I pretty much don’t do WoW holidays any more

So we’re almost six months into the post-5.0, account-wide achievements era, and I have to admit something…

Ok, I guess I already admitted it in the title of this post.

Occasionally, I see people on Twitter talking about working on holiday stuff, and it occurs to me that I would like to work on some holiday stuff too. And then I remember that I’ve completed everything that I want to complete, achievement-wise, for that holiday – which, to be honest, for some holidays like Love is in the air, is “nothing at all” – and I decide to do something else instead.

I’m not a mount-chaser, so I’m not after the meta. There are so many mounts in the game, and I have enough that I’m completely content with what I’m riding (which, at this point, is some type of gryphon or hippogryph on virtually all of my toons – and the reasons for that would make up another short post altogether).

The Lunar Festival is ending today, and I realize that it’s been about two weeks long, and I haven’t even bothered to check it out. Since there was really nothing new, and I have the achievement for completing it, and have done it several times over several years/toons, I had no desire to get involved.

At first, I blamed this personal trend of omission on the account-wide achievements. Stupid account-wide achievements; whereas, in the past, my pals and I would faithfully work on holiday achievements on multiple toons, driven by the achievement bug or whatever, now we all already have it, and so there’s no point from that perspective. (Stupid account-wide achievements. Mumble-mumble-mumble.)

However, while the change to achievements is certainly partly to blame for my apathy toward holidays now, there’s also the fact that not much has changed when it comes to the holidays themselves. Perhaps that’s just the nature of holidays – we have our traditions at Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving or Halloween, and part of the fun is living those traditions each year. But I guess it doesn’t really feel the same way in-game. I have no desire to visit the all of elders again. If I see one, I will generally honor him or her, and it’s a small, special occasion. But I’m not going to trek all over Azeroth and Outland to honor the elders for the Xth time.

I guess the big problem for me is that, after so many years, most of the holidays haven’t changed much at all. For Winter Veil, they changed Metzen the Reindeer, and the Greench so that I don’t even care to try to kill him anymore. The only thing that is remotely interesting is opening the presents under the Winter Veil tree to see what this year’s cool gift will be. And yes, I have the footballs. They are fun to use in short spurts. Freezle and I always like using them after we kill the Spirit Kings, when Loremaster Cho starts going on about how “these halls have not seen footfalls in many years” or whatever. It really, really sounds like he’s saying “these halls have not seen footballs…” and so we get out the footballs and start rapidly kicking/passing them back and forth between each other for a couple of minutes before the trash pulls to Elegon. That’s fun.

But almost everything else is the same. There aren’t lots of new holiday activities to do from year to year, and my desire to revisit the same old same old seems to diminish each year as well.

The other factor is something that Blizzard probably considers a success: there is so much to do in Mists of Pandaria that holidays fall by the wayside, particularly if you have alts. I have three toons that I play regularly: Mushan, Modhriel, and Droignon. Each is generally raid-ready to varying degrees, and that has taken a lot of time to accomplish. With little-to-no new holiday content, there is little incentive to interrupt my regularly-scheduled gearing/dungeoning/raiding program to revisit (what feels like) stale holiday content. Since Pandaria, the only non-Darkmoon holiday activities I’ve participated in have been Direbrew-farming and opening my new footballs.

Perhaps that’s intended. Perhaps the holidays are new and exciting for newer players, and not intended to be a big deal for veterans or raiders. That doesn’t seem 100% correct, though. At a time where the developers are concentrating on keeping us busy, holidays seem to have taken a back seat, but I don’t necessarily believe that they intend for us to forget about holidays.

But generally, I do just that.

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Thanks for reading this post by Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!

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