Okay, look, no one ever said that Noblegarden was a -great- holiday in the past. It was relaxed, though, and chill. Run around and collect eggs. Eat chocolate. Buy rewards. End of story.
This update though has added all the worst elements of other holiday events to it, and it all has to do with the boss and the mount drop.
You have to physically travel to a specific location to summon the boss.
You have to find a specific object somewhere in the forest and drag it over to summon him.
After killing him, you have to travel to a -different- location to turn in the quest.
Your reward is almost always a brightly colored egg of the sort you can literally find lying around on the ground just a few feet away. And if you’re really lucky, there’s a 1% chance at a mount.
This is a week-long event, so your shots at the 1% drop are limited.
So what’s bad about this, besides the inconvenience and RNG?
The time consumption. Sure, it’s just to Goldshire or whatever, but time adds up. Travel time. And especially the time it takes to respawn the boss.
The across-the-board miniscule drop rate also means that people who really want the mount will feel the necessity to throw all their alts at it. This is nothing new. This is gamer behavior. This is what we’ve done for nearly two decades in this game. When presented with a chance at something we want, we’ll throw every available resource at it. And so people with numerous alts will blow all that time into traveling, fighting, traveling, and repeating daily for a week.
There will be people who don’t get the mount this year and that’s fine: we’re not entitled to anything, and we’re not asking for it to be handed to us on a silver platter.
It’s just that the overall design is bad. Why isn’t this a dungeon boss like Brewfest or All Hallow’s Eve? Why isn’t the respawn timer shorter and automatic like Winterfest? Why isn’t the drop rate higher for the first shot of the day like some of the other events we’ve had lately?
For a week-long holiday that used to be stress-free, this certainly has done everything possible to be inconvenient, stressful, and just annoying.
Suggested fixes:
Make Daetan spawn quicker and automatically instead of making people seek out an egg and wasting time between kills, if you really want us to throw armies of alts at it per day. At least that way we’re not spending our lives on this.
Do the higher chance of drop on the first kill of the day, so we don’t feel like we’re missing a shot if we can’t throw alts at it. This will also benefit those with only a few characters, or those with less time to dedicate to the event.
They probably don’t actually care if you do that. You already paid for the month if you do it once or 50 times every day.
Players lack of self control isn’t blizz emergency to deal with, so they made an event that’s more than spam queue from SW/Org/veld nonstop till reset, and it’s a good thing.
Whenever I try to look for an egg, I almost miss the boss. This’ll be easier when someone publishes possible egg locations, but it seems like inherently poor design that contributing gives you the risk of missing out.
edit: There should be a zone-wide yell when the boss spawns so people can look around without fear.
Blizzard is a master-level company when it comes to exploiting, manipulating, predicting, and controlling gamer behavior. They know exactly how to get people to do what they want, and that’s also why it’s our obligation to call them out on their manipulation and sleazy tactics. They only respond when there’s a public enough outcry.
This update is bad because of all the reasons I’ve listed: they basically took all the worst parts of other holidays to make this one just as grindy.
I’m annoyed at the duck disguise toy. I don’t like that I can only turn into the duck that that specific character chose, when they have to know we’ll do this chain on multiple toons. I expected to be able to collect all of the appearances so it’d work like the Pepe whistle.
Hopefully there’s a way to obtain the other colors. Maybe as a daily? Because that’s another annoyance. Why isn’t the duck disguiser account-wide so we can collect the colors on alts?
Yeah, it’s…not great. I’ve ran about 10 characters through so far, and I’ve gotten 2 green transmog items. The rest were just eggs. At least give me 15-20 to make that worthwhile. That wouldn’t even bother me so much if it wasn’t for the respawn timer that may or may not bug out with the golden egg.
Seriously. If they made this a viable alternate way to farm currency for the vendor that doesn’t involve running circles around Goldshire for eight hours then it wouldn’t be such an insult to have gotten nothing but chocolate on the eight characters I’ve done this on so far.
I’m holding off on completing the chain on alts until we see if there’s a solution or if this can be accomplished as a daily.
So far in 8 attempts I’ve gotten 4 out of the 5 transmog items… and the mount, much to my extreme surprise. But all of my obvious critiques still stand because RNG is RNG.
Done 2 toons, so I chose 2 colors, it’s a shame the toon using the toy can only select the color they opted for when handing in the quest.
As for the basket drop from handing in the quest, I got legs on both toons that have done it so far /sigh
Then I went about farming eggs in Razor Hill, got 50, bought the flower toy - then the flower toy dropped from an egg hahaha but I did farm for about an hour, managed to get the hearthstone and the new duck pet. I’m not too worried about the +1 mount that I really will never ever use, I really do not like the carpets at all.
It makes the toy unusable for alts who haven’t done the quest, and there’s no point in the toy dialog to pick a color if you can only ever have one. Drown 'em in bug reports and that will get fixed.
Sure, but that player can spend those 20 days doing stuff they actually enjoy instead of throwing every alt they have at an event they don’t even like, and that seems like it’d be much more likely to keep them month over month.
True, but I bet a great number of product managers are fine with hacking their own metrics even if its detrimental to player enjoyment: “look how successful this holiday is at getting engagement!”
Agree with your points, but I will say, mounts mean nothing these days. For about 3 xpacs mount collecting has been pretty worthless and just about a number. It used to be you actually USED all the mounts you had, especially the rare cool ones.
Personally nothing in this game is worth my time that does 1% or 3% type drops. So many other things I can do. Also for a mount that I will just add the the collection and never use…kind of dumb. They are trying to FOMO people into they must have it.
That wouldn’t even bother me so much if it wasn’t for the respawn timer that may or may not bug out with the golden egg.