The new servers are brilliant ideas. Though I am a vet and don't personally need them, I think its great for any beginning player to learn the game mechanics on such a server. And to top it all off, it teaches you to travel to another server to progress. Might as well call them tutorial servers.
But the event... that really screws it up. Would have been much better to just come out and say it that you no longer want to do events. First off, from a PR standpoint, you really screwed it up with it coinciding with Mother's Day. Intentional or not, it was a mistake. Worst is not to give 2x taming. I get that breeding 2x is out of discussion, due to the whole server cap issue. Taming could be viewed in the same way, but there's one difference. Taming 2x does one thing great: it allows to tame creatures with mutton very close to kibble levels. This means a lot of players are very happy to trade off a few levels so that they don't have to build massive kibble farms. I am one of them. I don't have 10 of each dinos, just so that i can kibble tame anything under the sun. Anything that's just an utility dino, I use mutton. Now the difference between 1x and 2x mutton taming is HUGE. So not giving 2x taming basically cancels all the great work you did by introducing mutton...