The first month of the revised Darkmoon Faire is in the books, and my mage has snagged a total of 75 tickets. The breakdown here was 20 tickets for six tradeskill quests (once per month, also good for five free skill points in the related skills), 10 for the general kill quest, 35 for doing five carnival game dailies every day for seven days, and 10 from a dungeon drop - I won one of only two I saw drop during the week.
By my standards, I played WoW pretty heavily this week to get even that many tickets. According to
Blizzard's post on the topic, I earned less than half of what is theoretically possible in a month, but they claim that the half I missed will be easier to gain in future iterations because you can get the random dungeon drops anytime, not just when the Faire is active. If what I got this month is representative of what I'm going to get normally, I would have to repeat what I did this week every month for twelve months just to get the minipets and mounts currently on the vendor.
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| Six pets at 90 tickets and 2 mounts, at 180 tickets |
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On some level, these are all cosmetic rewards, and it therefore doesn't "matter" if I obtain them all. (The six minipets do represent by far the largest trove of pets that I don't own that can be easily obtained, but we also can't be sure that these won't be account-wide when Pandaria hits - being able to farm them on alts would dramatically speed this time.) There are a lot of tents in the Faire that are closed for "construction", raising the possibility that more ticket-earning activities will be possible in future years. (Note: I meant to write "patches" instead of years, but the Freudian slip seems appropriate given Blizzard's patch cycle.) For that matter, there's an argument to be made that a Veteran reward that actually requires in-game activity is more interesting than one that you get just for paying up, with the caveat that players would need to be available the week the Faire is open to get their tickets for that month.
That said, the fact remains that this is a game that charges a monthly fee. I would have no complaint if this event was open year-round so I could work on it at my leisure. Having an event that requires me to drop what I'm doing and work on it for the first week of every month, at the risk of losing my monthly token allowance, does not strike me as especially fun.
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| Consolation prize: a bunch of easy achievements |
Wow, I thought after the Darkmoon Faire got its own special area that it would become year round. I had no idea it's still open only one week of every month. You're right, it would be so much easier to be able to work on it at my leisure, especially since I would be playing so sporadically if and when I sub again.
ReplyDeleteThe point is exactly what you wrote: you don't need them, they are just fluff. WoW has been going in this direction for some time: if you raid/pvp all you need to do is raid/pvp, but if you want decorative stuff, it's nightmare of farming (well, at least according to my standards). I know for sure that I will never have all those items, actually if I even manage a single one, I'll surprise myself...
ReplyDeleteBut the good thing, it doesn't interfere in any way with the activity I like to do in WoW: raiding.
If you went at it hard core and only got 75 tickets, the things you can buy seem pretty horribly overpriced to me (based on what you showed).
ReplyDeleteI like that it's only available for a week each month; makes it feel more like a special event and a treat instead of just another grind.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'm not sure whether "how long would it take me to get all the things" is really a fair way to evaluate rewards that are designed with the very idea that they are not needed for anything and nobody gains an in-game advantage from having any of them. That strikes me as similar to judging the prices in a F2P MMO by adding up the value of all its cosmetic items together.