My thoughts:
Spawns: 9.5/10. Yeah, the bees were annoying, especially in terms of shiny hunting, but super-common Scyther and easy t2 Mime/Gligar were quite generous. The only real negative comment here is that there seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to why these spawns were chosen - they certainly don't fit a wintry theme. Plus, the Deerling fiasco: the images in the client were included incorrectly, leading to missing icons and other such problems. The back/front images (used in battles) have no autumn forms; the follow images (for you and other players to see as you walk around) have no spring forms, and the icons have a duplicate of the spring forms labeled as autumn (with no autumn forms). To say nothing of not actually following the rules of how the forms work - but I don't fault that, since I wouldn't expect PWO to have that implemented properly yet.
By far the biggest problem with the spawns though: Beldum. Catch rate 3/255. Only learns Take Down, and will Struggle after PP runs out on that. That's just mean, and I'm glad I didn't find a shiny one - I don't need that kind of stress in my life, lol. I feel like that was included to spite the complaints about Baltoy's Selfdestruct and Ralts's Teleport from last event
.
Also, here's my t2+/shiny tracking (over 89 hours); third column is hours and minutes between encounters, on average:
Would be interested to see how those numbers line up against the actual spawn tiers. I don't think Leafeon is actually a hard t4 as this data suggests - I think that's just a sample size issue - so it looks like Trapinch was the only actual t4, and a relatively easy one at that, while Roselia, Cacnea, Mawile, and Aron were all t3. Perhaps the biggest indicator of how generous the spawns were is the total row - roughly every 9 minutes I found a t2+ spawn, which is remarkable. Of course, the last row highlights my biggest gripe with this event, which wasn't really about the event itself: the shiny chance. I know, I know, it's been said a thousand times, but it's still pretty ridiculous for certain people to see average times between shinies consistently at 6h or less while mine sits at a stupid-low almost 18h - boosted by a 28.5-hour (!) dry streak after #5 to close out the event. I don't know what the deal is with the way it seems to consistently favor certain people and screw over certain others, but it feels like it ignores my MS, and it's incredibly annoying to always be on the losing side of that coin. Anyway.
Quests: 8/10. I thought the quests were pretty fantastic. Placing the invisible presents was a fun puzzle, one that I'm familiar with from other games (looking at you, RuneScape) that use similar mechanics. Bonus for next time: make the NPCs move for increased complexity. The cipher NPC was also a neat puzzle that took some effort to understand and solve, although I too was disappointed by some who thought it would be good to give away the answer to others, and I was also disappointed by those who clearly didn't want to put in any effort to solve it themselves and instead tried to pry the answer out of those who had solved it. The Aron quest was a typical "find rare poke and faint it for an item" fetch quest, which wasn't bad since it was only one item and Aron wasn't a hard find. However, when the event was released, caught Arons held the item (and many of the other spawns held snow powders), which was fixed a few days into the event. I know staff are, uh, short-staffed, but this is not the first time this has happened - events are released with problems like this, and they're fixed partway through, giving earlier players an advantage (I didn't have to faint any Aron, because I knew from other players that I could catch them and receive the item).
Another issue with the quests - and this was a problem with the last event as well - is that the player is given basically no direction. Players who came to the event should certainly be expected to talk to the Lazy Delibird, after which they would complete the invisible presents task, but there was absolutely no clue given that there was anything else to do - my first thought when I finished that part was "... that's it?". Even worse, the NPCs to talk to for the other quests were in houses, and players were taught via the Delibird's quest that NPCs inside the houses were hostile and would throw the player out if seen. The cipher NPC's house was no different in this expectation, since the same script check that stalled movement occurred at the entrance to his house, even though there was no NPC inside that would expel the player. So, the player was on their own to figure all of that out, until some of us did and let others after us know.
Map: 6.5/10. Not much to say about it. As Ramens noted, the grass was annoyingly patchy - there wasn't a single contiguous run of more than 4 tiles of spawn grass. I didn't really like how far the spawn grass was from the PC, or some of the narrow paths around the map (especially in front of the houses - with the script trigger pausing your motion in front of each house, there was no way to avoid that for a house you were passing rather than entering). Other than that, the map was sufficient. I didn't notice any particular mistakes like with the last event's map, and it was fortunately not super maze-y like that one either.
Rewards: 7/10. Ice punch tutor wasn't particularly necessary, since it was available in last year's winter event, and available again in the Jihai Village event for Primeape, the most common poke that needs it - I didn't need to tutor a single poke with that move. Plus, since the spawns didn't have a wintry theme, only four of the spawns could even learn it: Mr. Mime, Mawile, Aron (as Aggron), and Beldum (as Metang or Metagross). Nest balls were nice, but not really helpful for Beldum, since the spawns were levels 20-24, and Nest balls only provide an advantage over Ultra balls for pokes at level 20 and below. Avalanche and Blizzard TMs were nice, Hail TMs were okay, Ice Gem and Icy Rock are intriguing. The negative, though, is what was
not included: two of the common spawns (and by far the most sought-after t1 shinies in the event) - Scyther and Murkrow - are usually built for using Superpower, which would have been a much more useful tutor. Cacturne and Aron also can learn and make use of this move.
Overall: 8.1/10 (no, I didn't average the above scores). Good event with generous spawns and fresh quests that didn't feel haphazardly rushed like the last one.