Children's Week, and a Tweak to Dailies

I'd been dreading Children's Week for two reasons:

- The Daily Chores achievement, which had to be functionally removed. (I'm pretty sure the counter somehow went backwards from 3/5 to 1/5 when I logged out for an hour or so on Friday, so I promptly did the remaining four quests to get it over with and safely no longer subject to resetting.)

- The PVP achievement, which you can read about at Klep's place. This achievement turned out to be much easier than I expected. EOTS and AB were trivial, WSG was an irritating click-fest, but one that only took 20 minutes or so, and AV took me three attempts because there are only four objectives to capture. I fully endorse Scott Jennings' critiques of this achievement, but it turned out to be relatively tame from an incentive/time ratio perspective - your milage may vary if you're not sporting 800+ resilience from faithfully farming Wintergrasp and Archavon.

I already had the two cooking recipes and ingredients banked before the holiday (Daria reports high prices if you had to buy everything, though probably still cheaper than the time it would take you to farm up the ingredients yourself), and the rest of the holiday was quick and easy. Unless Blizzard manages to break some portion of the Fire Festival, my chances of getting the drake are looking reasonably good.

Collecting randomized dailies
One thing that appears to have changed in the 3.1 patch is that you can now obtain more than one of certain randomized daily quests. Previously, if a questgiver offers one of a selection of daily quests each day and you have a previous one in your quest log, you cannot get the current one. Now there are some daily quests (not all of them) that allow you to collect multiples if you come back on subsequent days - examples I have seen so far are the daily quests from the Frenzyhearts, and the Argent Tournament valiant "go get a weapon" quests.

Why would you want to do this? To use the latter example, the only effort in those particular argent tourney quests is the travel. I don't think it's worth my while to do ONE of the three quests due to the sheer time involved. If, on the other hand, you collect all three over subsequent days, you can combine them all into one big loop - get the flowers at the dam in Crystalsong, kill the fire elemental above the Crystalsong -> Dragonblight border, drop off the flowers at the edge of Grizzly Hills, go kiss frogs in the Grizzly Hills, fly south just across the border to the Fjord to thaw out the dryad, and finally fly (or teleport/hearth) back to turn in all three. Because so much of the time is spent on travel and so much of the travel overlaps, it actually becomes worth doing all three quests when you can get them all at once.

(Collectively, this makes the Argent tourney relatively lucrative - two of the champion dailies overlap with two of the valiant dailies, and then you can clear out the three valiant weapon dailies 1-2 times per week on top of that. The Frenzyhearts are looking similarly profitable, with the chance to clear out most of their quests in a single loop around Sholazar if you wait a bit.)

Obviously, not doing all the daily quests every day will slow your progress somewhat. However, this can be a good thing - less daily quest burnout, more flexibility to do other things (such as doing holiday achievements, or cherry-picking the most rewarding dailies each day), and better time /played to reward ratios. It's nice to have an option that doesn't cause you to lose too much ground if you just don't get to everything every night.