Pros:
- Lot’s of cool rewards!
- Daily accessible World Bosses to help gear up easier are a nice option to have.
- Lot’s of XP buffs to help level characters.
- Black Rock Depths raid is pretty cool to see and with Classic Timewalking it was a lot of fun to see updated versions of old content. Not sure how much I’ll enjoy doing the Timewalking dungeons for the weekly quest complete past the first few weeks.
Cons:
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The events were individually kind of neat, but together were extremely boring. Mount off, fashion, and storytelling were all literally stand in place for at least 5 minutes and click through menus while the event unfolds. Add in the need to repeat them to get the Coldflame mount and it felt like an unfun chore. Just made me want something like the Midsummer’s event where you toss firesticks in the air and have to catch them, or any number of the Darkmoon Faire events. Overall, very underwhelming and boring.
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The Chromie event was absolutely terrible content to experience. It had no appeal or anything of interest going on for me.
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The Bronze Tokens are feeling like an unfun grind. It’s doable definitely, but the rate of acquisition vs. amount to spend them on makes it also feel like a chore rather than a celebration. I’ve been at “forced fun parties” before, and doing a bunch of tasks at a party in order to get the cake is never a good party. If the 100 token achievement effect was in place from the get-go and the Tier 2 transmogs were 20 certificates to start with it might feel better. Not even being able to get 1 of 13 sets after doing Everything this week that rewards the bronze tokens sucks. Feels like I’m being kept on a repetitive treadmill to ensure I keep playing every week for at least the next month to get a significant amount of the rewards.
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Didn’t feel like there was much generosity coming to me for my part in the game being around for 20 years. Releasing the majority of the content at the beginning and saying, “Just keep doing this same stuff every week if you want more of the rewards” isn’t very fun. Felt like I was given a list of tasks to do in order to get the rewards. Hope Blizz finds better ways to make earning rewards in a celebration event more fun in the future.
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Lot’s of bugs and issues with the update, which do seem to be getting resolved as far as I can tell. But it’s not a good sign from my outlook for the 8 week content cycle, and sometimes it feels like I’m paying Blizz to be a beta tester.
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Maybe it’s just me, but the Coldflame mount wasn’t as cool as the Heroic Edition War Within mount. Felt a little weak to have the 20th anniversary highlight reward not be as cool as the paid mount. This was maybe heightened by the lack of fun I was having with the events at large and compounded by the release of a $90 mount, a $30 pack of 4 mounts, and a $20 charity mount. Felt like the whole anniversary was more about trying to get my money and my time rather than a celebration.
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Speaking of the charity mount, and again this may just be my outlook, but it seemed awfully shabby to release a $20 mount for a nice charity at the same time as the other mounts. The $90 mount is just a better version of old brontosaurus mount at ~1.3 million gold converted to WoW Tokens (rate when it first released) when the old one was 5 million so of course people are going to want that. And there’s a pack of 4 classic mounts for $30. So there’s a highly desirable mount at $90, 4 mounts for $30 ($7.50 each), and a single mount for $20 to support a charity. The charity mount is up against a lot of opportunity cost options for players. Some players might get all of them or specifically care about supporting the charity, but having that many options just dilutes the amount of support that the charity might get as I see it. Just from the valuation comparison, the charity mount comes across as being put on the bottom rung. Blizz could have given half or just $20 out of the $90 mount proceeds to the charity knowing that it would sell like gangbusters. But they chose to keep all that for themselves and release the charity mount as a tertiary option. Just comes across very poorly as it seems like Blizz is using the charity mount as a PR stunt rather than actually trying to support the cause.
TLDR; Overall kinda ok event, but that’s mostly because of the BRD raid for me. The event as a whole feels like a bunch of mediocre/boring content with enough cool rewards to make sure I keep playing rather than a fun and generous celebration of the past 20 years.
I don’t mind companies trying to make money as long as it feels like that money is being used to also directly improve the quality and fun of the game experience. Hasn’t felt like that for this update, especially considering it’s a big 20 year celebration.