I am most certainly referring to the new 'Winterfest' mission, which despite suffering from severe balance issues involving tier three players and the second and first tier, is objectively refreshing.

First, the good-

1. If this style of mission were to be added into the game as a "thing," it would be fair to call it a blow against the claim that Spiral Knights is "repetitive" in its game play... that we play the same levels over and over with the same limited set of enemies, many of us with the same set of weapons, is enough as it is- adding a new objective can be a blessing.

Along these lines, the new mission type could be fit into daily missions and even danger missions. These could really help to spice things up for those grinding the same 10 levels over and over to earn their horse.

2. Then there is the fact that the game's more cooperative side is helped along greatly. There are an infinite number of ways in which level design can be utilized on this mechanic to provide a new experience- players controlling gates for other players, bombers clearing hordes of other enemies as other players carry things across, etcetera.

3. And there is that it can be implemented in any number of ways- as a krogmo game which might even involve pvp in some instances, as a new set of missions that could be integrated into the current "rank missions" or, if the player-base proves to truly find something against the idea of carrying a box across for a given amount of time, as a spammable "holiday filler" for whenever OOO is busy coding a "real update," as they "should."

Secondly, the balance issues

1. As I'm sure all of you are aware- there is no reason to do T3 over T2, unless you want a humbug hat, which typically means soloing or doubling up on the T3 mission and camping it. OOO rebalanced the mission once by re-deciding the time constraints. The end result? T2 was the new T1. Players from T3 flocked towards the T2 mission in order to get their fill of winter garb. The problem however, lies in that it wasn't enough. There are a few ways I can see of fixing this:

The first is to do more of the above. To make T1 extremely short and unrewarding, T2 also short and unrewarding and T3 fat and juicy. This fails because T2 players should be able to participate equally and fully and still manage to "make ends meet" or whatnot.

The second is to make T2/3 worth it in another way. For instance, adding the humbug hat was a start; but since we're not talking just x-mas, what about making the T2 and the T3 pay out something entirely different? You can't farm the roarmulus twins for a fang of vog, just as you can't farm vanaduke to earn sealed swords. But the devs know this and I'm sure that if they did make the xmas event into actual levels, that they'd know to do this. Actually, I'm not sure of anything.

2. Speaking of camping for humbug hats- Camping the mission for hats is NOT playing the mission at all- its farming it out of greed... But this brings up a whole new point! If the players are doing something like this, it isn't necessarily wicked; they're still possibly having fun with it! What about a "hunting minigame" of some sort? Put a group of players on a map, and have them hunt down a specific monster for tokens. But I digress; the bottom line is that this hat, and things like it, belong somewhere outside of the "carry the object" style of game play.

3. There is also the fact that this kills the "exploration" portion of the game to an extent, and that it quickly becomes routine; within a couple of days, players already knew exactly the route to take for each objective. When invited to join my parties, I continually got "Oh, that. That's boring, so I'm going to sit in Haven and admire NJThug's mountain of confetti, which is vastly more entertaining." Part of this was that the mission was six to ten minutes long, and that players did not want to have to go through the same actions for 10 minutes over and over. This could quite easily be changed in some way during an integration into the main set of levels, most likely with some form of randomization and timed events during the mission (that is, gates that are set to open or close, and changes in the enemies that spawn like in arenas.)

So what do you guys think about the possibility of levels like the "winterfest mission" being added into the "main game" in some way?

And- would it be worth the wait? Or would something like a new enemy type be better received?