Well as far as i know/heard from the GMs there is no rule or anything for how monster trials should be :o
If i remember correct i heard a few times that "the first round isn't necessary the easiest and the 5th isn't always the hardest". I guess you could see it as a challenge where you are never sure what you're up against instead of from "easy to harder" type of rounds. Personally i never have any expectations from monster trails and just see what i'm up against when i enter the portal. I think its mostly the players that believe its from easy to hard but there are no specifications about that on the wiki nor the forums o.o
Pinkies sucked though but mostly because they have high Mdef (60) and only 20 vit so for me as creator they where kinda hard xD I misclicked and killed my homun, then ran into 3-4 at one time and died. If it wasn't for those extra points Panda gave us i would have ended with 35 points because i ran away from the Dolor XD Overall a lot of people would have probably managed to make about that amount of points if it wasn't for the extra points from Panda. I ended up with 50 because of that.
As another note, may i say that i find it extremely rude how some players react to 'mistakes' and some problems that happened. Sorry but honestly the GMs spend a lot of their time to events like these and shit happens but i don't see any reason why anyone thinks they can be a jerk about it :/ Be glad ToH is so short nowadays and that it still happens *remembers ToH's up to 6 hours and more*. /endofrant.
At first i was a little bit intimidated by the amount of items we had to gather because it was so divers and from so many monsters. However i was even more surprised when i managed to get 45 points because i never expected to get past 30. It seems a lot of people ended up around 20-35ish points.
PvP was fun, i joined in to help out with the battles. It was really enjoyable even though i don't like PvP.
Trivia was in my opinion balanced because i never assume to get more then 1-2 questions correct. Though i did think the last bonus one was a bit weird with the "suicided", while typing it doesn't show it as correct even now XD Though English isn't my first language i always thought it was "she committed suicide last year" and not "she suicided last year" but maybe that's me.
All in all i think it was a balanced ToH, i ended up with 120 points.
I felt so bad for one person in my team who missed 1 point >< I wish you could donate 1 point to someone from the same alliance if you wanted to.
Thanks for the hard work you guys