WoW's Children's Week holiday is live once again, and I finally picked up the last of the ten minipet rewards. (I skipped the event a few years in a row back when each pet you owned took up a slot in your bank, so ironically the final pet I needed was from Vanilla.) I went on
Warcraft Pets to update my pet collection and noticed an interesting tidbit they picked up from WoW Insider.
With the new account-wide pet feature in Pandaria, this feat will no longer need to take multiple years, as it did for me. Rather, players with enough eligible alts will be able to collect one pet on each alt and potentially wrap up their collection in a single year. The same change potentially affects a number of other holidays - along with the Darkmoon Faire.
- If you previously collected minipets on more than one character, obviously your workload just went down dramatically.
- Likewise, some events have currency token limits that make it very challenging to collect all of the rewards in a single year. With the change, you will be able to farm the pet on an alt while saving tokens from your main for stuff that is not shared (though I'm a bit fuzzy on what will and won't be shared by the time the expansion lands - mounts? achievements?).
- If, like myself, you only collect pets on one of your characters, this change gives you a choice of increasing the rate at which you gain pets at a cost of increased time investment.
One thing to watch is whether the time investment for future rewards increases due to this change. For example, the current Darkmoon Faire setup awards almost half of the tokens for a minipet for a single visit to the event each month. Currently, it isn't a huge loophole if you can collect pets on an alt you're not even playing. If, on the other hand, the change means that I can now clean out the Faire vendors in 2 months using a pack of alts, rather than taking 6-9 months on my main alone, that's potentially a big drop in the staying power of the event. I don't expect them to change the prices on current items - though it won't hurt to watch the beta servers just in case - but there could definitely be a change to how this works in the future.