I play a few other games, all of which have events at least occasionally. Two of them have events more or less constantly, as far as I can tell -- sometimes multiple
different events running
at the same time. For
days. And yet... it's not exhausting the way events have come to be here.
One of the games has three kinds of events: one in which you get a small prize every day (leading up to a nice big prize at the end if you collect all the smaller ones) and the other in which you earn points each time you do something that you will definitely be doing anyway, with a final prize for how much you end up doing of it, and one that's sort of more complicated but ultimately you can do it or not. It's really win-win for all three cases! You can choose to participate or not, you don't have to do anything you don't want to, and if you do decide to participate, everything you do to get the prize benefits you.
The other game has... I don't even know, five or six kinds of events? Running sometimes all at once? One category I don't like because you can get pretty far and then suddenly you can't do anything without spending real money. Funny enough, that one is structured the most like the Elvenar events. The other kinds of events either do not affect your game play literally at all
or they might cause you to do something slightly differently than you'd planned, but still in a way that ultimately benefits you.
Which is to say: it is completely possible to run events all the time without burning out all of your players and/or requiring them to do things they feel are detrimental to their cities in order to progress. Sure, no event will please all your players! But there's a difference between events that not everyone likes (for whatever reason) and events that leave a significant number of players stressed and burned out from the outset. The event teams clearly put a lot of thought into their storylines, and the artists do a really beautiful job with the event artwork. Why isn't that same effort going into the mechanics and structure to make the players happier?
My Beta city was in a position to build the Woodelves settlement well over a month ago. I started building it
yesterday. Part of this is on me; I was sick with some horrible cold for a lot of December and pretty out of it, and I didn't want to sell off all my pretty buildings from the last event, and I could have done that differently. I take responsibility for that. But even so, my city still has very little extra space available, and I had the choice of putting in any extra event buildings and building my settlement up. I don't think this is a reasonable choice to demand of players.
I also completely agree with
@Aramina that we shouldn't have to be in a constant state of readiness in case an event pops up, especially not after one of the longer events. It's sort of the gaming equivalent of always living out of your suitcases in case you have to make a run for it, and for a lot of people, that's just stressful.