Darkmoon Faire Wrap-Up

The first month of the revised Darkmoon Faire is in the books, and my mage has snagged a total of 75 tickets.  The breakdown here was 20 tickets for six tradeskill quests (once per month, also good for five free skill points in the related skills), 10 for the general kill quest, 35 for doing five carnival game dailies every day for seven days, and 10 from a dungeon drop - I won one of only two I saw drop during the week.

By my standards, I played WoW pretty heavily this week to get even that many tickets.  According to Blizzard's post on the topic, I earned less than half of what is theoretically possible in a month, but they claim that the half I missed will be easier to gain in future iterations because you can get the random dungeon drops anytime, not just when the Faire is active.  If what I got this month is representative of what I'm going to get normally, I would have to repeat what I did this week every month for twelve months just to get the minipets and mounts currently on the vendor.

Six pets at 90 tickets and 2 mounts, at 180 tickets

On some level, these are all cosmetic rewards, and it therefore doesn't "matter" if I obtain them all.  (The six minipets do represent by far the largest trove of pets that I don't own that can be easily obtained, but we also can't be sure that these won't be account-wide when Pandaria hits - being able to farm them on alts would dramatically speed this time.)  There are a lot of tents in the Faire that are closed for "construction", raising the possibility that more ticket-earning activities will be possible in future years.  (Note: I meant to write "patches" instead of years, but the Freudian slip seems appropriate given Blizzard's patch cycle.)  For that matter, there's an argument to be made that a Veteran reward that actually requires in-game activity is more interesting than one that you get just for paying up, with the caveat that players would need to be available the week the Faire is open to get their tickets for that month.

That said, the fact remains that this is a game that charges a monthly fee.  I would have no complaint if this event was open year-round so I could work on it at my leisure.  Having an event that requires me to drop what I'm doing and work on it for the first week of every month, at the risk of losing my monthly token allowance, does not strike me as especially fun.

Consolation prize: a bunch of easy achievements