Brewfest Confusion
The past few days I’ve put all my other WoW goals on hold in an effort to get a Brewfest ram mount for Mania. It hasn’t been a smooth process. Let me tell you about my travails, and then I’m going to rant about the target audience for seasonal events. (If you are looking for anything even vaguely pet-related, feel free to skip this. This is all rant.)
I logged in the first day of the event, all excited and ready to earn tickets! And … the damned Brewfest organizers were still setting up their tents. A quick trip to the WoW forums told me that they’d be setting up all day and I should come back the next day. I logged out, disappointed, to wait.
(Aside: Since then, Kisirani, a Blizzard Poster on the forums, has said that there will be no ‘clean-up’ day for this event. It ends directly on the 16th, as the web site says.)
I logged in the second day of the event, all excited and ready to earn tickets! And I earned some tickets — except I couldn’t get the quest “Pink Elekks on Parade” for some reason, and it took me three attacks by Dark Iron dwarves to figure out how to defend against them (partially because I kept crashing out). Those mugs on the tables? You couldn’t pick those up. You had to wave at a barker to get a mug. (And you could keep waving to create a funny but terribly spammy shower of mugs effect.) Well, you got a souvenir mug, but that was an entirely different sort of mug that could only be used on the casks of free brew. And it took me 15 minutes to figure out that I had to equip the souvenir mug before I could even use it for that.
Annoyed and feeling stupid, and down 40 tickets because of the pink elekk quest, it didn’t look good for getting a ram. I did the math on how many tickets I needed and realized that I needed to hit something like 4 of the Dark Iron attacks every day to make this work out — especially given that I was getting about 3 tickets per attack. (Later I stopped aiming entirely and went to a strategy of drink-and-fire-at-random and my haul doubled to about 6 tickets per attack.) That meant I needed to be in-game or ready to be in-game for some 4 hours a day — and I couldn’t be wandering off to do quests in that time either, unless I was very careful about getting back in time.
But then Blizzard started with its Brewfest hotfixes. Suddenly I could get the pink elekk quest. Yay! And the Dark Iron attacks were gone. Yay! Instead, the reward for the daily “Bark for …” quests was increasing, along with the per-keg reward for the unnamed keg delivery quasi-quest. Yay! Day three would be a lot better.
I logged in on the third day of the event, all excited and ready to earn more tickets! Except … the “Bark for …” quests were broken. And for some reason, completely perplexing to me, the apple barrels in the keg delivery quest failed to fire about a third of the time and I was only able to deliver a few kegs. I logged back out in disgust. Worse, in checking the forums about these issues I found out that the keg delivery quest isn’t a daily quest — instead it uses a hidden 12 hour quest timer. So unlike the daily quests, which you can do once a day at any time of the day that’s convenient for you, if you want to maximize your earnings from the keg delivery quest you need to arrange your playtime so that you are on every 12 hours on the dot. Don’t be late, or you will soon find that your 11am/11pm runs have slid to 2pm/2am runs.
Of course, they fixed the barking quests yesterday and I see on the forums this morning that they’ve fixed the problem with the apple barrels that made keg deliveries so frustrating for me. So in that sense, progress is being made. But still, I just have to rant about this.
Let’s rant logically, with bullets:
- I believe that seasonal events are intended as fun, fluffy events that are open to everyone. Certainly nothing Blizzard has done in the past has contradicted this, so at this point there is an implied contract with the players regarding the tone of seasonal events.
- Since seasonal events attempt to draw in players at all knowledge levels, it is just good sense to make them as obvious and clear, as foolproof, as possible. Brewfest has a number of really impenetrable mechanics, helped along by bugs, that make the less dedicated gamer in me throw up her hands in sheer confusion.
- Likewise, it is just good sense to make seasonal events as impervious to griefing and stupid behavior as possible. As a fun, fluffy event that half the server doesn’t take seriously, there is less social constraint on bad behavior than normal — so it pays to root out any mechanics that allow or benefit bad behavior (preferably before you go live).
And finally there’s the time thing. I don’t have any qualms with the price of the ram mount. It’s fine that there’s a reward that takes more time to get than the most casual players may have. I assume that you can save your tickets and combine them with next year’s tickets to get a ram. And I’m actually very glad that this event’s big reward is obtainable by me for a change and not in a raid dungeon or a drop off some boss.
But for those players who do want to put in the extra effort to get a ram this year — like me! – let’s not make it incredibly difficult on them, shall we? This is a nice fluffy seasonal event, remember — not an epic quest. Let’s not design a system that puts a majority of ticket earnings into an event that happens every hour so that I have to schedule my entire day around WoW — at least not if it’s going to take more than a day or two! And let’s use the perfectly great daily quest system we already have, that allows me to do a quest once a day at a nice flexible time, instead of hacking in a hidden flag that forces me to set an alarm because there’s not even an in-game UI on the damned thing and if I forget and miss by a few hours I’ll have to skip the next one or wake up in the middle of the bloody night to complete it.
Whew! That was just a little more ranty than I intended. Sorry about that. But I feel better now.
Look, I know this stuff isn’t easy. I’ve built seasonal events — they can be tough. But after this many years and this many events, and with the resources of Blizzard … I just expect more. I expect a baseline level of competence and fun. And I expect them to understand their target audience better.
15 Comments
Brewfest is a really cool idea that needed an extra week or two on the PTR. The problems they’re having make me glad they have the ‘it will be released when it’s ready’ attitude towards everything else they’ve done.
I really hope they realize that because of the bugs, players are not being able to earn what they should, and lower the number of tickets required before festival’s end.
I too started the brewfest event on the first “live” day (even though I felt that 1 week in the PTR was probably not enough to properly test it out!), but then I also gave up. Weird quest mechanics, bugged quests, needed to be wow-addicted (well, I am!) but on a more unrestricted time schedule to even “think” of getting the only worthwhile reward…
Too much fuss for such a “small” reward and done in so bad, “blizzard-usual” patch style, where the patches go live “NOT” when they’re ready but “ON SCHEDULE” regardless of being ready or not…
So, that’s one less thing for me to worry about! If I were them, I’d save the time spent on creating the 2.2.2 PTR and would instead manually revise the code and look for errors! Would have done them much more good, if you ask me!
I would love to be a ram-riding orc (plus the little beer mug symbols on the epic ram’s saddle blanket fills me with happy). Just hope it’s possible for a casual player to collect enough tickets in time.
It took me forever to figure out you had to equip the beer mug to use the kegs too.
I love the idea of this holiday, I just wish they had thoroughly tested it out before hand.
I agree. I had problems with the apple crates, barrels, and the beer mugs. Brewfest definitely needs some more testing.
The thing with Brewfest is that Blizzard did not think it through. There was no bugs in the code for the Dark Iron Attacks, its just when you drop 100+ people in a space half the size of an arena and have them spamming the same 2 commands its going to lag people out.
I have 200 tickets accumulated on my main, and I figure if I do the barking quest EVERY day and do the beer run twice a day every day I may get to the 600 to get a ram. Blizzard needs to lower the # of tickets needed for the ram to 500 and be done with it. This simple thing would appease almost everyone who is upset.
Huh. I didn’t even figure out the dark iron dwarves thing when I was on, because I was in the middle of the wolpertinger thing and then there was crap everywhere and things ran slower than they already were.
Looping around a few times just to get the tossed barrel when doing the first timed ram thing? Yeah, that worked fabulously. Screw that, I guess if I want a ram I’ll get exalted with Ironforge or do some more battlegrounds.
Brewfest was just the latest blunder by Blizzard. The worst patch that I have ever seen Blizzard implement in over 2.5 years of playing this game was 2.2. The QA issues in that patch were horrendous and for the most part wont be fixed until 2.2.3. Blizzard’s Tech Forums were clogged with threads from people complaining about poor sound quality, missing sounds, increased lag, poorer frame rates, frequent server disconnects, poor voice chat quality etc etc etc.
Unfortunately all good things must come to an end, and these issues along with the general direction that the company is taking the game like adding low demand features and churning out x-pacs seem to indicate that they have lost their direction and are desperately trying to counter the increasing defection of players.
You don’t have to do ram racing twice a day to get a mount, though, do you? I got 27 tickets last time, even though I missed the apple barrels and got baby-sealed twice, so that’s a very achievable number. One run like that plus the barking quest will give you 67 tickets, so you’ll have enough in 9 days, not even counting the tickets from the one-time quests.
But yeah, Brewfest was obviously nowhere near ready for prime time. Another remaining problem is the way that the ram racing NPCs often don’t throw or accept the keg until some time after you’ve passed them, and apple barrels are sometimes late in firing, so it’s easy to think you didn’t get close enough and have to go back. That makes it more difficult than it should be to get the hang of that quest.
The most frustrating thing about Brewfest in my mind is that they really had some *great* ideas going. The Dark Iron attacks were fantastic, chaotic fun while they were up (before the server traffic got up to normal, at least), but they just didn’t think through and test it thoroughly enough. Brewfest has a ton of bugs, but it also has a lot of cool stuff, even for people who aren’t normally into holiday events: mounts, noncombat pets, quests that take you back into old Azeroth instances. It’s a real disappointment, but it’d be even more disappointing if Blizz decided to scale back the fun factor with future WoW events.
To be fair to Blizzard (and I do agree with Mania on almost every point), remember that they took quite a bit longer than expected to get 2.2 propped to the retail servers, which put them behind the 8-ball with Brewfest. And, they have a timetable to meet to get Brewfest in before Hallow’s End…so, quality control suffered a bit.
I disagree that 2.2 was bug-ridden, by the way: The only area in which I felt Blizzard didn’t do as much as they should have is in respect to the new sound engine. Otherwise, 2.2 was pretty blah (I’ve posted elsewhere that it should have been 2.1.3).
But if Brewfest is the biggest “fiasco” we ever have in WoW, we truly don’t have much to complain about.
I agree with niwaar: The thing with Brewfest is that Blizzard did not think it through. The bugs were annoying, but it’s the bad design that makes me rant.
Unfortunately, they usually use testing and polish time to catch those design mistakes and fix them, and as Kestrel points out they were probably rushed this time because of the sheer amount of time 2.2.2 took on the PTR. They may ship things ‘when they’re ready’, but seasonal events are on their own timetable. Ah, well.
Incidentally, I usually average 8 kegs per run, or 24 tickets. (I’m not very good at it, apparently, although I thought I was. Heh!) With the tickets I’ve made so far, I should be able to get my ram next Wednesday doing one keg run and one barking run a day. I’ll probably try for two keg runs, though, and then switch my efforts to building up tickets on my other (8!) Horde characters. None of them can ride mounts yet, and I don’t play any of them much, but one of them will be next in line for attention after Kaet and it would be nice to easily get a mount next year.
Yeah this is a bit fubar.
on an interesting note, the little Wolpertinger pet you get has about 4 or 6 different sounds when you click on em. that gives us a teeny bit of pet-ness
I note that I can’t get any other quests now but the delivery. that means there’s no way to get a ram by the 16th. no barker, and dark Iron is gone.
You lost the barker quests, shibumi? On my server they are now operational.
There is no ! for the barker quest; you just need to talk to the ram driver again and he will have a chat option if you can do the keg delivery. It appears to be on about a 10 hour reset.
/agree with Znodis. Brewfest is a great, fun idea that’s been plagued (I won’t say doomed) by an awful lot of bugs. They really should have taken another few weeks on the PTR and bumped the date back to, say, sometime in November (maybe with patch 2.3)? We don’t care if it’s not actually October when Oktoberfest- whoops, Brewfest- we just want the quests to work.
On the plus side, I was able to pick up some fun stuff (hats, the love goggles) on my alts and the pony keg on my main with a minimum of sweat and tears. (I don’t even do the barker quests; they’re very, very difficult on Horde side with ANY amount of lag, like lag caused by everyone hanging around the Brewfest tents…) I have to say, running Arcatraz is a lot more fun when you’re stinking drunk.
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