As
@JawJaw mentioned there has been a lack proper feedback to improve events on I will give some structured feedback on why there is not a single player I know in my tribe on either of the two worlds I play who enjoys this event.
The idea of having these kinds of fights which gain xp and distance travelled is fine, however the main issue is how frustrating the mechanics of this event are as well as how underpowered the rewards are compared to other events.
Everyone wants to get the 40% res packets from the 800km distance travelled reward, if only winning battles it would take 32 battles to get there sadly the amount of frustrating losses drive that number up way higher.
The combat is very simple, I can see the developers thought of how picking out what units hit what targets for maximum damage per cycle of turns could be an interesting game mechanic for this event, sadly the number of times a player actually experiencing a feeling of "outplaying" the AI is rare even when trying to.
Due to the number of fights players have to grind to get the 800km travelled as well as how boring the fights are after you've done 10 fights causes players to mostly just hit the target the most to the right as that target has the highest offensive capabilities as well as the least health so the easiest to take out which makes it the best target 9/10 times.
There being barely any strategy in choosing targets makes the fights boring, especially when you have to do a 100 fights to get to the 40% res pack.
What makes this event severely frustrating is the way fights are lost, you can make the best possible choices 5 games in a row and lose all 5.
For example, this is a game where I have made 0 moves and already lost:
These occurrences of unwinnable fights are actually quite frequent.
From my experience the AI usually outlevels the player (unless spending a lot of PP) and with the AI moves being randomised with maybe a bit of a preference for the higher targets (untested but that is how it feels), games won and lost are decided on the draw of the amount of AI attacks coming out before your own and sometimes the AI targetting the least favorable target for the AI causing the player to win, barely ever it's the player himself winning the fight with an outplay or anything simular which makes the whole fighting part of this event extremely boring and a meaningless grind.
The rewards:
Simply said, the rewards suck compared to other events. This is an event where you can't choose your own rewards like in other events so you'd assume the number of powerful items overall would be higher than in events where you pick your own rewards in a world where events are balanced, yet this event players barely get any decent items.
Most chests have 1 decent item, which is the 5% chance one while some also have the 10% chance item being useful.`
With the event being 96 hours long and assuming i open the same amount of big/medium/small chest right on the second when possible, this is an average of 5 hours per chest which would be 19 chests over the course of the event total. 5% on a top item means about 1 in 20 chests have such an item which means 1 top item for most players during the entire event and 2 decent items as well.
This is way lower than in any other event I have played, it almost feels unrewarding to even put in the time to play this event because the rewards feel mostly unrewarding, the combat is boring and all other events are a lot better for getting actual rewards.
The PP spending:
Usually, PP gets players a ton of extra useful items.
In this event, Inno chose to have players pay 40pp per hour of runtime of the chest when the instant opening is triggered, so 120pp for a small chest, 200 for a medium and 320 for a big chest.
In the last event (which was overpowered), 320pp got someone with a medium favourable recipe a triple rare item, so for example a 30% res pack, closest comparable with the best reward in a big chest. Where in the last event 320pp got you a guaranteed top item, in this event it gets the player a 5% chance at a top item, making this event 20 times worse to spend pp on than last one.
Actually, the difference is even bigger, for that 320pp in the last event the player could choose which item he wanted while he has to rely on RNG what item is the top item in his chest for this event.'
Conclusion:
The addition of the fast battle speed and running away is great but also shows the developers understand the problems with the event being the huge grinding aspect and the unwinnable battles right off the bat however they decided to re-release this event with bandaid fixes instead of actually fixing the event itself which is sad.
Previously players have stated that the event was boring and it has been brought out with the same issues in the combat which made the event itself boring.
If the rewards weren't hugely underpowered, players would be more interested in actually timing opening chests when they come available and get more xp that way and have the smaller level difference take away some of the frustration maybe? but a better fix would be to majorly overhaul the event itself or just scrap it imo.