I've just been pissed off this whole weekend because of this event due to the horrible choices the devs made this year.
Researching cure does nothing to help your nation - WHY??? This makes zero sense, at the very least stop new zombies from generating. At high levels slightly diminishing the zombie population!!
AFK to go to sleep with 1B (out of 12B) zombies - wake up with no attacks/cures and 8B of my citizens are dead and 4B are zombies. WTF??? Did they all just decide to kill themselves because of this terrible event??? In a region of hundreds of thousands of nations, it is just unrealistic to expect them to monitor every nation for increasing zombie count. Hell, I posted in our RMB many times during the event and still didn't get the time of day to be put on any sort of watch list.
USING CURES/MISSILES/HOARDS SHOULD INCREASE RESEARCH PERCENT. This is the part that blows my mind. What kind of fucking moron decides that the research level should depend of the region as a whole and only update once an hour?? At the absolute minimum, let us earn exp towards research by being active in the event. Then consider our nations population - more people = more research. Then toss on some bonuses (or hindrances) for our accomplishments in scientific advancement/military/healthcare/weaponization/whatever to increase the speed in which we research.
I think next year I'm just going to give Max Barry the finger and go do something else.