Suggestions

Yup, I'm suggesting it. Please don't grab your pitchforks just yet. Hear me out.

First and foremost, there's the fact that holiday items are holiday items. Fundamentally, they are all the same. Yes, I know things like the sprites are stated to be retired. But we have now gone through:

• Everything but the emblems retires
• Everything but the emblems and the item you vote on retires
• Nothing retires

There is now an artificial disparity between holiday items caused by the site growing and changing and learning what works.

Fundamentally, holiday items at their core are the same from year to year. They are gotten with the same mechanics for the same prices each year. But because staff have (RIGHTLY) been adjusting exactly how they retire while trying to figure out the best method for the longevity of the site, a split has been created.

A subset of holiday items are now completely limited whereas others are not, and thus going to become exponentially more expensive as supply dries up for absolutely no other reason than they happened to come out before the arbitrary "holiday items do not retire" cutoff date.

This doesn't feel right to me. (And before anyone accuses me of wanting handouts or not understanding hard work: I have most of the retired items, and I bought them off other players for large amounts of gems and treasure, as I joined during year 2)

SO

I propose putting everything in the chests. Plain and simple. They are all holiday items, they should all be in there.

HOWEVER, I don't think we can completely ignore the stated "this item is retired" either. So I suggest also skewing the drop rates in the chests. Make rarity tiers based on how many years ago it was, and if it was originally said to be retired.

Said to be retired should definitely always be 0.01% or lower chance. Something like this will not crash the market! Your valuable items will still be valuable!

For math sake, at those odds, lets see what your chances of getting a light sprite are. Using the anniversary numbers of 250,000+ clans registered, lets say everyone buys a chest.

• Using the current announcement numbers you have a 25% chance of getting a familiar or "large" apparel. So 62,500 clans are going to pull that.
• Within that, assuming rarity tiers are in effect, you only have a 0.01% chance to be in the retired tier. That's 6.25 clans.
• Now within THAT you need to actually pull the light sprite. There are 22 retired holiday familiars (11 sprites and 11 acolytes) and 33 retired large apparel pieces (11 per years 1-3). So you have a 1 in 55 chance. That means that if EVERY SINGLE CLAN buys a chest, each month you have 0.11 light sprites coming in.

(feel free to check my math its been a while since I've done this sort of thing. edit: Already fixed it once)

Seeing as the number of active clans is probably much lower, I think this is perfectly reasonable for staff to do. Its such a small number coming in that it won't lower their value. It will however keep the smallest of trickles of new supply coming in. As it should, because deemed retired or not, they're still just holiday items. If you're not going to retire them from now on, you should un-retire all of them.

If they're going to keep the old stuff retired, then they should keep up the trend of retiring Holiday stuff, imo. As much as I dislike being able to get ahold of anything older than my reg window, as Sopheroo says, everything un-retired will eventually become worthless. That means only super old players would have any chance of turning profits on old, retired items.

I don't like the idea of everything in the chest, either, because the pull is all RNG. The larger the pool, the more difficult it is to get what you want, and there's already enough work involved with getting old items. :/

There will no longer be any more of these items on the market at some point, due to players leaving or collectors never selling them.

I support and agree 100%, ALSO as someone who has saved up for expensive retired items! The Wind Sprite I bought for 1 million treasure is now worth a lot more than that, which means anyone who decides today that they want to get one has to work over TWICE as hard to save up, and there are fewer up on the AH than there were when I bought mine, showing that these items ARE LEAVING CIRCULATION.

You can already see the retired items are reaching unattainability with the ever-notorious Light Sprite. These things are up for sale so infrequently that you see maybe 2 on the AH at a time. And while 50k gems is still possible for some people to eventually save up to, that's a lot of gems for something that, aside from the art and year of release, is fundamentally the same as my Light elemental acolyte. It wasn't a reward promised to people who helped the site get rolling like the kickstarter items--it's just a holiday familiar. Only now once people save up that much? They have to find a seller, which is getting harder.

Yeah, having a very very rare chance for old items to pop up might be good. Especially given the point about how the shifting status of holiday items has created a category of items that will make a small subset of players richer and richer, while others will have no chance for the same sort of profits on later items.

Honestly, I think the major example here that's really getting under people's skin the most are the items of the first Jubilee, especially the Sprite. Given how rare those items are because of coli issues, etc. and the lack of announcement previous that they would be retired, they are going out of circulation and out of the realm of affordability much faster than others. And the familiars stick out because of the public, list nature of the Bestiary.

I would be in favor of stocking the chests with all the old items, weighted for rarity. But, since that seems unlikely, I'd also be in favor of at the very least locking Bestiary entries so that familiars stay lit even when sold/traded away. That would help keep the retired familiars in circulation and affordable for those who want to complete the collection instead of being faced with big impossible-to-fill blanks in their list.

Together with that, it would be nice - though again unlikely - if they were to do a one-time limited rerelease of retired '13-'16 items. Or even just the '13-'14 items. Maybe include them JUST for the first year of the Joxar chest, and then no more. To bring down the insane prices a little.

Because really, at this rate Light Sprites are going to hit $1000 in the not too distant future, and that's absurd.

No support. I like what flight rising is doing with the cycling but I don't really see the need to put in lets say the light sprite in there to be honest. Even if I would love to get a light sprite.

Support! Before people start saying that we newbies (relatively, I joined six months ago) that we're looking for handouts and not appreciating the hard work that older players put into sprites, let me just say that I will happily fork out ten million treasure for a sprite.

Something like Hawkfeather is suggesting will hopefully stabilize the sprite market and keep it going. The sprite price just keeps going up and up. Eventually there will be no more sprites or they will become so ridiculously expensive that anyone who has it either won't part with one or can't find a buyer.

Real example: I joined Nov 2015. I'd been stalking the site for a while and really loved familiars, so I want to collect them. One of the first things I did was look up sprite prices. As this was six months ago, the only price I remember is Nature Sprite - it was 400kT at the time. As a newbie, I worked to get that 400k and I bought one. Fast forward to today: it's about 600kT. It's gone up about a third of its original price.

Now scale that up to something the likes of a Fire Sprite. It's 7.5mil now. Assuming the same trend, in six months, it'll be almost 10 mil.

Again, I would happily pay out 10 mil for that Fire Sprite. But prices inflate so quickly that it's hard to keep up. I imagine this is the same for others - it's an endless cycle of saving and earning and not quite making it.

Supported. I really don't understand why there's been an arbitrary limit placed on which years' holiday items would be placed in the chest to begin with; holiday items are holiday items. The only difference is a user-based value on some of them, and removing those particular items from the chest just enforces a wealth disparity which is only going to get worse. That seems short-sighted.

People objecting seem to be doing it on the basis of the fear that some insanely rare items will become dirt-cheap, but if the Joxar chest works on the basis of a chance ratio, that won't happen. Rare items will remain rare; there'll just be slightly more opportunity to get them. Even a high percentage of a ridiculously low percentage is still a ridiculously low percentage.

That means that the item worth is going to remain high, which makes them a continuing investment.

Or, to look at it another way: right now, a subset of holiday items are a finite resource. They're going to run out. They're going to stop being an investment, because no one is going to sell them, or they're going to get so expensive that no one will be able to buy them.

If there's a continuing supply, then they will continue to be a resource to invest in. No resource, no investment. Resource, investment.

No support.

I argued heavily against the total abolition of retiring future festival items for this very reason. The outcome of 'the only thing this change will ultimately serve is to remove a necessary investment stepping stone for new players' should not seem new or surprising as it has been a pillar in the neverending debates that surround the issue.

I see no reason to segue one bad idea straight into another and call it a 'solution'.

We can, of course, return to the discussion when this often-invoked market extinction occurs. We're not anywhere near there yet.