darkmoon faire

All posts tagged darkmoon faire

Suggested Reading: Of the Brawler’s Guild, being sha-touched, the Dominance Offensive, and more

Posted by Peter (Devee) on December 20, 2012
Posted in: Suggested Reading, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Bizmo’s Brawlpub & The Brawlers Guild, Pugnacious Priest, 12/17/12.

A fantastic account of what it’s like to be in the Brawlers Guild. A really good read!

Jin’ya & the Sha, Cymre, Bubbles of Mischief, 12/19/12.

I finally learned why my Mindbender looks like a little Sha! In case you don’t know, check out her post for more info and to check out her new loot.

Murdering animals for 5.1 reputation, Anne Stickney, WoW Insider, 12/19/12.

If you’re working on the new 5.1 factions, make sure you’re doing the optional quests!

Reputation in review: The Dominance Offensive, Anne Stickney, WoW Insider, 12/16/12.

Here’s a good review of the The Dominance Offensive.

Student artist’s Darkmoon carousel stuns Blizzard, earns internship, Lisa Poisso, WoW Insider, 12/13/12.

Title says it all

Why the Burning Crusade didn’t suck, Alex Ziebart, WoW Insider, 12/14/12.

Last week we learned why BC sucked. Now we learn why it didn’t.

Suggested Reading: Of leveling, bosses, 5.1, the Darkmoon Faire, TOR endgame, GW2 races, and D3

Posted by Peter (Devee) on October 18, 2012
Posted in: Diablo III, Guild Wars, Suggested Reading, The Old Republic, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

Getting started with reputation at level 90, Anne Stickney, WoW Insider, 10/16/12.

As someone who isn’t 90 yet, I found this very reassuring and informative.

Guild Wars 2 writer laments racial lopsidedness, Justin Olivette, Massively, 10/16/12.

Humans are the most common GW2 race followed by norn (big humans). This makes me really sad, because some of the races are pretty interesting. I can’t believe more people don’t want to be charr or sylvari!

Questgiver PSA, Typhoon Andrew, TyphoonAndrew’s – Eye of the Storm, 10/12/12.

Please, everybody give this quick post a read!

Endgame PvE in The Old Republic, Rohan, Blessing of Kings, 10/14/12.

An interesting evaluation of TOR’s endgame with comparison to WoW’s.

Heroic Dungeon Bosses in 5 seconds, Olivia Grace, WoW Insider, 10/16/12.

These guides are always fantastic.

#129 The depressing Tone of Mists’ Dungeons, Spencer Nozell, Be MOP, 10/12/12.

Do the player characters in Mists’ dungeons lose? It’s an interesting idea.

Make your pet battles look like Pokemon with WoWkemon, Olivia Grace, WoW Insider, 10/15/12.

Who doesn’t want pet battles to look like Pokemon?!

This is a very, VERY fast mount, Dawn Moore, WoW Insider, 10/15/12.

Super fast, limited-use, and nearly uncontrollable? Sign me up!

Darkmoon Faire updates in store for patch 5.1, Anne Stickney, WoW Insider, 10/13/12.

5.1 brings the DMF a new attraction that gives an XP and rep buff, a master pet trainer who has a chance of awarding a pet when defeated, and a new pet for 90 tickets. And I was so close to not needing tickets!

World of Warcraft Patch 5.1 PTR Patch Notes, Adam Holisky, WoW Insider, 10/11/12.

Speaking of the 5.1 patch, here are the notes on the patch. The naval fleets are coming, and with them come outdoor PVP in Krasarang Wilds. In addition, there will be solo PVE underground fighting rings in Stormwind and Orgimmar and the ability to upgrade the quality of battle pets.

Lost and lonely dog seeks warm and loving home (on your farm), Anne Stickney, WoW Insider, 10/10/12.

I want a dog!

PvP sound announcements in patch 5.1, Olivia Grace, WoW Insider, 10/17/12.

“The gate of the yellow moon was destroyed.” Useful or annoying? I’m not sure yet.

Diablo III Monster Power System Detailed, Andrew Goldfarb, IGN, 10/11/12.

The Monster Power System allows players to increase the power of monsters in order to increase some stats and drops.

Suggested Reading: DMF rides, final bosses, AV, pets, dailies, and more

Posted by Peter (Devee) on July 19, 2012
Posted in: Suggested Reading, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

This post goes back a little more than a week because last week’s Suggested Reading was written in advance. This is also all from WoW Insider, although I swear I caught up on my other WoW blogs!

Around Azeroth: Mistaken identity, Elizabeth Wachowski, WoW Insider, 7/10/12.

I never expected an Around Azeroth post to make it here, but this is just so cute. It’s a screenshot of a gnome at the Darkmoon Faire competing with the NPC that ports players back to the cannon.

Know Your Lore: The final boss of Mists of Pandaria, Anne Stickney, WoW Insider, 7/15/12.

The Old Gods are known to cause destruction and chaos around them. Who’s causing destruction and chaos in the upcoming expansion? We are.

WoW Archivist: The evolution of Alterac Valley, Scott Andrews, WoW Insider, 7/13/12.

A great look at how Alterac Valley has changed. While they were clearly flaws in the original, and I’m glad I can do AV relatively quickly, this article does make me think that Blizzard’s has gone too far.

Reflections on moving from a PvP to a PvE realm, Matt Walsh, WoW Insider, 7/9/12.

After moving from a PVP to a PVE server, Matt realized he didn’t have to be afraid out in the world anymore, but it also felt like something was missing.

Team Matticus takes on the updated Pet Battle system, Matt Low, WoW Insider, 7/17/12.

Matt gives a tour of pet battles!

Grandpappy Frostheim on dumbing the game down, Brian Wood, WoW Insider, 7/12/12.

Is the game really getting easier, or is it just getting more accessible? Grindings not hard; it’s time-consuming.

Obsidian Nightwing now available as Recruit-A-Friend mount, Daniel Whitcomb, WoW Insider, 7/16/12.

Take a look at the new RAF mount.

48 dailies are 48 dailies too many, Olivia Grace, WoW Insider, 7/18/12.

There are up to 48 Mists of Pandaria dailies to do each day, and Olivia Grace thinks that’s 48 too many.

Menagerie

Posted by Peter (Devee) on July 13, 2012
Posted in: Achievements, Pets, World Events, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

While working on the Darkmoon Faire last week, I purchased that ugly mount along with three pets – Darkmoon Turtle, Darkmoon Zeppelin, and Darkmoon Tonk. In doing so, I earned Menagerie! Of course, if you look closely at the chat window in the screenshot, you’ll see that Moogle had to show me up!

Improving the Darkmoon Faire: More games, high scores, and Darkmoon VIP Cards

Posted by Peter (Devee) on June 6, 2012
Posted in: Game Mechanics, World Events, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , . 2 Comments

The Darkmoon Faire was only recently revamped, and it’s much more fun and impressive now. I was very excited for the first few months, but its attraction is already wearing thin. I’ll most likely stop caring about the dailies once I purchase all the mounts and pets. Luckily, there are a few things that Blizzard could do to improve the Darkmoon Faire even further.

More Games

First and foremost, the faire needs more games. If the size of the island and “under construction” tents are any indication, Blizzard plans this as well. However, players will eventually tire of these games as well. Right now, the Darkmoon Faire is exciting because of its limited availability. It can only be accessed one week per month, making it more shiny and new when it’s around. This should be taken a step further. Every month when the Darkmoon Faire is available for a week, it could feature five random games of the pool of 10 to 15. The five wouldn’t change over the course of the week, but next month they could be different. Because it’s different, it’s unlikely that on the second month it would be a brand new five. This would definitely keep the Darkmoon Faire fresh. As the number of total games grew, the amount offered per week could also increase. If there were 30 games total, maybe the faire would feature 10 every week, allowing you to do 10 dailies each day.

High Scores

Next, the games need to be actual games and not just quests. They seemed like games at first, but there’s no way to know if you’re doing better than last time. The game should track your high score. It’s Hammer Time; He Shoots, He Scores!; and Tonk Commander could each track how long it takes you to finish the game. Target: Turtle could track how many tosses it takes you to get three to land on the turtle. The Humanoid Cannonball could, I suppose, the number of shots out of the cannon you use. If this system was introduced, it would give players a fun reason to continue trying these games – to beat their previous high score.

The Darkmoon VIP Card

Lastly, I think the daily system should be changed. Really this is something I’d like to see everywhere, but I’ll take it as a change to the Darkmoon Faire. Each day you should be allowed to complete each daily once for free. Each week (that the Darkmoon Faire is open) you should be able to complete each daily seven times. After you’ve used your free play, you could use a “Darkmoon VIP Card” to play the game again. This would still count toward your weekly limit.

We’ll examine how that would work. Let’s say I can play every day that the faire is open. I would simply play each game on each day, and it would be exactly like it is currently. Now let’s say I can play only on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Tuesday and Thursday I can only play for a short period of time, but I can play all day on Wednesday. In this scenario, let’s say I play It’s Hammer Time once on Tuesday. That would use one free chance at that daily for that day and bring my weekly total for that daily to 1/7. (To be clear, the totals would be per daily. The other games have their own total and daily freebie.) On Wednesday, I have a lot of time to play. I play it once to use my free chance. That makes me weekly total 2/7. Then I play it another four times, using four Darkmoon VIP Cards. Now my total for the week is 6/7. Why didn’t I play it a seventh time? Because I can still play for a bit on Thursday, so I might as well do it without using a Darkmoon VIP Card. On Thursday I go ahead and play the game, using my free chance. Now the total is finally at 7/7. Even if I suddenly find myself with free time on Saturday, I wouldn’t be able to play that game again.

Obviously I’m inspired by the “daily” heroic, which is now simply a bonus for the first seven of the week. However, I’ve made a change. Blizzard wants people coming back to play repeatedly. My Darkmoon VIP Card system encourages players to play daily to avoid using Darkmoon VIP Cards, while still allowing people who don’t have time to play daily the opportunity to get their total amount of tries into a limited game time. There’s still the question of how Darkmoon VIP Cards are earned. They could be awarded randomly on completion of the games, awarded absolutely each time a certain score is beat in certain games, or sold for gold. They could even be purchased with prize tickets, although I’m not sure how I’d feel about that.

Conclusion

I love the Darkmoon Faire. I love the feeling fun and mystery. And I don’t want that feeling to go away. I want to like and enjoy the Darkmoon Faire. The Darkmoon VIP Card would be a large change to the system. More games would take more development time. However, surely the high score system couldn’t be that much work. Add the high scores into our characters’ statistics page! The timed games would be easy!

World Events

Posted by Peter (Devee) on April 25, 2012
Posted in: Game Mechanics, Holidays, World Events, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

I really enjoy events such as holidays, the Argent Tournament, the Darkmoon Faire, and the Molten Front. At the same time, I have some issues with them. Blizzard wants people logging into the game daily and these events (through the use of daily quests) force players to do them daily. I like participating in world-changing events and rare holidays, but I don’t always have the time to play daily. What can be done about this?

We can breakdown events into three types: there are events that happen once, events that are always accessible, and events that re-occur monthly or yearly. I don’t have a problem with events that happen once. In fact, these are the most exciting. Admittedly, I’m sad I missed so many, but that’s what makes them so awesome. I wasn’t max level until Wrath of the Lich King, so the first in which I participated were Zalazane’s Fall, Operation: Gnomeregan, Elemental Unrest, and even, I suppose, the Battle for the Undercity. These are very exciting in and of themselves, but the fact that they’re time-sensitive makes them seem more important. These are now events the occurred in history, and I was part of them. A great part was that I simply had to experience them. I didn’t have to experience them, and experience them, and experience them, and experience them.

By contrast, holiday events and events that are always accessible have dailies that require you to perform the same tasks repeatedly. I think events like the Molten Front and the Argent Tournament work better than holidays. Some of this is due to the fact that they’re not time-sensitive. There’s no reason to force me to do either of them daily. If I do, I progress faster. That’s great! But if I don’t, that’s okay. I get to go at my own pace. I think Blizzard also did an excellent job designing both of these. I liked progressing through the tournament. It was also a way of making things feel less tedious. In actuality, I was just doing another jousting daily, but the story allowed me to feel like I was moving through the ranks of the tournament. The Molten Front took this further with the phasing world. It was excellent.

Holiday events are terrible. I feel that I must participate daily. Let’s take, for example, the Headless Horseman. I need to fight him daily because I want his mount. The same goes for many other holidays as well (such as with Coren Direbrew during Brewfest). Then there are vendor rewards that require a huge amount of some sort of token. These are the worst in my opinion because I have to do a bunch of dailies everyday. I either have to to do some math to determine just how many I can miss or, more likely in my case, I do everything I can until I hit that magic number.

I have some proposals for improvements. One option is to allow the tokens to be obtained some infinitely-repeatable but very slow way. Doing the dailies would be best, but you don’t need to feel bad about missing some, because you can always get more tokens. Of course, then you’d have people that would do it non-stop on the first day. To combat this, you could have a second token that you can only get once per day. What if the holiday mount’s price tag was three daily tokens and a bunch of the other? It would be easiest to just play daily the entire week, but if you’re going to miss a bunch of days for some reason, you could grind the rest as a long as you actually played on three days.

This still seems flawed. Another thing that would be helpful would be for each day of the event to give you another opportunity to do a daily (or holiday boss or whatever). This opportunity would not expire at the end of the day. A week long event would give you seven chances to do the boss. You could do it once per day. You could do it seven times on the last day. You couldn’t do it seven times on the first day because you hadn’t earned the opportunities. This is the method I like best.

Most importantly, can’t Blizzard just make events that are more fun and varied? What if the Darkmoon Faire had 30 games but only 5 were randomly available each day? This would give a better reason to play than grinding for pets, mounts, or gear. Or how about high scores for certain quests/minigames. Most of the Darkmoon Faire games could have high scores saved. How about There and Back Again, the Brewfest keg delivery quest, or This One Time, When I Was Drunk…, the quest to defend against the Dark Irons?

New Mounts

Posted by Peter (Devee) on February 20, 2012
Posted in: Devee, Holidays, Journal. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Three holidays at the same time might have been a lot of work, but at least I got a couple mounts out of it! First, we got out Darkmoon Dancing Bears. It makes me sad thinking about the painful way bears are treated in captivity (especially how they’re taught to “dance”). Still, I like collecting bears in WoW because bears are cute, okay?

We also snagged the odd Swift Lovebirds. In this picture, our Lovebirds are kissing! Or it’s possible they’re just being kind of ugly together.

LFR, Dungeons, Dailies, and the Darkmoon Faire

Posted by Peter (Devee) on December 16, 2011
Posted in: Devee, Journal. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

I thought I’d share some screenshots of my activities. Here Mooglegem and I are hanging out with Thrall and the Aspects. That jerk Deathwing is in the shot too.

We had to borrow some power from the Burning Legion in order to fight them in the Well of Eternity.

I finally finished all my cooking and fishing dailies!

I got on this stupid ride and couldn’t get off of it again. Every once in a while, custom interfaces fail me. I took a guess and typed /exitvehicle. Luckily, that’s the correct command.

I  got into a group for the Darkmoon Faire arena and we totally kicked butt. It was a lot of fun!

Week and a Half into 4.3

Posted by Peter (Devee) on December 9, 2011
Posted in: Game Mechanics, World of Warcraft. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

We’re now into the second week of 4.3, and I’m extremely happy with it so far. It packed a bunch of features – void storage, transmogrification, three new 5-mans, Dragon Soul, the LFR, the Darkmoon Faire, epic gems, and more!

The first thing I did was look at the simple additions of void storage and transmogrification. I immediately filled my entire void storage. It has 80 slots, and in my opinion is pretty cheap. It’s 100 gold to unlock and 25 gold per item deposit. That’s 2100 gold for 80 slots. What a deal! Next, it was time to transmogrify my gear. I have to be honest; I’ve never been as good as I was in Icecrown Citadel. And I know why! It’s because of my gear of course. To solve this, I transmogrified my gear to look T10. (And actually I’ve been doing well this patch, so it must be working!)

The three 5-mans are very fun although very easy. Nozdormu informs us that we need the Dragon Soul to defeat Deathwing, but we’d need to go back in time to get it. Unfortunately, access to that time period is blocked to him, and the disturbance is in the future. In the first heroic, Nozdormu travels with us into the future in End Time. There we defeat shadows of past heroes in a dark future in which Deathwing succeeded in killing everyone. In the end, we fight Murozond, leader of the Infinite Dragonflight and formerly Nozdormu. This fight is most likely what drives Nozdormu insane and pushes him to become Murozond. Of course, this is also the first time Nozdormu decides to change the timeline, which most likely contributes as well. The fight itself is amazingly cool. Nozdormu gives us the ability to set back time. Our mana and CDs are reset, but Murozond’s health does not reset. It’s pretty cool.

Next up we’re sent back in time to the War of the Ancients where a young kaldorei named Illidan helps to fight the Burning Legion. We even get to fight Azshara (by the way, she’s hot). In the end we’re able to snatch the Dragon Soul. In the final 5-man, Thrall now has the Dragon Soul, and we escort him through Dragonblight to Wyrmrest Temple where the raid begins.

In the raid, we first fight an elemental giant who’s turning the earth against us. Next we fight two faceless ones in the spawn of the Old Gods. I won’t go into the rest of the details because I don’t want to spoil anything. However, we do revisit the Eye of Eternity, board an airship, fight on Deathwing’s back, and then fight Deathwing a second time. The Spine of Deathwing is an especially awesome fight. You cause adds to explode, knocking pieces of armor partially off Deathwing’s back. Then you break tendons holding them in place, sending them flying. Wow, how awesome.

Some people in my guild are annoyed at the difficulty already of 10-man normal, but I’m quite content. It’s the second week, and we’re 2/8. A boss per week is good progress in my opinion. One boss per two weeks would be fine with me even. However, when we add this to the fact that LFR is incredibly easy, I’m not annoyed at all. LFR is broken into two raids of four bosses each. The first is a complete faceroll. The second is a bit harder, and tanks especially will want to read about the fights before entering. Still, I’ve already completed the entire raid in LFR. While it’s easier, it’s very cool to be able to see the entire story. I imagine there are a ton of players out there who never raided previously but can now at least see all the assets. This is fantastic. And if they want to learn to truly raid, they can enter normal (which is easier than it was previously in my opinion). Then, if they want to be challenged as a raider, they start heroic progression. This is a cool way to segment things.

Enough about raiding. Isn’t there an even more casual form of PVE than LFR? There is – the Darkmoon Faire! Again, this is a big success. The coolest thing about it is the ambiance. I love being there. It really feels like a faire. It offers five dailies that are all carnival games. These gives tickets that can be spent on mounts (dancing bear!), pets, heirlooms, and transmogrification gear. There are also quests that can be done once per month for each profession (primary and secondary). There’s also a quest that tasks you with collecting 250 grisly trophies. These appear in your inventory randomly when killing players or PVE enemies that are in your level range. However, they don’t appear every time, and I wish they appeared more. The only annoying aspect is that there are also items that start quests that can drop in battlegrounds and heroics once you get the Darkmoon Adventurer’s Guide. There are nine of these, and they can be turned in once per month each. You can trade them, which is nice, and more importantly, you can find them even when the faire isn’t around. That’ll be great next month, but I really want to maximize my tickets, and I haven’t found them all for this month yet!

tl;dr, right? Well, I’m loving the patch!