While I'm usually very admiring of PWE's nefarious marketing schemes, I think they've failed with HotK's CNY celebrations.
... technically, if you kill these snowmen, you get a chance to get a card. Collect all 5 cards, get some kind of shiny. Usually, players would be all over them. Only... the snowmen take about 2-3 minutes to kill, and you can only gain 4 cards per hour. Snowmen cages, however, load in player inventories every ?hour? or so. As a result, there's a massive invasion of snowmen that players by and large are totally uninterested in killing.
And then there's the New Year Statues.
Now, if PWE had limited them to oh, 5 tokens per character over the entire duration of the event, I'm sure they'd be worth a lot more - and more used.
As it is, I get 1 every hour (I think) that I'm online, and afk. Which strangely, has the effect of making me utterly uninclined to use them. When I only had ONE of the things... I was tempted. Now that I have 20, I'm not tempted at all. It's just easier to leave them in my inventory until the event is over. You can't even sell the things, no one wants them. I see some people trying to sell them. I see no one buying.
Add that to the fact that HotK just had an update... which bugged out the combat and made everyone hit like non-ninja bunnies - that means even MORE people sitting around town spawning even more snowmen that no one wants to kill while accumulating more New Year Statues that no one wants to buy... XD
And why, you ask, is everyone sitting around AFK instead of just logging off? Well, PWE likes to reward you for staying logged on no matter what. They don't care if you're AFK. They don't care what you do. They just want you to stay logged on. And because of that, every 30 min for the duration of this festive season, characters get a token that they can right-click for about 30% of their level's worth of xp - it scales. As well as other rewards.
And so, the snowmen slowly take over the Middle Kingdom. Hee!