Making Events Opt-in?

[Hazgod]

I hate it when people say "too complicated" when they clearly have no idea of how it works. It would be incredibly simple to just reward the people who opted in to the event. This HAS to be done otherwise I just can't be bothered to "compete" in these events where we're just screwed going against the german servers. Up to 100% before it was tweaked they were progressing 3* faster than us. They should progress at the same rate, make them collect 3* more than us. MAKE IT COMPETITIVE otherwise it is just a waste of time. Make it opt in so the people who "can't be bothered" (who can blame them really, why bother with the effort for a small amount of gems when it's impossible for most of the servers to hit 200%) won't be counted in the progress then decide what is reasonable for 1 player to donate towards the event. That amount * number of opted in players = progress. Auto opt out the ones who aren't taking part. Do something to make these events not totally pointless for anyone but the top german servers

[Gerontius]

Given that BB couldn't even calculate server groupings for a fair fight as the event currently stands, do you really think they're up to doing the calculations if there's an additional opt-in stage?

[Zotamedu]

Given that BB couldn't even calculate server groupings for a fair fight as the event currently stands, do you really think they're up to doing the calculations if there's an additional opt-in stage?

Not only that, they can't even make the event work properly.

[MrBranch]

Can we start defining 'participating'?

As a low level player, I'm not really participating if you'd compare it to donations of 50k balloons of high level players.
I finish all my quests and donate the balloons. All balloons I get from our cousin (or whoever it is), plus everything I find via treasure search is donated.

The Shaman made a huge gap in my resources and as low level player you're not swimming in your resources yet. I don't want simply to waste them on making balloons. Nevertheless, I participated with about 2K balloons by doing the above.
It's not a large contribution and neither I'm producing balloons to my absolute max. But it's still a contribution that counts if all low level players are doing the same thing.

So, I'm just wondering what the definition of 'participation' is.

This thread starting with a game suggestion, but in the meanwhile it's just people complaining a lot, while BB is trying to make this static game less boring with a new event. Of course there are bugs: it has not been tested in a live situation.
So if you don't like it, just stop donating balloons. But please stop complaining and come up with useful suggestions.
Or simply don't say anything and play your own game.

The suggestion in this thread is: make it possible for players to indicate that they don't want to participate in events, so that teams (server combinations) can be chosen more adequately. So let's get back to this suggestion:

Good suggestion, but my personal suggestion would be: stop using events based on servers. There's no logic in that and you'll never get it balanced.
Rather simply divide all participating players who enlisted over groups, while taking into account that all groups must be evenly balanced from a player level point of view.