Hi all,
Catching up a little late on this - apologies for the delay! This thread has been stickied and the first post has been updated with sale information (including notes/observations about some of the items).
This update came completely out of the blue (no pun intended), so I'm still trying to get more information about it for everyone. If you have questions or comments please post them here and I'll try and get them to the team for some answers. Thanks!
Hi Francys08,
Would you be comfortable sharing which recipes you're seeing on the Winter Echo Oven? Are they the same as the ones on the Winter Oven (Frost Cookies; Winter Cupcake; Winter Cake)?
I've flagged over the issue about the chairs - thank you for reporting!
There doesn't seem to be anything special about the Winter Echo Oven other than that it costs gems. So, it would not need any parts to build.
I'm sorry about your loss of gems
Please file a ticket with
Storm8 Support regarding this to see if they could be of help.
(This is pure speculation as I haven't heard anything official from the team) - it looks like this sale might be a "trial run" of bringing back goal content for gems. It's something players have requested for a long time.
Personal opinion: With the exception of the appliance and maybe the counters, I think the items are priced fairly, and I like that the team duplicated the items so players who unlocked the originals are still able to purchase more for coins.
(For those who play Restaurant Story: this was previously attempted in that game with the April 2014 goal content. However, instead of duplicating those items, they were all taken off the market, and all reintroduced for gems. Players who had unlocked the items and had been able to previously buy them with coins were no longer able to do so, and those items are still removed from the market to this day. They resurface very rarely).
Other attempts in Restaurant Story to reintroduce goal content included introducing recolored variants of goal prizes for gems. I'm generally supportive of this too (it still gives players who had unlocked the originals something new to look forward to), and a lot of players at the time viewed it as a happy compromise, but I can understand why players would want the original items as well.
So, I definitely think this approach is an improvement, though my favorite would be if the goal prizes were allowed to be unlocked altogether (this was also explored a couple of times when the 15-day side goals debuted - players could complete side goal steps to unlock previous goal content; and once unlocked, it would become available for them to purchase just the same as any other goal content).
I do think there are still some details that could be ironed out. For example, as someone who had completed the Winter Wedding Goals previously, I thought my chairs had all been sold before I went to the end of the market and saw the ones I purchased still there and purchasable for coins.
That being said, I am very appreciative to see this update, and hope the team will consider implementing additional player feedback on other aspects of the game as well.