I just logged in and saw the poll has gotten 240 responses so far - that's awesome! Thank you all for your feedback, both positive and negative, and please keep it coming!

Since I've had a chance to review everyone's comments thus far, I thought I'd just share a few observations that kind of sum a few things up.

First off, just so everyone knows, this isn't a truly statistically accurate poll given a) It's on Stratics (representing a very specialized segment of the player population), b) This wasn't randomly sent out to people, and c) Apparently some people who picked "I didn't get to play on the shard" still went ahead and chose Likes and Dislikes for things they never actually saw

Nevertheless, this is fantastic information for identifying things we're definitely interested in. So let's see, the comments generally fall into Likes, Suggestions, and Complaints - let's address each.

I have to say that we're all really happy with the overwhelming response, across the board, to the various things we implemented as a part of the festivities. It's been really neat to see players explore parts of the game they've been hesitant to try, such as PVP, and remark that they had a positive experience that may impact their gameplay on their home shards (I've even been getting email about it )

It's also been great that people got to interact with, uh, "new stuff" like the reanimating Zombies, Paint Stations, and Costumes.

Here are a few of the suggestions I noted:

- Give more information about the overall setup, where things are, and what events are happening
- Add a color chart to the Paint Station, or at least fix the issue with people being able to override each other's choices
- Bring these holiday shard concepts over to the production shards
- Make sure there's plenty of non-combat related material as well

I have really fond memories of all the shardwide holiday and special events we've had in the past. The only real reason we implemented the Shard of the Dead as a single shard was the timeframe. As Wilki mentioned earlier the development team actually put this together in our volunteer time - there was no reallocation of resources or time to work on this, because we've had some pretty pressing business to be working on during the day. (Especially the Live Team, who are focused on bug fixes and the PVP balance; most of the engineering was actually handled by JIB, whose part of the Design Team and coincidentally is the one who got us all started on this).

On the other hand, it was an awesome chance for everyone to get together and just have fun plotting a holiday diversion for the players. It was pretty fun walking across the street for dinner, sitting down, discussing what we could do and how to do it, jotting down notes, and then working on it into the evening. Draconi will work for Food.

So in the future you can definitely expect more content in these types of events, and more information to go along with it.

And here are a few complaints:
- Too much neon
- Inconvenient Community Collections interface
- Not enough starting items, especially with the zombies taking your stuff
- Things changed after the patch

I admit, I'm kind of an earth-tones guy myself, but in keeping with the spirit of both our test centers and Halloween (seriously, people dress up in all sorts of crazy color combos) we added the Paint Stations so players could express themselves however they wanted. Obviously this will not be possible on production shards.

We also totally understand how frustrating it was for players with the Costume Robes to log in after the patch and discover that their item had changed - this was not intended to be a nerf on your Dragons and Balrons, rather, we were having another issue entirely and in order to fix it we had to reset the costumes (which randomly assign their state when they're created).

I'm afraid I haven't been able to cover even a smidgeon of everything, but I just wanted to let you all know that we're reading the feedback We really appreciate everyone spending the time to complete the poll, as well as post comments here in this thread. We hope you all had as much fun playing on the shard as we did putting it together!

Thanks again!
-Draconi