Palia's First Event! Maji Night Market

We're about 2 weeks into Palia's first event, the Maji Night Market.  I'm not gonna lie, I was a little unhappy with it the first week, but the second week made an excellent comeback.

The first week wasn't all bad.  There were quests to do with very valuable rewards.  You get your first collectible plush by completing the 3 part quest chain.  There's a quest from Kenli to attend the market, a quest from Kenyatta to stir up trouble, and a quest from Eshe to fix it.  In the end, I had some food, some gold, and my first plush.

Collecting plushes is the biggest long term feature of the festival.  You can buy a couple with gold, gain one from completing the quests, and earn the rest by participating in the only minigame at the festival, called the Chapaa Chase.  When midnight strikes, the chapaas get loose from the petting zoo and run wild everywhere.  The minigame is to chase them, catch them, and put them back in the pen.  The first week, the only scoring you could do was 10 tickets per chapaa captured, and there weren't very many chapaas to go around.  So, the fastest players got all the chapaas, and everyone else was empty handed and upset.  Fortunately, they made some modifications the second week to save this event from disaster.

From the second week on, they increased the number of chapaas spawning and more spawn locations, so there were many more chapaas to go around.  In addition to this, they created a group pool of winnings for everyone participating on that server instance.  So, you would pick up chapaas, and get 10 tickets for every chapaa you catch, but also 1 ticket for every chapaa everyone else in the area catches with you.  These two key changes made the minigame rewards much more bountiful for slower players, while not penalizing the faster ones.  Everyone gets more tickets, more prizes, and less hurt feelings.

Thanks to this change, I went from having a mere 20 tickets, to having enough to purchase two prize plushies.  Yes, I'm a slow player.  That's me.  On week 1, I had concluded I simply wouldn't get any prizes from the ticket rewards shop.  It was depressing, but I hoped for better next year.  I was very happy when they made these changes and gave me the chance at some of the plushies too.  I now have a total of 4 plushies from the event; one was a quest reward, one was bought with gold, and two were bought with prize tickets.  This is a very satisfying result for me.

I should mention, two festival outfits were added to the cash shop with the Maji Market update.  However, they do not appear to be limited time only and will probably be there forever, as S6 has promised with their cash shop practices.