The Big Birthday Bash

I held off a little on writing about WoW's 20th anniversary celebrations in retail because they were off to a bit of a rocky start but I had a feeling that things were going to get better. And they did!

Basically, the problem during the first week was simply that acquisition of the anniversary currency was throttled to an insane degree. I have no issue with devs preventing people from being able to grind out everything on day one, but that first week, even if you did every single activity that awarded bronze celebration tokens, you still couldn't earn enough of them to buy even a single one of the reimagined tier two sets that had been promoted as the main reward to earn during the event. So that sucked.

However, Blizzard saw the feedback and immediately course-corrected in week two, massively increasing token payouts from all sources and it's been fine since then. I've acquired most of the new sets already, but there are plenty more rewards to earn and I'm having fun.

The celebratory activities are very varied and I've been kind of surprised by how... self-directed some of them are. Sure, there are plenty of quests to be completed and achievements to be earned, but there are also a lot of things that don't seem to serve any particular purpose other than to have fun - something that's quite rare in modern WoW - such as rare clickables scattered around the area that temporarily grant you the appearance of popular NPCs and allow you to say some of their voice lines. I wouldn't even have known that these existed if it wasn't for Arlaeya Explores on Bluesky posting about all the different costumes she keeps finding. When I started to look around for myself, I managed to turn my hunter into Jaina.

Most of the time however, I've been busy taking part in the more "directed" activities. First off, there are three very open and casual events constantly rotating around the area: Storytime, Mount Mania and Fashion Frenzy.

Storytime is Lorewalker Cho telling you a story similar to what you got to witness after collecting all the lore scrolls in Pandaria, while you sit in the audience and cheer or boo as appropriate. I think these are nice, it's just a shame that there are only three different ones because that makes the event become repetitive quite quickly. Hearing C'thun get called a "giant creepy artichoke" made me laugh out loud though.

Mount Mania is basically an official version of the "mount-offs" that were popularised by streamers over the years and is easily the most popular of the three activities. To be honest, I can see why! Even though there are no prizes, it's just fun to join in and see how many of the mounts that get called out you've got yourself. It's also kind of humbling as a long-time player who might feel that you've got quite a few mounts to repeatedly be reminded of just how many you don't have.

Finally, there's Fashion Frenzy, which I believe is similar to the Trial of Style. People are invited to take a couple of minutes to create a transmog that goes with a certain theme, then everyone gets to cast votes, and winners are briefly announced on stage (though again, there are no prizes or anything). This doesn't seem that popular to me, I think mainly because of the time pressure. I like me a good transmog as much as anyone else, but I wouldn't be able to throw something together so quickly. Since voting is also something that gives credit towards a quest and achievement, people also tend to just show up and throw their ribbons at random people, regardless of whether they were even trying to take part and match the theme. My priest was once declared one of the winners just for standing nearby in her tier two outfit.

But really, all that's just the "background noise" to all the dedicated events you can take part in for rewards.

The BRD raid was a nice trip down memory lane, but I was a bit disappointed to find that you seemingly can't get all the related achievements done in LFR, or at least not without great difficulty. The final fight at the Imperial seat was interesting from a lore perspective as it makes sense that Moira nopes out of watching you kill her husband again, but the devs also gave him some voice lines that feel like they are trying to retroactively make him into a more sympathetic figure. Ragnaros also gets summoned in during the fight, because I guess you can't have any nostalgia-related activities in WoW without him.

Classic Timewalking was slightly disappointing to me in the sense that most of the dungeons featured in it are just the already neutered Cata versions (though I still found all the Strat runs I'd done in Classic to be beneficial in terms of knowing what the different trash mobs do for example). They did bring back the original Deadmines though, which I appreciated, even if you can't queue for it specifically and just have to cross your fingers that the randomiser will put you in there at some point.

The biggest disappointment to me personally though was the Chromie activity that had been promoted as being about "time tours of the opening of the Ahn'qiraj gate", as it doesn't really have much to do with that at all, other than being set in old-school Silithus. It's still a fun little scenario (I particularly enjoyed the activity where you have to find the NPC that matches your class - once I figured out what I was supposed to do that is); it's just not at all what I thought it was going to be.

The thing that surprisingly caused me to fall down a bit of a masochistic rabbit hole was Korrak's Revenge, the Alterac Valley mode with vanilla mechanics, including all the different quests and NPCs. AV has always been one of my favourite battlegrounds, and one I even enjoyed in Classic (even though I think PvP in Classic in general is pretty bad).

There is a weekly quest to earn 500 honour within that battleground, but once inside I also found that some of the quests within the valley itself, such as to capture a bunker or graveyard, also award bronze celebration tokens, plus there was a ram mount to be acquired for earning 200 timewarped badges from doing quests within the valley over a longer period of time, both of which encouraged me to keep queueing beyond the requirement for the main quest.

Interestingly, it was nothing like the quick rushes I'd experienced in Classic. Instead I lost every single match I joined, and many of them took over an hour (may have been longer, since a couple of times I also just deserted after a while - something I usually never do, but I honestly hadn't been prepared for how long these were going to last and needed to do something else). It was always the same scenario of an awkward stalemate at the Dun Baldar bridge, with the Alliance occasionally pushing forward as far as Icewing bunker but then quickly losing ground again.

That's pretty old-school and I guess I wouldn't have minded so much if I had the feeling that anyone at all actually understood what was going on or cared about winning the battleground, but I distinctly got the impression that the Alliance side at least was full of PvErs who just wanted to do the quests for rewards and had no clue what was even going on. This was most obvious at the start of a match when the majority of people rode southwards to Snowfall graveyard to cap that, but then just awkwardly stood there, not even trying to go any further. Once I saw a small group of about five players dare to venture a bit further south and ran along with them to provide encouragement and heals, just for them to decide to try to take on Galvangar with five people - I even tried to warn them in chat but they clearly had no idea what awaited them inside that building and it was just pointless carnage.

Where it gets really frustrating though is when you hit that stalemate at Dun Baldar because the thing to do when that happens is to get a small group of people past enemy lines and start capping things down south - you'll probably still lose, but at least you'll get some honour and break the stalemate. However, the NPCs in this version of AV hit so hard that you can't really take anything but a mine by yourself, and often times when I would try to sneak south, literally not even a single other person would want to come along, preferring to just get slaughtered over and over by the bridge. Or on the rare occasion when someone would come along, they would once again not really understand how hard the NPCs hit and charge head-first into a group of guards just to get insta-gibbed. It's just a kind of painful and bizarre parody of what PvP is supposed to be like. I wonder what the experience is like as Horde.

Finally, there's this thing called Secrets of Azeroth or Guest Relations, which is basically like a bunch of quests without quest markers that expect you to actually read the instructions and put some clues together by yourself. On paper, that sounds like something I should really like, but in practice my experience with it has been so-so. I managed to work my way through the introductory quest by myself, just using the in-game hint system once or twice, but eventually I hit a point where I just had no idea what was going on and had to look up help. The instructions are just too vague in some parts, and I simply don't have the patience for this kind of thing any longer, especially when so much of these quests seems to require you to run around on foot (Azeroth is big, y'all) and look for tiny things to click on on the ground. When I'm not even sure anymore whether I'm even remotely in the right area, I definitely just want to get on with it at some point.

Still, all in all I've been having fun with the varied activities. What's been your favourite thing to do so far?