I’ve been in that position from both sides. When I’m the high level character, I usually get some jerk whinging at me about “stealing” all the kills. When I’m the low level character, I ask if I can join the higher character, and share credit for his kills. 99% of the time, they say yes, and I’m done with the quest twice as fast. And not infrequently, the high level character will stick around and help me with some other quests I have, out of what I presume to be gratitude for not being a whiney little bitch.
Your approach is obviously the right one to take, but I can understand why the lower level players get annoyed. Especially if they’re new to the game when everything is harder and just finding the right mobs to kill can be a challenge. I know when I was levelling my first character I wouldn’t have had the balls to ask a lvl-80 to group… I was too scared of proving myself to be the noob I was.
It’s not really much fun to tag along with an 80 either - you don’t really do anything. I will always remember my first dungeon run where at the last second the group leader invited an 80 to run us through Wailing Caverns. The whole run was just me trying to keep up without getting lost - I learned nothing and got no enjoyment out of it.
Also, there really are players that will gank quest-givers and grief lowbies doing quests. I have no idea why, but they obviously exist, and it’s hard to differentiate yourself from them when you roll in on your epic mount with your bad-ass armor and start destroying every living thing in the Hillsbrad Foothills.
Next week is going to suck. “School of Hard Knocks” is going to be the Proto-Drake killer for a lot of people, I’m guessing. It’s certainly the only achievement that might prevent me from getting mine (and even then, the WSG flag-return part is the one I’m mostly concerned about).
I don’t know, maybe it’s because the rush is about over. The first few days I did the quests with my alliance toons. People camping, yelling, cursing, trying to SELL their stupid camping spots, all sorts of stupidity. Last night I did the quests on one of my horde toons. It was a lot more laid back, no yelling or idiocy. If someone got beat to a node, they simply moved to the next. No one got mad, no one got abused. And, it sure seemd like everyone got done faster because they weren’t “fighting” each other over every egg.
Or maybe it’s just that the spoiled little kids had gone to bed. Personally, I’m really just after the bunny pets, I don’t really care about the rest of it. 
This reminds me of one instances when I was hunting in the Wetlands. I had to kill an orc leader, and I’d fought my way to his little camp. I was planning out the best way to attack when a level 80 showed up. “Oh, great, I guess I’ll have to wait for the respawn.” Instead, he invited me to group, we laid waste to the camp, both got the kill credit, and all was well.
Being a maladjusted social outcast, I’m still figuring out this “cooperation” thing.
Just to be clear–If I’m reading the achievement correctly, you don’t have the run the flag (as in, grab it and take it to your base). All you have to do is return it (that is, make the other side drop it or be around when it drops) and click on it to return it to your own base. Still not a walk in the park, but definitely a lot easier. I think it wouldn’t be fair to do it the other way–some classes are simply not at all suited for running flags, so it would favor those that are (druids and rogues, for example) too much over the others.
I’m planning on getting a group of guildies together to do it, if I can.
Yeah, the WSG requirement is to return a fallen flag but the Eye of the Storm one is to capture the flag.
My bigger concern is what a complete mess the BGs are gonna be all week. Imagine all of the drama you saw with hunting for fricken’ eggs and putting ears on female players translated into the battleground context full of players than never PvP… I get nervous just thinking about it…
I’ve rarely had any trouble capturing a flag in EotS, and I play a mage (not exactly the optimum flag-returning class. :p) I’m not worried about this one, or the others except for WSG. That’s the only one that I think is going to be problematic for me, hence my efforts to get some guildies together and do a premade in hopes of making it less frustrating.
I got the title on my priest (mostly via getting up at my normal early hour before work and farming eggs rather than ore/herbs), and decided I just wanted the bunny pet on my pet-collecting warlock.
My priest had gotten it in one of her first dozen or so eggs. Guess how long it took the warlock?
Yup. I had to buy one with 100 choco eggs. :smack:
Although capturing the flag in EotS is miles easier than capturing the flag in WSG, since half the players are off capturing objectives &c. (Not that I really know, as I usually spend my time fighting over the fixed objectives).
A good time to put together a four- or five-person group and go dominate some battlegrounds for a while =).
Yeah, capping the flag in EotS is not that hard in a normal match - but I’m not sure what to expect during the holiday. Will anybody be capping the towers or is everybody gonna zerg the flag?
Considering the level of outrage and indignation over picking up “someone else’s” egg can you imagine the howling if you grab the flag before someone else? Or what about your team letting you get fragged so they can get the flag instead of you? Or in WSG everybody camping the base hoping to get the return? AB battles will be all about offense and no defense - in fact you’ll probably have people giving up nodes voluntarily just so they can recap. It’s really poorly thought out by Blizz I’m afraid.
You’re right about guild groups being the only way to go.
Oh, I know that’s what the requirement is. It doesn’t make it any easier, though (indeed, capturing a flag would be much easier). I think I’ve managed to return all of a couple fallen flags in the entire 3 years or so I’ve been playing my main character. For one thing, he’s primarily a healer, so I’m not often in the thick of the melee if/when the flag drops. For another, even minor latency means someone else gets the click before you do.
This one favors certain classes, too (namely, melee types, who will be in a better position to return the flag after the carrier is killed), just in a different way.
That, coupled with the fact that Horde in my battlegroup just plain suck at most BGs, will make this achievement especially painful.
I had to buy my bunny, too. I opened over 300 eggs, and never got the drop.
On the plus side, I’ll get my 75th pet during Children’s Week (# 73 should come tomorrow when I finally get 40 Champion’s Seals, and then Childrens’s Week will net 2 more as rewards).
Even if everyone zergs the flag, it’s a lot harder to get “behind enemy lines” to attack the flag-carrier in EotS than it is in WSG. Definite point about how freaking useless your own allies are likely to be, though.
I’m happy with the Noblegarden event. It’s the first holiday with achievements that can be easily done by casual player. At least it’s the first one I’ve managed to complete. All the others required completing some instance many times until you got a lucky drop. Noblegarden does it a better–if you don’t get the drop, you can turn in some number of consolation prizes to get it.
I agree with this - bad luck with the random number generator could make it take much longer, but you could always finish it (at least for the meta-achievement) in a reasonable amount of time.
The negatives for me were the decisions regarding the placement of the eggs (having them all so close together made it a camp-fest with much whinging) and the achievement for finding race-appropriate females (which led to harassment).
I think it would have worked better if the eggs were a bit more spread out (perhaps all over Mulgore for example instead of just Bloodhoof Village) and didn’t despawn if one player clicked it (but rather had a reset-timer for a given player - you couldn’t click the same egg twice in 4 hours, say). It would have been more of a “hunt” and players could either get all the eggs in Mulgore every couple of hours or get all of the eggs in all of the starting areas and be done in one session.
As far as the female achievement I would have just made it gender-neutral.
I didn’t even realize that the pet and the clothes did drop until somebody mentioned it to me. I thought you had to buy them. I didn’t get anything but chocolate and shell frags until about my 80th egg.
I don’t know why the ears achievement is female-only. Kind of odd. I don’t understand the “harassment” people are referring to, though. Is there a problem having ears put on you? I know I’ve “eared” a couple that already had bunny ears, so it can’t be a timing thing. 
Actually, when I’m doing quests a few levels over my head (which is how I like to do them), I quite like when a level 80 roars in and does a bunch of kills. Then I can pick the mobs off one by one as they respawn and not have to worry about adds.
The ones where you have to kill a named mob are different. I almost always group with anyone else that’s doing the quest in that case, whether I’m the high-level one or the low-level one. It’s just the polite thing to do.
The most grief I think I’ve gotten was when my level sixty-something decided to drop a crafting profession that was too expensive to level and switch to mining. To skill up, of course, I had to go through all the low-level areas to find the ores I needed, and boy, the lowbies were pissed. Sorry, but I needed copper as much as they did, and I tried to be polite about it (I wouldn’t steal a vein if someone else had just worked to clear the mobs around it, for example). The anger was amazing. Dudes! We all have a right to the content in this game!
Late last night I decided to play with some alts and “hunt” eggs with them. Went like this:
Lvl 4 female human warlock, Goldshire: Discovered Mr. 20-hours-or-more Camper had finally moved on and his spot was open, so I camped there long enough to collect 20 eggs. Eggs spawned in two places there, one between the planters and one over the window. Didn’t find a single item in those 20 eggs. Another player set up shop beside me, and a few eggs later he said, “Man, you’re quick!” after I beat him each time an egg spawned. Since I was only aiming for 20 eggs to complete the initial quests (I’m not sure if I’m keeping this toon, so why bother) and I was at 17, I told him, “3 more and then I’ll get out of your way.” Got 20, turned in the two quests, and logged off.
Lvl 11 female draenei warrior, Azure Watch: Lots of fun! The eggs were distributed over a much wider area than in Goldshire. I camped a 2-egg spot long enough to get the first 20 eggs again, and found the Tuxedo Shirt in the first 20. After that I set up a small circuit of 3-4 spots. From eggs I went on to find the Tuxedo Pants, the Spring Robe, and the Flowers, and collected 50 chocolates to buy the Elegant Dress. Put some bunny ears on a lvl 80 female human paladin, and while wearing the tux I /kiss-ed a male draenei who was wearing the Elegant Dress 
Then I mailed the tux shirt and pants to my male draenei paladin.
Lvl 25 female night elf druid, Dolanaar: Again, a lot better than Goldshire. No camping at all this time. Lots of spawn points spread over a large area, and relatively few people. So this time it was a lot of run run run. Finished the quests but the only items she found were the Tux Shirt and … the Spring Rabbit pet!
Earlier in the day, my human paladin hit lvl 72 in Northrend. I made a humorous observation to my guild: Blizzard makes us learn Cold Weather Flying in order to fly in NR, but doesn’t see any problem with quest after quest requiring swimming in the freezing ocean, where IRL that arctic water would be far more deadly, more quickly, than the cold air. (Of course, swimming in full plate armor is ridiculous anyway, but still…)
Somebody a while back mentioned that the gear I’d bought at the AH would be quickly replaced with quest rewards once I hit NR, but that hasn’t been the case for the most part. Mainly because I waited until lvl 71 to go to NR, I suppose. So far very few of the quest rewards have been an improvement over what I already had. Part of that is I’ve discovered that most of the items I’ve purchased are things that drop from mobs in NR. I’ve kept a couple quest rewards - the necklace I got for ringing the bell in Farshire and some spaulders. The spaulders look much much cooler than the ones I was wearing, so naturally a couple hours later another set of shoulders dropped from a mob that have better stats and they look exactly like the ones I was wearing before I got the quest reward shoulders. :rolleyes:
Oh yeah, and big LOL: “Heigaar the Horrible” 
Also, I was a little surprised at how quickly they wanted to shuffle me off into The Nexus.
You can’t re-ear someone - they either have to remove the buff or it has to time out. You might have hit someone that was wearing the holiday headpiece that looks pretty much the same.
The harassment is basically non-stop tells and group invites for those few players with rare combos (female troll and female dwarf in particular). I can see how it’d be annoying getting mobbed by 50 players just for setting foot in Dalaran. Similar to how famous people get annoyed with autograph seekers - it seems cool from a distance but sometimes you just want to fish in peace.
DKs get a spell that lets us walk (and ride) on water.