Honestly I think we fucked up a bit on a couple of pieces of Pool Party. Without going into too much detail, 2 of the problems I saw in hindsight were:

1) We were not clear about how the goals were meant to be earned. Pool Party Mundo wasn't supposed to be obtainable without an increase in spending. This was intended. But we were not upfront enough about it and set expectations wildly off from where we wanted them to be.

2) We rewarded gifting because in general, players have reported great satisfaction from sending gifts. But by providing incentives to gift without guarantee of the payoff, we set players up to feel bad about the purchases they made. This is something we absolutely never intended.

We would definitely make changes to those two issues and more if/when we run a community rewards event again. Ultimately though, players in the aggregate did appreciate pool party based on our surveys. Sure, the vocal Reddit wasn't pleased, but Reddit is actually only a portion of our player base. One thing to keep in mind is that while Tiers 1-5 didn't matter to you, it did matter a lot to a lot of players.

And I really appreciate your well thought out response.