This past week I found myself without anything I wanted to work on in World of Warcraft, which is kind of a new thing for me. I’d recently gotten my Heart level to 67, so there wasn’t much point in working on that more. I mean, I could keep pushing on it to get it as high as possible before 8.3, but I didn’t enjoy that process to get to that point, so I don’t feel inclined to keep pushing on gathering azurite. My alts are great, but I’m at the point of having to gear my Monk up, and that’s not exciting even with Benthic gear. All of this thought about what to do in led me to the idea of giving Pilgram’s Bounty a go.
Doing one of the annual events is honestly something that hasn’t occurred to me ever since I got the What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been achievement back in 2009. Unlike some achievements I don’t have any bad memories of trying to get this one. It’s pretty straight forward; I just had to complete a handful of world events. Of course, it does take about a year to complete since these events occur throughout the year. I do remember there were some events where it was a bit of a pain to get through, but that was more due to the fact I was in my Junior year at college and had some of my hardest classes that year. I did, however, feel compelled to complete it for the mount because back then there were far fewer mount options. Hilariously though, I can’t remember the last time I used the violet protodrake.
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Nonetheless, ever since I finished that achievement, I haven’t participated in any world events. There are a couple where I did things out of habit, went and looked for eggs during Noblegarden, or did some of the Brewfest things for the heck of it. There were even a few times I did some of the events with friends because they were working on the meta achievement. However, I’ve never done any of them entirely or felt compelled to do them. Even the addition of transmog items and toys hasn’t been enough to lure me back into participating in the events.
In this general milieu, I suddenly realized I’ve never actually participated in Pilgrim’s Bounty at all. It isn’t part of the meta achievement, and I’m reasonably sure it wasn’t added to WoW until after I had already gotten my achievement. As a result, I had precisely none of the achievements for this event and everything about it was new to me, which was exciting. As weird as it is to say as I am writing about a game I’ve been playing for 15 years, I love new things. I had a lot of fun traveling around to the different cities and eating the feasts. I, however, wish the blasters to turn people into turkeys were more plentiful, or at the very least had multiple charges rather than being single-use. Within the game it isn’t clear how more of these blasters are obtained, which is frustrating. I know we have great out of game resources, but I prefer things being explained in-game as much as is possible.
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One aspect I wish had been more expanded upon in the event is the food fight achievement. While seated at the bounty table, there’s an option to “pass” whatever food you are currently seated at. The food fight achievement happens when food you pass lands on another player’s head. As there’s no way to aim, this achievement seems to be completely RNG based. Which isn’t terrible I got it pretty quickly. It would have been cool if they could have set-up something more interactive and more resembling an actual crazy food fight.
Perhaps if there was a way to interact with the table and pick-up food without sitting in one of the seats. Once a player does this, it could pull up a new menu of options for attack. For anyone who has played Guild Wars 2, there is a system where a player can put on a costume, which then gives them access to different abilities and can fight other players until they get knocked out. Players would have to opt into participating, so the opportunities for griefing would be low, but we could have a fun and interactive actual food fight. There could even be an aspect where you have to stay near the tables to get more food to throw. Also, even if there weren’t exclusive rewards for this it would probably be a ton of fun, and I’d love to see something like this in-game.
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The cooking tie in was also really cool, although my cooking skill outside of Legion and BfA is incredibly neglected on my Druid. As a result, I found myself buying a lot of stuff off the AH to level my skill so I could cook all the things. Which is good for people who like to sell low-level items, but was a bit painful on my already low gold supply. Oddly though I enjoyed this whole process. Despite the fact I mostly do cooking to fill the need for feasts in my guild and outside of doing that I mostly find it an annoying profession to level up, I had fun leveling my skill up so I could make the various dishes for the quests.
After thinking about all of this, I realized the real issue with the World Events is even though they occasionally have new things added, they don’t change very much. For events like the Lunar Festival and Midsummer, it’s still the same type of things to do, just in more places. For other events like Winter Veil and Noblegarden, the variation from year to year is even smaller. There wouldn’t even need to be new and exciting things to do in every event every year, but having some update to the activities would go a long way towards making these events enjoyable again.
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I realize there are some issues with this idea. For example, after a while, all the events would end up having a massive scope if they were to keep adding new things. To keep that under control, somethings would have to be retired. This inevitably would result in some people being upset about old favorites being removed while others would lament never having the opportunity to see the content before it departed. However, having the events be stagnant is even worse. When the only new updates are more of the same kind of activity or just more rewards participating begins to feel pointless and boring. It would be great for the holiday events to be something I could look forward to and be excited to participate in.
