Brewfest Blues

I haven't seen other people talking about this much, so I thought I'd take a minute to share my pain. I've been trying to complete Brewfest on two of my toons. Kaliope needs it for her final event to unlock the Violet Drake. I'm also trying to complete it on a second toon so I can get all my girls through the holiday achievements in two years. I know, I probably deserve what I get with this plan.

I'm starting to get frustrated because it requires SOOOOO many tickets to finish the Brewfest achievements. We get 14 days to collect tickets, with 3 quests available each day. The Barfight quest rewards 10 tickets... the Barking quest rewards 15 tickets... and the Barrel Throwing quest... varies. I'd say the average player can probably get 20-30 tickets per day with barrel throwing, so I'm gonna call it 25. I know some folks have been able to get as many as 80+ tickets on one barrel run, but that would probably take zero mistakes, zero lag and lightning reflexes to achieve. The way I see it, you can reasonably expect to collect about 50 tickets each day from daily quests.

In order to complete all of the achievements from scratch you need 552 tickets. If you also want to pick up the new pet or the pony keg, you'll need another 100 tickets. Personally, I'm trying to get the elekk pet on ALL of my toons (yes, I admit to insanity). Now we're talking about 652 tickets to get just one of the two vanity items, 752 if you want both. But with 14 days of the event and 50(ish) tickets per day, the most you can reasonably hope to get is 700 tickets.

I know, I hear you saying that there are non-daily quests that award tickets - that's true. If you do all three of the regular quests, including killing Coren Direbrew, you can get another 60 tickets. But lowbies cannot kill Direbrew, so the most they can collect is 20 extra tickets. Either way, the most this would possibly save you is about one day of dailies.

The bottom line is this, if you want to collect enough tickets to complete the Brewmaster achievement, you have to do dailies for 11 of the 14 days. In other words, you can only miss three days the whole two weeks. If you want to finish the achievement AND get one vanity item, you can only miss 1 day of dailies the whole two weeks. If you do all of the non-daily quests, that buys you an extra day of breathing room. BUT, if you want to get both vanity items in addition to the achievements, you're probably screwed unless you do dailies every day AND every non-daily quest. All of this assumes you have no tickets or items from last year to ease your pain.

After watching my ticket stash inch up slowly, I crunched these numbers and realized just how much work it was going to take to get all my tickets. I know Blizzard has said they want to make these achievements challenging, and I totally agree with that idea. However, I'm not sure forcing people to log almost every day for two weeks is appropriate. There's hard and then there's just unreasonable. I'm not saying these quests take all day, you can probably knock them out in 15 minutes if you get lucky on the Barfight timer.

On the other hand, if I got the flu and I was out of commission for a week, I'd be unable to get caught up. Even if I had a full week left to devote to Brewfest! This doesn't seem considerate to me, we don't want players to get obsessed with games but then we build in stuff like this. Surely it wouldn't have been too "casual-friendly" to build in one more daily quest to give players a bit more breathing room. I'm fine with the idea that Brewfest can be hard and require a lot of time. But I don't really agree with bottlenecking the ticket collection so we have no choice but to log in practically every day to get dailies done. I'd almost prefer the Summer Festival gig, where I could visit bonfires and spend 3 hours collecting blossoms or just 30 minutes. It's the same amount of work either way, but then the player has more control over the time allocation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not really fussing because I can't handle it and I'm going to miss out. I'm on track with both of my toons, despite my raiding/blogging/webadmin/mommy schedule. I can generally get my Brewfest dailies done in 30-60 minutes depending on how many toons I try to push through each day. I'm just wondering how well this is working for other players, because I can see that this would be a challenge for folks who can't log in every day. Is anyone else having problems, especially if you're one of the peeps who can't be online every day?
Posted by Kaliope at Monday, September 28, 2009
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17 comments:

  1. Kaliope i learned this too late to help me, but you can get enough tickets for items you may not want to keep but need for the achivements (the costume for 250) use it to get the achieve, then return it and get you 250 tokens back. Unless you really want to have a costume for each toon, this saves you alot of time and token grinding.
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  2. I believe the costume is 350, not 250. 200 for the dress, 100 for the hat (or shoes) and 50 for the shoes (or hat). And yes, you can sell it back. Of course, one of my toons already had brew of the month from last year, so thats no help to her, but maybe my 3rd 80 can also get the title this year, even with a lot of slacking on my part.

    My main likes to keep costumes. She's just lucky she had tickets left over from 2007, that she couldnt' find in her bank in 2008. The tickets dont' decay, like the tokens do.
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  3. The ticket haul you get on the first day is quite nice. However past that, it really becomes dependent on your keg run. I lucked up with getting the body pc of the brewfest grab last year and only had to pull 150 tickets to finish that up. I managed to get my meta done only a few hours after brewfest started somehow. Still, I haven't been pushing to get all the events done so it wasn't really helpful overall. I can say I pull about 20-26 tokens a run on the keg run but thus far have only done the event with 4 of my characters, only chasing after certain items. I'm sure in the next few months, I'll feel like I should've tried harder lol. ~Scrübby/Llane (still learning new site setup)
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  4. You should be able to get 30 tickets in a single keg run. The most you can possibly get is not much more than 40 tickets - it takes 42 seconds a run if you get everything spot on. You can do the keg runs every 18 hours, (though on my main I have been lucky and had it reset after only 12 hours a couple times) which means you can do it 4 times every 3 days.

    If you are really dedicated, you can get 195 tickets each three days. Even doing the keggers once a day you should be able to pull in 55 tickets a day. Add on the 50 tickets you get for the initial quests (not counting Direbrew) and with a little effort you can get everything.
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  6. Removed wring math... 80 tickets might be possible. Wow...



    If you're in the US, you can get another 40 once for the pink elkk. (according to wowwiki)


    The drake is nice, the events are nice, but the holiday achievements are the biggest pile of shit I've ever seen in a game.
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  7. 80 tickets from ram racing is flat out impossible. If you hit everything absolutely perfectly, the quickest you can do a keg run is 40 seconds. You get 30 seconds added per run, so each run takes 10 seconds off the clock. With 4 minutes at the start, that means the most runs you can do is 24, giving 48 tokens if you nail every single turn and barrel just right. A little bit of leeway each run means the best practicable time is more like 41-42 seconds, giving you a maximum ticket haul of 40. If anyone claims to be able to do a single run in less than 40 seconds without using any exploits, I'd love to see some video proof.
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  8. 80 tokens is 40 runs.
    40 * 30 + 4 * 60 = 1440s

    That's 36s per turn.

    As Alliance, you take the barrel on the other side of the bridge, then the one farther away, then get your beer and cut to the one at the bridge again. This doesn't take 40 seconds if executed perfectly (and the server doesn't muss a refresh because of lag). 36 sounds very possible.

    Now, I won't be able to concentrate enough for 24 minutes to get these tokens, especially since I can get enough if I do it every day and it doesn't consume more time if you collect the tokens over multiple days.
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  9. I agree with the way it is setup currently. A holiday event like this shouldn't just be a handout fest of items. You should realistically have to make choices on what items you want to buy. If you simply must have everything in the catalog, then yes you had better be willing to put in the time.
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  10. Rien/Stacy: I've heard about the "buyback" plan and I fully intend to do that to save time. However, I doubt Blizzard planned for that to be a viable option. They designed the event to require 552 tickets and next year they may well plug this hole. That's why I included it in the conversation. People wouldn't be resorting to this if the achievement requirements were reasonable IMO.

    Shawn: I realize that everyone needs to make choices, I was primarily questioning the scope of the event as required by the "Brewmaster" achievement. Even if you don't purchase any extras, you still have to participate 11 out of 14 days to get all of the necessary items. As I mentioned, this seems a bit excessive for casuals. I'm not suggesting a huge change or any modification of effort, I agree that it should require work. I'm merely suggesting that they add a little more flex on the daily quest options to accommodate those who can't log in most days of the week. But I'm not suggesting that they just hand out tickets, any reworking should involve the same time investment.
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  11. I agree, it would be great to see some of these changed to allow a more intense "grind" for people with only a few days to play. I was out last week and am struggling to get the tokens I need to get Brewmaster (and my drake!). Since they only come up once a year and have a pretty hefty reward attached with the achievement system it would be nice to have more flexability. For example, they could change the barrel runs to only last for 2 minutes but allow you to do it every hour similar to the Halloween or Valentine's events.
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  12. Kring, your math is wrong: You start with 4 minutes, which is 240 seconds. The best time I have seen for the ram racing is 40 seconds per run, nailing every barrel just right and every turn bang-on. You get 30 seconds back per run, so each run takes 10 seconds off the original 240 seconds. 24 runs is the theoretical maximum. Assuming you could do it faster, say 38 seconds, that would still only be 30 circuits before you run out of time. I still contend that 40 runs/80 tokens is impossible, and 40 tokens is about the practical maximum you could expect to get.

    Anywho, we now get an extra two days of Brewfestering, so everyone should be able to get enough tokens. (FWIW, my main now has everything already, so extra tokens collected will go towards getting all the hats instead of just the one, and maybe a lil supply of hops for the year ahead...)
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  13. I noticed the time extension too :) It seems to indicate that I'm not the only person who found the time window a bit grueling. Luckily I got both of my toons their achievements already - I did the dailies every day. It's still nice to see Blizz acknowledge that perhaps the schedule was a bit tight.
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  14. I finished it on my main char, in fact I leveled especially for Brewfest, started playing a couple months ago so this is my first one and I really wanted the Brewmaster title, thought I had it in the bag at 72, then 1st day I went to do Direbrew and found you needed 75, had to level fast!
    Regardless, I did the starting quests and the dailies and bought then returned the brewfest outfit, completing the achievement on Monday. I bought the pink elekk pet, the pony keg, have 235 brewfest tokens still in my bank and haven't done the dailies since tuesday when I realised there was nothing left for me to get with them and figured even if they bring in nice new stuff next year, that's enough of a head start.
    I really don't see the problem with it tbh.
    Ageaeth
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  15. Not to be picky, but the only reason you have extra tickets is because you returned the Brewfest outfit and got 350 of them back. If Blizzard had closed that loophole and disabled merchant buyback on those items, you would still be collecting tickets. As I mentioned, successful completion of a seasonal event shouldn't hinge on scamming the vendor. That's fine that it doesn't bother you, but it's still bad design.
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  16. I really hope they put in some sort of Costume Closet for those of us who like to keep the outfits. Every holiday seems to have some sort of costume. And the various "fishing hat" or "cooking hat" or whatever that you can get for all of these is taking up a ridiculous amount of space on my main's bank. Holiday's with requirements to get a costume to get the title only make this worse. And something like that for tabards would also be quite welcome.
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  17. I.....am still recovering from trying this on 30 toons at once. I did get about 20 of them the drunk dancing in Dalaran achievement, but it got reaaaaallly hard for me to log in to do the keg run back and forth and forth and back.

    I got interested in doing the holiday achievements and dailies with the Midsummer Fire Festival, where you'd get a bubble of XP for each daily you completed, no matter what level you were. 2 bubbles for each toon was great, and got me to log in each one for the 3-4 minutes needed to do the torch tossing and catching.

    This event? It's really annoying, especially after I wasted 3000 tickets buying the elekk for all my toons, then deciding to go for the Disturbing the Peace achievement as well. I don't even have an 80 yet! What was I thinking?
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