One More For Sausages!

Let's take a momentary break from all the excitement about WoW Forever to talk about... Brewfest. I've repeatedly said on this blog that I often forget about WoW's in-game holidays nowadays, but sometimes when I do remember them, I end up being positively surprised.

So when I noticed the other day that Brewfest had come around again, I went "hmm..." - Brewfest has never been among my favourites as I don't drink in real life, but at the same time it had been so long since I last checked it out, I figured a lot must have changed since then and that it would surely be worth at least a quick look.

And indeed it was! Good old ram racing was still a thing (though I needed a bit of a refresher on the best way to do it) but there were quite a few quests that were new to me as well, such as two that mentioned dracthyr, which made me think they must've been from Dragonflight, but apparently they were only added in War Within last year.

At the full hour all hell suddenly broke loose and an event reminiscent of the Earthen theatre "broke out", with players signing up to gather ingredients, prepare food and drink, or serve the former to revellers in the area. It was delightful! The only slight disappointment I had on later revisits was that the "optimal" strategy to maximise the score seems to be to sign up to just gather lots of cooking ingredients without actually cooking and serving them... not that this stopped me from still doing the latter for fun.

However, the best thing to me was the "Brewfest Chowdown" sausage eating contest, apparently added in BfA. I had actually seen references to this before but had thought that it was just a joke, not a real thing. It's basically a little mini game that requires a total of four people to chomp down plates of sausages as quickly as possible. There are no achievements for this or even a daily quest; the only possible reward to earn is a toy that you can acquire after winning first place five times.

At first I was honestly a bit confused. So this is... a group thing? And there's no automated group finding for it? How do you get other people to join you? However, I found one guy in the manual group finder eventually and got my first go at the game this way, which ended up being just too funny to me. Later I just sat down in one of the chairs by myself and /yelled at people in the vicinity to come eat sausages with me. I haven't talked this much to randoms in the open world in modern WoW in ages. When my character was too full and had to sit out, I'd happily watch other people go as well and spectate while whooping and cheering for them. What a silly little activity to add just for fun. Once again, I'm positively surprised by a modern holiday event.