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First off, how would you list that? My account name? No thank you, I would rather not give my AQ account name out. (Speaking for players who wouldn't want this, as it's a security issue)

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Thank you all for being so patient! Due to the number of interesting and thorough suggestions, it took us much longer to analyze them and make some decisions than we had planned. I want to thank our community for taking the time to write up so many great suggestions this year (some ideas you may see repurposed in a future release). You folks made narrowing down the choices to 3 difficult!

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To mention none of those things would have been a massive misrepresentation. It would've required making an exception to the requested developer notes and potentially following it with nothing short of a rug pull. Transparency and professionalism demanded that we made voters aware that if that set won, we would have to either take the extra work to revamp related mechanics, or create something that would be subject to thorough changes that we could not specify the details of until we revamped said mechanics.

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Donation Rewards II

In my first post, I drew attention to the unfairness surrounding token donations being divided by character. With that said, I don't think I did a particularly good job of emphasising just how dire the situation is.
To illustrate the problem more clearly, imagine a hypothetical scenario in which 100 players are participating in the donation contest, each owning a single character. Notwithstanding Flash's notoriously bad RNG system, you would typically expect each player to receive approximately 1% of the total donated tokens under these assumptions. Now, imagine a second scenario where 10 of these players have 10 characters each, and another 10 have five characters each. The remaining 80 players still have a single character as before. In this scenario, while there are still 100 players, 10 of them contribute a total of 100 characters, and another 10 add a further 50. In total, this means there are 230 characters in the prize pool. Each player with 10 characters can expect to receive 10 / 230 * 100 = ~4.3% of the total share, while a player with five character is likely to receive 5 / 230 * 100 = 2.2%. By contrast, the other 80 players can each expect to receive just 0.4% of the total share; this is, after all, a zero sum game.

Of course, it's impossible for me to know how many characters each player participating in the contest has. However, as you can see, it doesn't take long for the disparity to become extreme. And it shows in the contest outcomes as well. I know of at least three players who received fewer than 10,000 tokens on a character during this contest, despite the record 54,000,000 tokens donated. One barely made it past 5000. By contrast, I also know of at least three experienced players who received more than 200,000 tokens from their characters. One received 270,000, enough to donate for the full Warwolf set and still have 50,000 tokens left over! Some may argue that this is fine because more characters means more spending, but those two things aren't necessarily proportional when those characters belong to the same people!

Some of you may also argue that this is fair—that we should reward players for having more characters because it encourages them the play the game longer and become more invested. To that, I say: "but does it?". Or does it simply just encourage the player to quickly raise nine alts to Level 25 for them to act as token mules? This practice is so prevalent that multiple players actively name their characters to highlight their status as mules or storage accounts. Even if we suppose that the system achieves this goal, aren't we already encouraging them enough anyway? Over a donation contest that typically lasts for two months (60 days), nine Adventurer alts (cap: 25 tokens) could collectively earn 25 * 9 * 60 = 13,500 tokens. That's already easily enough to get them into the top 200! Moreover, encouraging players not just to create alts but to have them actively play the game is far more likely to get them invested.

If one of the main benefits of the Summer Donation Contest is supposed to be that the donated tokens end up in the hands of the more casual players who need them, then I can't help but think this system is utterly failing to deliver. Since the donation system is character-based, you can even donate to yourself! One individual, whom I shall not name, managed to donate 80,000 to themselves during this contest! That's five to 10 times more than the average single character player is likely to receive in total!

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Consolation Prizes

Just as I thought the contest had finally begun to settle down, we were treated to a new thread highlighting the problems running with a 'Top [x]' format. As I noted in my response on that thread, the fight for the top five Dev tickets became quite the battle. Together, the top seven donated 33,539,100 tokens during the contest, a truly astounding display of both generosity and competitive spirit. An amount that made it particularly disappointing for me to see that, despite several calls for a consolation prize for positions six and seven, others were against any leniancy, even given these completely unprecedented and unforeseeable circumstances. And, what's more, I can completely understand why they'd be upset. While I disagree with the way that the argument was phrased, they are, ultimately, correct. Awarding consolation prizes to these positions would be deliberately making an exception to the rule. As I said in my response post, I think these unique circumstances warranted such an exception, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fair to everyone else. That applies even though, as noted by @Branl, every member of the top five agreed to it. Making exceptions has the potential to open the floodgates. While I don’t believe the argument is strong enough, one could easily argue that exceptions should be made further down the leaderboard due to how close those positions were. You could even make a case based on last year’s events: when the staff openly announced that the suggestion system was based on popularity, they compensated those affected with the release of Wishweaver. However, what about those affected in previous years? What about players who made suggestions without knowing this (and therefore didn't stand a chance of having their ideas accepted)? Should they be compensated as well?

My point here isn’t to argue whether they should be compensated. Rather, it’s to demonstrate that if the goal of the Dev Tickets and the 'Top [x]' Giftmaster format is to reward generosity, then this year’s system failed to achieve that purpose effectively. The fact that consolation prizes might have been warranted underscores the problem with how the current format is executed. It failed to adequately reward the generous, and it even exacerbated the already stark ideological divides within the community at a time when that is the last thing we need.


So, what do we do? II

Somehow, despite the mountain of existing issues with the Summer Donation contest, new problems keep being piled on. This only reinforces my belief that sweeping changes are needed. For those arguing that more power should be handed to the top 50 donators, I find that hard to accept when certain players can apparently receive enough tokens from the contest to reach that marker without spending anything themselves. Don't get me wrong; redonating those tokens is still a generous thing to do, but the situation is different when (i) you aren't buying them yourself and (ii) the token distribution system is severely biased against certain individuals. Two players might donate 250,000 tokens, but depending on their individual circumstances, one could have received all of those tokens from the contest!

I want to raise an idea suggested by @Dreiko Shadrack elsewhere: Perhaps the Summer contest should be more like the Winter Gold donation contest. For example, there could be fixed community benchmarks, similar to the current community set, with the top 100 donators receiving a recoloured, elementally distinct version of the same set. The top 100 restriction could address many of the claims for needing consolation prizes (since it's much lower than top five), while the rest of the set remains benchmarked as before. This runs the risk of reducing the total amount of tokens contributed to the contest, but has already been raised by some donators but, as long as the tokens are distributed more evenly, could still be a net benefit to the players that really need those tokens. If that isn't enough of an incentive for large donators, we could retain the 'Top five' Dev ticket system, but with the added explicit qualifications that (i) the item will be made public, and (ii) the staff can provide additional rewards (both collectively and to individual players) depending on the circumstances. This approach would ensure that top donators still receive a degree of special treatment while also benefiting the wider community. Additionally, reducing the contest to one set rather than two would lessen the staff's workload, and their time could instead be spent on something else.