Greetings! First and foremost, as stated in the title, this is a rant. This is me yelling at a cloud. Don't expect this to be a serious, data-backed analysis of the stuff I'll talk about.
Secondly, this is written from the perspective of someone who usually can't spend many hours grinding event stuff. "Just grind it" ain't useful feedback, given said context.
So I've been trying to get my hands on that sweet Oaken Order Armor they've added with this event. I really dig both the design and the theme. As usual, I logged in, did my dailies... you know the drill. I did not get it on the boxes awarded by the quests, but I didn't worry about it -I was sure I'd get it on the boxes dropped by vents or world bosses, anyway-. No luck. Shrugged, logged in my 2nd account and repeated the process with the same result... maybe it wasn't my day, so I just called it a day. So today I logged it, did the same and... you guess. Nothing. I really want the armor, though, and since today I had time enough to spare. I decided to grind it for a while. One hour, two, three, four...
...Still nothing. I scratched my head and started asking in /zone, guildmates etcetera. Most of them have told me the same, the luckiest ones got to loot a single Oaken page. Fellow /zone pals more or less the same, with a few lucky ones that did get their motif both days. I start thinking about it, and realize this has been a thing that's been slowly snowballing over time. And it frustrates me.
I played ESO back when there was no daily limit on how much motifs you could get. You just played the event, which rewarded you with a generous amount of motifs you could either trade for gold or store in your guild bank so future newbies could have access to them, no grind asked. For me that was wonderful, since I could bring new friends to ESO and hand them a bunch of cosmetics, making them feel welcome and wanting to further engage with the game. I adored that.
Now? You can barely get enough of them for yourself (and you may even need to spend tickets for missing pieces, see my 2nd initial point). Don't even think about giving motifs out unless you're real lucky. Everything's carefully calculated so you don't get many extra pages. The drop rate has been slowly decreasing, more so this year, to the point that getting the full armor is a chore, rather than rewarding. Imho they should tweak both the daily limit (if not removing it) and the drop rate so you don't have to spend hours to get a motif page. This is getting out of hand.