I really hate the design of this event. Especially that 3 card buff on the farms. I have my tree with a 24 hour cd now, so run it 6 hours a day and since it is only 6 hours, can't run it overnight easily so basically now I have 6 hours I can't do adventures/coops since it feels like such a waste to run them for the small amount of refills you get without the valentine buff.
Then you have people looking for others to help with coops or looking for people for loot spots, you almost have to have the entire guild in sync on that tree usage.
I'm just using zombies the rest of the time. Means I need to keep using stop buffs, but those are cheap enough.
I'm having good success with loot swaps. Originally I didn't think I wanted to bother, but it seems to be pretty good.
There are a number of things that is wrong with this event. Starting with needing more farms, and a better drop rate. This event and others could be made much more interesting instead of just a adventure grind fest. Grind fests get old and boring fast. You can do much better if you really want to. I do have a number of really good ideas, and I am willing to help. Maybe you should hire me as a consultant if your interested.
There really should NOT be anything available for gems that is not also available for event items.
Christmas was noticeably better than Valentine's Day.
More like Christmas. One of the better events in some time.
Less like Valentine's Day - Bottlenecks (Flower Farms, Cemeteries, etc) suck. Eventually it doesn't matter how many Refills you get, because you don't have the time to use them. *Especially* with only two weeks to load them up and three (total) to empty them. Consider a longer Event. Drop rates were disappointing.
The only decent aspect was stacking PFB, Cards, and Prem for Adv loot/XP/etc, and the only part of that that is Valentine's specific is the Cards.
Sending out 80+ Explorers still sucks, especially for such paltry returns.
Still not even thinking about spending any money on Gems until 'after' we see:
a) How stable things are on Unity.
b) How fast BB deals with long-standing issues.
I found this year to be a lot better than last. A year's worth of explorers helped offset last year's nerf, and love tree became a lot easier to use. Of course, the drawback to that is that it meant probably 45 minutes a day of mindless clicking. Not particularly taxing, though tedious. Unlike last year, this year I was satisfied with explorer returns. The triple loot/XP made it worth the effort to fill up the farms. I didn't bother doing any co-op, but I used almost all my 2nd Thief and swapped a bunch of loot spots.
Having love tree below 24 hours is really nice. Same also for the scouting post/observatory time reduction.
I ended up learning how to use the block and ignore functions. During an event about cooperation. Kind of annoying that you're forced or at least strongly need to swap, but there's not actually a mechanism in game to facilitate the process. Still, overall I had a lot of interactions with many people that I mostly would not have otherwsise and all but one were positive.
I'm taking the exact same approach on (a) and (b) before spending currency on the game again. My time investment is already expensive. I need a strong reason to spend money, too.