It’s a bit cliché to say that I haven’t participated in a World of Warcraft world event ever since I completed What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been, but it is mostly true. I’ve gone back briefly here and there when I want something new, mainly when it involves corgis. However, Noblegarden is one event I really haven’t gone back to despite the addition of a few things I wanted over the years. A huge reason for this was how painful collecting the eggs was when I worked on the meta-achievement.

The old only one person could loot the eggs thing was terrible. It was either people mad dashing all over the place trying desperately to click the eggs first or people camping out in one spot. I found a nice spot where I could camp four egg spawns and get them as soon as they spawned without moving. It was incredibly efficient but exemplified my least enjoyed type of content. When I play games, I want to do things. Standing around doing nothing so I can click on an egg every few minutes is incredibly boring. I don’t have the patience for that.

With the recent change to allow multiple people to loot the eggs before they despawn, running around looking for them felt like a much more reliable way to go about things. I was also quite amused to see all the other players running around collecting them as well, and it was a fun social event. Over the few days in WoW, while I worked on getting enough chocolate to buy everything I didn’t already have, I also saw many new players trying out the event as well. Since no one was a threat to each other, we could chill and help each other out. It’s honestly the first time the event has ever felt fun for me. So that was a welcome surprise.

Unfortunately, anytime people are having fun; other people have to try and cause problems and get in the way of people having fun. I saw both putting a ton of toys down on the egg spawns and dropping feasts on them. Most of the time, the eggs were still lootable through creative camera angling and zooming in. The interact button also helped a ton because I often found it much easier to get the highlight on the egg and use that keybind to get it. So, the trolling wasn’t the end of the world or anything, but it wasn’t enjoyable, but this is how it always is at any group event.

At this point, I would have thought that Blizzard would just make things that are interactable unusable around any public event. I know that probably would stomp a bit on RP players who might legitimately want to do things around events, but unfortunately, people have shown themselves unable to refrain from being crappy. As I said, it wasn’t the end of the world, and toys/feasts do despawn reasonably quickly.

However, that doesn’t stop someone without anything better to do from spending hours putting things down to try and make life harder for people trying to enjoy the event. It also makes a terrible experience for those new players I mentioned. New players don’t always know the tricks to get around trolls, and running into this kind of thing can create a very negative experience, which can color how they view the rest of WoW and the players in general.

I was also reminded of another, less important but no less annoying, issue while working on chocolate gathering: getting a mount drops when I already have the mount. This isn’t just an issue with Noblegarden; I’ve also seen it happen in raids. Having a mount drop when I already have it is incredibly frustrating because I can’t give it to someone else or even vendor it.

The only option is to delete, which wastes time for something that shouldn’t happen in the first place. It feels like it shouldn’t be too big of an ask not to have unlocked mounts drop for me. This year I had the Noblegarden mount drop twice, and both times I already had it. Even in the raid, the person who got the second drop couldn’t trade it to anyone else in the raid. It’s ridiculous.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with Warcraft's Noblegarden this year. I met some new people and had interesting conversations, which usually doesn’t happen a lot. Since there was so much I was missing from the vendor, I spent quite a few hours at it, and I plan to go back and finish up some more things. I’m even considering participating in some upcoming events, especially if they will update them to make them more enjoyable like they did here. Did you participate in Noblegarden at all this year?

PS – The dragonriding flower basket should be visible when the dragon is on the ground in addition to when they are flying. Please and thank you.