if the player even made a Mando the first time around.
OR
You walk back a poor design decision, possibly lose the players who both feel strongly that sitting here for 240 floors of Arcade for one gun was an irreplacable status symbol and inexplicably don't have any other status symbols from their time here, and signal to both new players and anyone skeptic about your return to active development that you're willing to properly start respecting their time.

I swear on my soul, my mother, and God that the second bucket of people you could possibly lose is either nonexistent or that you'd be willingly choosing to exploit someone with vulnerable mental health by validating their feelings, either about the Mandolin or the lootbox orbitguns. If such a mindset does actually exist, they would heal quickly and in a much more healthy way by just continuing to do good work.

2. If the new NPC in preview notes is a way to swap tracks on the crafting tree for finished weapons (Mando to Fire Mando, Callahan to Iron Slug?), please understand this won't change the issue with this event's pricing.

Again, I must reiterate, 240 floors of Arcade with average spike rewards. If you're in a competent party, you only needed 8 runs max of Apocrea's special floor, and the REPEATABLE EVENT MISSION either gave those floors to you without needing to waste time on a prior stratum (looking at you, tiny/medium/huge spikes) or surprised you with a free radiant-crystal-dropping arena.

If one of those recolored Mandos is elemental and one of them is shadow, that's at least 240 floors of extra grind, again, for anyone who decides they really don't want a normal damage gun (another problem I'm sure you're monitoring closely since you're also finally doing balance changes on weapon trees that have a lot of normal damage representation)

For someone that wants one of each element for any good gun, that's 720 floors if they didn't catch the grind this time. For someone that wants EVERY variant, that's 1200. I really hope you do have thoughts of the player's experience in mind despite the picture this paints, but even if it's solely your benefit, I should impress this upon you: someone on your team who is less concerned about looking at the root cause of player metrics may blindly look at people only doing arcade forever and write "let's revitalize [thing that was wildly popular before we banished everyone to arcade on purpose]" on your dry erase board, giving you an unreasonable amount of work that you didn't have before deciding the trajectory of this event.

3. Love of God, please make people work just a little to earn the weapons on test.

I know a major part of the focus was getting us to test the weapon itself, but the trouble people had with acquisition would have been caught if people didn't just get the mando for free in the testing server.

Maybe that's how you could test the economy changes suggested. Plan to multiply how many material items a spike is worth by like, 4x (bringing the floor requirement down to 60 - still looks evil to complete outsiders but at least it's fine for people who know how long a floor takes), but multiply it by 10x in test. That way, players can get to it in an arbitrarily small amount of time on test, still be compelled to actually go do some testing on your test server, and test their elemental diskgun of choice for bugs while they run for the rest of the spikes. And you'll know if anything goes wrong on the backend by deciding that one spike gives you 10 materials (though it shouldn't, because Lost Souls can drop things 3x too...)

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I know you don't have to read this forum at all, or listen to my post in particular, but there's dozens of posts every event about killing the FOMO grind. Please just pick one. I swear it'd be an instant improvement if you let people actually enjoy this game in one weekend compared to them getting 10% of the way through your event if they only gave you the time they'd normally set aside for a brand new release of a AAA game.

Peoples' outlook on this game is bleaker from outside than inside. Way bleaker. Posting about this game outside of communities dedicated to playing more evil grinds is usually just laughed at. I told my friends what I'd been up to for Spikes and previously Kataclysm and both times they made puking noises. Players here are looking at the old team coming back with genuine hope for the future, but until you make the game loop look like it was made for someone old enough to actually know about this game, to anyone else it looks like a sweatshop is reopening.