Noblegarden

Blizzard's holiday events have gone through quite an evolution over the years. Until October, they were innocuous little festivals, with lots of little fun things to do. For me, the two I really enjoyed were Winter Festival, a kind of Christmas event and Hallow's End, the Hallowe'en festival. You could open presents or kill the Headless Horseman and a bunch of other little fun things. They were part of the background, making Azeroth more of a living world.

In October, though, things changed. The holidays themselves stayed largely the same, but the Achievement system revamped them in significant ways. If you did all of the achievements for an event, you would get a title, and if you got all of the titles, you would get a mount, the Violet Proto-Drake. People will do anything for a title or a mount, as I myself proved during my "bear runs" in Zul'Aman last year.

This got more people interested in the events, but it also created the situation where, if you wanted the reward from the event, you had to do all the achievements. All of a sudden, the achievements required balancing, something they'd never needed before. Blizzard wanted to put some sort of limit on the number of mounts available, so they felt more like an achievement for those who got them. Other achievements, which were the result of pure luck, raised huge ire among the population, who saw the drake they'd worked hard to get for six month vanish because of the random number generator.

The disaster struck: "Be Mine!", an achievement for the Fool For Love title at Valentine's Day. On a four day event, you had to get eight different little candies from bags. However, the bags were only available once per hour and you only have a ten percent chance of getting one per hour. On average, you needed three bags to get all the candies. Even a cursory glance over that math will show the problem: even if you set your alarm to wake up every hour, there was a chance you wouldn't get the candies. If you didn't, there was a very good chance. Goodbye title. Goodbye drake.

The fan base went ballistic, more ballistic than I've ever seen them. Dozens of people claimed they were going to leave the game, and I believed them. What had been a minor incentive, a mount, to participate in fun and interesting festivals had become a source of frustration and anger. "Did they really expect us to wake up in the middle of the night?", people were asking. Blizzard had miscalculated. In order to be fun, achievements need to be at least somewhat challenging. However, they seemed to miss the point that their festivals were never challenging and were never really an achievement. They were fluff and attempting to add challenge or rarity to fluff upset the people who were having fun. It was like ordering push-ups at a Christmas party.

Noblegarden, on the other hand, was a fantastically handled little holiday. As the only holiday designed after the introduction of the titles and mount, it seemed to get the balance just right. True, getting the title meant finding literally hundreds of little eggs in towns full of dozens of others hunting those same eggs, but that's what Easter Egg hunts are all about. All the items needed were available from the eggs, but if they didn't drop, you could still buy them for chocolates, one of which was in each egg. So, you felt lucky when you got the items, but not frustrated when you didn't. I really enjoyed the event, something that I can't really say for "Fool For Love", which was imbalanced and frustrating or the New Years Festival, which was properly balanced, but boring.

When Octoberfest rolls around, we will see whether they learned their lesson when it comes to the achievement, "Have Keg, Will Travel", which requires you to get a special mount from the Octoberfest event. Two years ago, you could get one in much the same way as Noblegarden worked, but last year they changed them to a rare drop. If they learned anything from the disaster that was "Be Mine!", they'll change the achievement. Fortunately, given the thoroughly successful Noblegarden event we just witnessed, it seems like they have.