The Rising

[Niwashi]

I would prefer bigger ones (maybe one for each season) that lasts for a while with some nice items that you can grind for.

I really got turned off of big grindy events by LOTRO.

In that game, they started off nice, but kept getting bigger and more grindy as time went on. Eventually, it reached the point where, in order to get the one-chance-only rewards, you'd have to grind nearly every day of the event (and they went on for a long time). Furthermore, it didn't have all classes on one character like here, so most of us had lots of characters, and we'd have to grind the event for each of them. With nine main characters and three or four other alts, it took a few hours every single day for a couple months to complete an event.

By the time one was finished, I was wiped out and would take a couple weeks off from the game entirely. Then, by the time I was ready to start playing again, I'd only have maybe a week or two at best before the next event started. (In the spring and summer, which had more events, I wouldn't even get that.) Instead of events being a break from the main game, the main game had to be fit in within the (very brief) breaks from the flood of event content. The main game of LOTRO is massive (far more so than here) and highly story driven, but trying to do it a week or two at a time a couple times a year (the rare bits I could fit in between events), it got too hard to follow what was going on, and that's what finally ruined the game for me.

Anyway, that's getting a bit long to rant about a different game, but to get back onto the topic of this one: I wouldn't want to see the same pattern happen here of one long grindy event after another long grindy event after another... I'm delighted that events in FFXIV are things that can (usually) be done in a day per character, even for those who can only play an hour or two per day. The Yokai event's much longer grind only worked because it was the only event that did that. And maybe that's the best way to balance the two. Allow one event a year to extend for a month or so of grinding, so long as all other events are brief quest chains that can be done in an hour or two. (Oh, and even on the long grindy event, make sure that the duration the event is available is significantly longer than the time it takes to grind it, to allow for players who may not be able to spend time on this game every day.)