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?