The merging machinics are kinda interesting, i guess. But its heavily time consuming. By the time i got done spending my event currency on one city i was already getting a migraine and starting to feel psychically bad. - So anything that yields that result, im not a fan of.
One option to speed it up would be to let the dishes do the merge automatically. For example; if you had a dish requiring just a lvl 3 drink. You buy a lot of drink options and you get 6 lvl 1 drinks, then the reciepie has an option to finish it (green check mark). It can use what you have available and then merge from there. - Granteed, its kinda counter productive to the cash in machanics. But it does make some sense. It provides a faster option for those that want it. And those that want to do it manually still can. You could even make the reciepies has two separate check marks for completion. One for using only that item requested, and a second for the merging option. It provides players with more options based on there personal needs.
All that being said... a lot of ppl in my fs mentioned completing all quests and only getting 5-6-7 artifacts.
As for me;
Dom got 210 points, bronze league, 7 artifacts.
Necro got 249 points, silver league, 8 artifacts. + i think it was 1 artifact from silver league.
Both completed all quests, email, ashen phoenix, colleced around city at same time, etc etc. So a 210 vs 249 is pretty far apart considering they started at the same spot.
And the fact that i completed everything there for the event, but still dont get the full evolving reward (on dom) is bs. Just on principle alone. No game should have a system where a player compeltes everything and gets half a reward... And i know its not jsut me, cause a lot of ppl have told me they were in the same situation (Most of them even worse off).
So now we get never ending events... with seasons we have multiple events at once, and many are not even getting a full reward... In what world is this a good strategy for making a game?