Instead of my planned feedback consisting of a summation of positive and negative things, I have chosen to give a brief summary of (my experience of) the event in order to convey a better picture of the event as a whole.
The Beginning:
A measly 5 days after the Christmas event had ended, another taxing event popped up: this time we were celebrating the Chinese New Year by celebrating the year that was about to end. It started off strong with what was easily my favourite part of the event: the signpost. Though it wasn't that easy to find (No NPC other than the one standing next to it acknowledged its existence, and I believe the exclamation points signifying its importance were added later on), it could have served as a great way to let players complete multiple tasks without having to visit multiple NPCs and going through tons of meaningless dialogue just to end up with a fetch quest. Sadly enough it did pretty much all the story telling, and the tasks had to be completed in order.
The Middle:
The spawns on the map were stale, I don't think there's ever been a situation where this word was more appropriate. All pig Pokemon were represented: the rare encounter on the map was Spoink, and the common encounters consisted of all iterations of the Mankey and Swinub evolution line. And Ditto was thrown in as well, so there'd be something worth catching. The quests on the other hand were far from stale: after a handful of fetch quests came the bane of people's PWO career: an NPC battle so stacked against you that the only way to complete it succesfully was to have Mamoswine, preferably 2 or 3 of them, fully trained to level 100 as well as battle items to aid you. The opponent you needed these preparations for had twice as many Pokemon as you were allowed to use, all of them were at least 10 levels higher as your highest leveled Pokemon (unless your Pokemon were level 100 for some weird reason), had movesets to deal with the stuff you were forced to use against them and were rumoured to not only to have had perfect IVs, but perfect EVs, natures and battle items as well. It's safe to say that those who were not prepared, including players that started out not that long ago, didn't stand a chance without help from others.
Later On:
Those who figuratively had reached the summit and were able to overcome the challenge the NPCs embodied were now able to make offerings to the gate and gain access to the second map of the event. To no one's surprise the gate opened much sooner than the staff anticipated, and the culmination of everything you had to do to get to this point was a big empty map where, along with the usual spawns, Tepig was encounterable as well. A little bit further down the road, after what seemed to be an eternity, the levels of the gatekeeper NPCs were altered a bit, in the hope of making it more friendly towards new trainers, allowing them to be able to hunt Tepig as well. Though I don't know the exact changes that have been made, the intended results were mixed.
The Ending:
After weeks of trying to determine the end date, all we had to go by was that this celebration usually took a couple weeks and 'January'. January neared its end and there hadn't been an update made as to when the event would conclude, and then February followed... still not a word, then all the spawns were abruptly stripped away from the maps... still not a word, then the login message reverted back to how it was before the event had started... still not a word. And I suppose that was that.