Hello fellow knights!
All of these statistics are based on t2. I obtained my last piece of 4 star gear the minute before the missions update, and thus was shoved into t2.
I've always found that one thing is frustrating about the various events we've had over the years: the high prices and small variation. Take a look at our caketastrophe right now! 4 products, three to be really honest, one of them costing the extremely low 10 cake slices, another 25, and the last 50. 25 cake slices, or 5 "cake runs" at is a fair amount. But having to do 10 runs in order to get a costume? That's 10 days you have to logon, or essentially the whole event. A lot of people (like myself) that I've met outside of and on Spiral Knights don't have that much time on their hands, and also like to play other games. Along with that, there are only 3 different products: a regular cake helm, a frosted cake helm, and a prismatic cake helm. That's not many different colors, and also the helms all have the same design.
We have had the same problem with the Halloween event, where there were just three options, and the best one didn't just require you to logon everday of the event; you had to stow on the mission one of your friends or guildies was hosting, and several times! I think the prices for the top tier halloween costume items should be bumped down a good bit, there should be different designs for the cake helms and more color schemes, along with all of the cake helms costing you 25 cake slices.
Find cake arena, 3 tokens per 10 mist, 30 tokens a day, takes 4 days to get a prismatic costume.
Even as a F2P you can get the prismatic costume if you REALLY want it.
You can even ask for your friends to invite you only for 5 tokens arena, bringing you up to 50 tokens per day, taking you only 2 days to get a prismatic and have 11 days remaining to farm for anniversary prize boxes...
P.S. There is more than the mission for each event, Halloween was like that 2 years ago, no missions, only arena in Arcades...