I think the Garden Festival was quite successful especially given the first-time nature of the event. I do think there were some small problems with the time frame (and LJ being down certainly didn't help), and possibly having not as many of the luck-based games might be a way to help with the point discrepancy at times (as I kind of think that was probably largely where some of the point issues people had are coming from: if you were really lucky you got a ton of points...but if you weren't, you maybe didn't get hardly any and there were a few instances where that kind of seemed to be a really big gap).

But I don't think anyone is saying the event wasn't fun or didn't go well: it's just a few things to probably consider for the next festival event and I think the ideas of having a longer festival event and perhaps less luck-based games would help out a lot on all fronts--not as much of a rush for people to finish everything and people would have more of an equal opportunity to earn points instead of it being based more on just how lucky they happened to be in a certain game. :)

Trivia and completion-based tasks could be really fun. Trivia games based off of different games or just certain things in the series (such as Moogle trivia or something) might be pretty fun! :D

Mini-contests would be fun too: I guess they would be sort of like UA but smaller scale then? Neat! :)