As said above, paints are filler reward, so the fact that they share rarity tiers with useful items is an important part of balancing container rewards. If you give them a different glow, they would still have to stay in the same rarity tier, but then it gets confusing when the same rarity tier has items with different colour glow. Just... deal with it I guess?

skill issue just buy all the paints so only augments are left no matter what.   or just you know... separate container... paints were obviously created as filler reward. now we have like 800+ items in container. we do not need rewards whose whole purpose is to be filler in rare categories anymore. nerfed dead useless trash bot noob augments serve that role. youre gonna look me dead in the eye 👁️ and tell me rubberized rounds for smoky is not as bad as Frigid Coat paint(what you don't know this one)? 

Its really annoying whenever I see an orange glow, only to end up being some animated paint... ;-;   I think paint should just have its own rarity color, so people can expect for the upcoming unbox that it WILL be paint, not some fancy shmancy unlock.

You did mention costs back then and costs now. The only main downside is the score requirement on contracts, but ruby costs from 990 to 290, speedups from 2000 to 1500. just to put it in simple maths, it's generally 60% cheaper, not saying 70 yet without seeing the -2 trigger effects. So let's make it sound a bit worse, maybe 50% reduction in cost. So to lose a lot of pure cosmetic items and gain some augments, most want busted augs. Granted, these may or may not be busted. Along with the first time release of a measly just a turret skin again. The main thing I need to know and confirm is, are the prizes from steps, same as last year. If they are, then this is still more than fine. Sure skin collecters get punched in the gut, have been for a while. Likely means they're holding them for black friday. But for the game to show Hunter DC on the wallpaper with Isida DC this seasonal event too is, well i'm not gonna complete that.   Also, one of the things, that a lotta 'buyers' fail to see is. Assuming they have the money, You always want to hit EVERY -1 (-2) step, because u get prizes for each step u make. More steps = more tile prizes. It's a weird and funny thing.  This holds more truth even at lower ends for small spenders who are going for X checkpoint, since any moves you can't use to complete and reach a checkpoint, are rendered null. This event has always been mainly for grinders with lots of crystals and small-large spenders. This trick or treat event is not made for f2p's.   Saw an image with 140 moves for completion. 140 epic keys, 262 commons, 150 pumpkin nades, 61 tsar and around 3k of each but mines/golds of supplies. On top of checkpoint prizes that is. 28 gold contracts, 8120 tk/rubies, now, tell me it isnt a great event for the grinders, cuz it deffo is.   Last years cost was around 25k ish for such grinders ofc with less rep points needed that time.

Depends on what event you are comparing it with. Some other event from this year or last Trick or treat event? If we compare it with last years event: Last year Rewards: Paint, 4 DC skins, 2 Legendary keys, Rare Shot effect, Module Slot, 30 Nuclear Energies, and 15 of each container This year Rewards: Paint, 1 DC skins, 1 Legendary key, 3 augments, 10 Pumpkin and Tsar Grenades, and 15 of each container Comparatibly, I believe last year there were more rewards with more focus on cosmetics while this year there is less rewards with more focus on augments (Excelsior and Boxer will likely be kind of a cancer as expected, Pulsar Isida probably wont be anything incredibly toxic). I am not surprised they changed the skins for augments in this year's installement as last year they leaned too much into cosmetics making all of the existing DCs available at the same time either from UCs, Elite pass or Minigame. I believe they were hesitant to repeat DC skins again in fear of disinteresting the buyer playerbase, given that a lot of endgame nolifers and buyes probably got all or majority of the existing skins last year. Personally, I think they should have taken some middle road, making at least 1 or 2 old DC skins available in minigame, replacing others with something new to motivate buyers to spend like new cool shot effect and some new augments, and make the rest of old DCs available later in Day of the Dead and/ or Black Friday UCs. As for whether this minigame is better or worse than last year's, the only thing that positively changed is the much cheaper Golden Contract going from 990 to 290, which is significant for sure, making it far more available for buyers and better for f2ps who somehow saved some rubies. However, we must also account for the fact that "Islands of fortune" or whatever they are called now, were only -1 last year while this year they are -2, possibly making progression harder and thus more expensive. And the contract progression itself has been significantly nerfed going from 3 000 to crazy 5 000 points. This also significantly lowers the ammount of contracts you can finish and puts a strain on your other ingame resources like supplies as well as your personal time. Also for pure f2p (just Silver contracts) nothing positive happened. The price is the same, but progression is slower and much more dependent on the islands of fortune coin drop. The other factors like prizes for individual islands, ammount of islands of fortune and the total length of the minigame (103 jumps) seems to be the same as last year. All in all for f2p, its completely nerfed minigame. For buyers it depends whether that GC prize is worth all the negatives (5k exp contracts, -2 islands and questionable prizes for each lap)