That may be, but did those events have idiotic fireworks and sparklers? Never mind, it doesn't matter. I found that the Albion crates were about middle of the road.
We've had sparklers and fireworks as rewards before. They're a gag gift and always have been; useful only for tooling around in training rooms for clan skirmishes and the like. I remember for one practice battle we had in DRACS my team loaded up on fireworks instead of a useful consumable and freaked out the opposing team, which thought for about 4 seconds that they were under mass rocket attack. It would be nicer/different if we could use these completely cosmetic items without having to sacrifice an actually useful consumable slot.
World of Tank's normal event boxes are pretty darn terrible, (even the decorations they give are usually more useless level 1 variations!), although their paid-for boxes ANYTHING is reasonable OPindrop rate EVERYTHING!.( the bolded terms meaning World of Tanks is pretty much Pay2Win now, don't bother with it.)
I wouldn't judge too harshly there on Tanks. I played Tanks casually (very casually) this Christmas season and still managed to get tier VIII Festive Atmosphere, and I didn't even play on the first day where the stuff was glitched and you could basically get to tier IX Festive Atmosphere just by putting in six+ hours of play. Two to four games a night took me from I to VIII and I got three female commanders out of the deal. It wasn't a bad event, and I didn't even buy any of the Santa Crates there. I did buy the smallest denomination of Santa crates here and in Warships, though.
World of Warplanes' crate situation is similar, except there aren't any decorations to grind, and the boxes here for Albion were near-pointless as their best rewards(the missions) were either impossible to complete for free or infected with rage-inducing bugginess.
I got the ten dollar Santa pack here and pulled the tier V Junkers Ju.88A out of it. No missions to do, she just appeared in my hangar. Acquiring her this way denied me the unique camo and emblem but meh. I acquired the Do.17Z featured here via a non-purchased Albion loot crate, and it required missions, which I managed to complete before the following day's event. Aside from those two planes the other things I got from Albion loot boxes were the Cheetah camo for the Bf.109B tier IV light fighter, about a week's worth of premium time, about 200 gold, around 27 free tokens, approximately 25k free experience and some free hangar slots and barracks bunks. Overall I would say I made out very well for this event considering I missed out on six days of it due to family time for Christmas, and only devoting about 90 minutes of play nightly to earn two loot crates that would be doubled to four on the likely result of an allied victory.
You have a very good point on the bug ridden nature of this event, though. Waffles got a +3 Hurricane pilot from one of his first loot boxes, then a later one awarded him the Hurricane and when the plane arrived its +1 pilot overwrote the +3 pilot Waffles already had. THAT would really irritate me. The fact that missions you had a limited time to complete would glitch out and not complete basically forced you to spend money on something you should have been able to earn for free. That didn't sit well with me either. So, Skies of Albion wasn't a terrible event; it was actually quite good...but where it had problems, they were BIG ones.
The boxes, again, when paid for, were quite good, but as for their earnable brethren, not so much. The earnable crates were piss-poor(20,000 credits and 2 sparkers? REALLY!?!? THAT'S ALL!?!?) most of the time, and what wasn't terrible was either extremely rare, or bugged out(again, the missions come to mind).
I'll agree and disagree here. The Santa crates were indeed very good; they always have been. As I relayed earlier, I did earn the crate that allowed me to earn the Do.17Z. The two extra loot crates I would purchase for six tokens nightly did not have a considerably greater yield over the ones I could earn for free and I eventually stopped Ordering extra loot crates entirely.
Then we come to World of Tanks and Warplane's more recent relative, World of Warships. Now, way back when, WoWS strayed from the path of Tanks and Warplanes, and got rid of the ridiculous, impossible-for-new-players-due-to-their-not-having-a-vehicle-at-all-3-sets-of-tiers daily missions. It instead got something more useful(and that could be easily integrated with crate events): Daily crates. Now, these are usually pretty poor.
HOWEVER, they can often have something semi-rare in them, or even if they don't, EVERYTHING they give is quite practical, unlike WoWP sparkers and fireworks. What's more, you can choose the type of crate you get by selecting a category, meaning if you are running short on camos,(camos are used per battle in WoWS) you can simply select the category "Flags and Camouflages" and you'll be pretty much guaranteed to get some free camos.
Oh, and their buyable Secret Santa Boxes are the best of all. They give you a free Tier II-IV ship about an average of 1 every 3-4(cheap variety) boxes. The more expensive ones however, slash this ration down to about 1 free Tier II-IV ship every 2 boxes.
What is your opinion, Magnus?
I agree, the ship Santa crates were awesome this year.