Happy Midsummer Fire Festival all! Ironically, I say that despite feeling the exact opposite way about it. There are few things in World of Warcraft that SlashNoob doesn’t like. However, there are a few, and probably one of the biggest is holidays. Now before you get all righteous on me, let me explain.
First off, I will concede that the idea of holidays is brilliant. Providing different gaming opportunities only once a year reminds me that my life is truly dedicated to WoW as missing any great length of time can cause you to miss a lot. The festivals themselves are wonderful, mostly merrymaking and fun ensue as players get to dress up in outrageous outfits, throw stuff at each other and do things they can’t normally do the rest of the time.
But that’s where it stops for me, and I’ll tell you why. There are two reasons, #1. Achievements for holiday quests are exclusive to the end game player only, and #2 with that exclusivity comes wonderful bounty that only few can enjoy. I’m not a hater, at least I don’t want to be, but I feel this time like WoW is giving me no choice. Alright, maybe I am a hater.
In this author’s humble (yeah right) opinion, festivals are to be enjoyed by everyone. Adventurers from level 1 to 80 should be able to enjoy themselves and with a little effort achieve all the quests that the festival has to offer. To me, the emphasis should be on being there, not sucking all of your time out of you. The emphasis on this is the meta-achievement (otherwise known as the REALLY REALLLY HARD achievement) that once completed gives you a beautiful proto-drake. Now this is awesome, for the 2% of the people who can keep up with it and have a character high enough to complete the quests/achievements.
The problem, for those of you NOT level 80, you don’t get the chance to complete them all because some of the quests take you into heroic instances in Northrend, something you most certainly can not do before that 80th ::DING::. To me, this takes part of the fun out of the game, because for those players who want to focus on alts and progressing with each at whichever pace they like are now penalized for it. Are they less valuable of a user? I would suggest not. But yet Blizzard keeps creating and destroying items that are cool to make sure the few who found them remain feeling cool.
This brings me to my other annoyance with holidays as too many times all the spoils go to end game player. What about creating a ride able proto-drake at level 60 Blizzard, or one that you can just buy with just one hundred gold? Make it green and ugly, I don’t care. What about making one available without having to replay one instance 11,000,000,000 times over? Why not make ONE available for those of us who can’t donate 40 hours a week to playing? Would it be so bad?
Unfortunately, Blizzard’s answer to me would undoubtedly be “YES, it is too much trouble” and I can understand why. The fact that I spent time complaining to all of you omgRPG folks proves the value of the proto-drake mount as it is designed to cultivate desire between the haves and the have nots. That’s also why you also don’t see us WoW writers decked out in Tier 8.5 gear the first day of patch 3.1. It’s because what the few have, the many will want, and thus you have us hooked again. What can we say? We’re suckers for a pretty dragon.
Now, if you don’t mind, I need to stick on my party hat, and get out there and breath fire. It is a holiday after all and no one should be this cranky!!
