Double Miracle Time Weekend

which is still a short term gain vs long term gain thing. your scenario shows one of the possible outcomes(doesn't mean it necessarily will happen) after the short term gain. Whether or not it will become true is up in the air. Events like this is an incentive, but whether the profit gained from this incentive + possible future incentive that has to directly correlate as an outcome of this effect is less than, equal tom or greater than not having the event at all and having people cube like they always have(and will as long as there IS a demand for power) is the question.

to give a hypothetical situation of a negative that happened irl to a classmate of mines studying a specific massage parlor is groupon. Groupon, as some will know is a coupon that works when used in groups. its goal is not really to gain profit but to advertise their business, as they are actually gaining little or even losing profit per groupon use(in this case, was an entire loss, 30$ massage down to 9$ per person in group). They bet on the hopes that with more recognition, people may return and buy a normal treatment. In this case, they actually loss and most people who used the groupon never returned. Of course that's just one of the bad outcomes. Its usually more effective, say in a restaurant business where people are more likely to return.

That scenario may work in MSEA since we've had a grand total of one Miracle Time, but given that cubing-inclined players in GMS know roughly when will a Miracle Time be out I find it unlikely that any but the most desperate people would use cubes for ranking up outside of Miracle Time when using it now has a better chance of getting their desired tier. I don't know how is the case like with other people that cube, but in my case I would not even bother cubing at a high rate unless my item is already unique and above and I don't bother to get to that rank unless there's a discount or I can buy the item pre-cubed.

I wouldn't say Groupon is an excellent example of this in play because unique and legend tier items are effectively useless if you have complete junk potential on them so you will have to re-cube at some point and people who do things like bossing may indeed resort to cubing without discounts if that were the case. In Groupon's case however, what you get from it is not always tied to another event (As you said, that one visits a spa now does not mean they'd re-visit since most people that frequent spas may already have membership) so the chance of a re-visit is less likely than if the discount given was for something important, like say a medical check-up. Also, given that Nexon has at least one of these cube sales in a month I'm going to say that they treat the sales as a long-term plan to get revenue in bursts.