newtinmpls wrote: »

Maybe in a future event, the crowd can throw coins (or weird little things akin to the breathmints or the "turn the world a pretty color" grog) that could be based on how many participants are dancing/singing or whatever.

I like this idea. I think it should be the consumables though (or something else festival-related) because gold is easy to get and not very special.

The first time I did the New Life Festival, it was really enjoyable. After that, not so much. The main enjoyment came from figuring things out, but after that it just wasn't there. The only reason I still do it is to sell Hissmir recipes. The Witch's Festival, on the otherhand, was far more enjoyable for me in the long run because I could complete achievements on alts, grind them, and obtain cool cosmetics and gold from valued dropped sets.

You should have made this a poll. I prefer New Life Festival. The witch creeped me out and I don't like skeletons. But I did like being surrounded by them at the bank. Was funny. Just don't want to be one.

OlafdieWaldfee wrote: »

I would like New Life better than Witches Festival, if the golden recipe would drop at all. It´s the only thing I still need for the title but even after doing the dailies everyday on one to three characters I haven´t got it yet.
RNG is not a very good idea for this thing.

What platform and server?
I have a spare.

I preferred the Witches Festival. This one feels more like an adjunct to the clown store than a true 'event'. The drop rate for the style materials for the motif looks like it was tailored to 'encourage' visits to the clown store for mimic stones.

Korah_Eaglecry wrote: »

OlafdieWaldfee wrote: »

I would like New Life better than Witches Festival, if the golden recipe would drop at all. It´s the only thing I still need for the title but even after doing the dailies everyday on one to three characters I haven´t got it yet.
RNG is not a very good idea for this thing.

Its a Legendary drop. Just like the Runeboxes. Its not supposed to drop all the time. You still have a week plus to get it or buy it from one of this communities beloved Guild Traders.

It seems to be far more legendary than the rest of the legendaries. I did over 160 quests so far (counting the style material) and got each runebox multiple times but not the recipe. The recipe is at least 35k. And I don´t own that much money.
It´s not that much fun any more ...

I enjoyed Witch's Festival. First thing I did was buy the recipes I really wanted from chat / guild stores (the max mag and mag regen, and vampire satiation drink). Then I was able to get the experience buff on one or two characters, carry it with them as they did undaunted/questing/crafting dailies. I liked gaining the plunder skulls alongside my normal activities. I ended up farming almost all recipes legitimately, and now have multiple characters with recipes learned.

I have participated in New Life almost not at all. I bought the gold Hissmir Fish Eye recipe in zone chat right away. The experience buffs were unreliable - didn't stick around as I swapped multiple characters to run undaunted dailies (sometimes dying and loosing the buffs). The actual new life quests themselves look like a grind - and I don't have wayshrines opened up outside my home zones.

Instead of doing new life, I am doing my crafting dailies, skillpoint questing on low level alts, and undaunted dailies when I have time. I hope I can pick up a few more recipes (max stam + stam regen) from guild stores.

OlafdieWaldfee wrote: »

I would like New Life better than Witches Festival, if the golden recipe would drop at all. It´s the only thing I still need for the title but even after doing the dailies everyday on one to three characters I haven´t got it yet.
RNG is not a very good idea for this thing.

Agreed.

I like the atmosphere, the writing, and the individual quests of the New Life Festival much better than the Witches Festival. But the grind has made me hate it. I was able to finish all of the achievements for the Witches Festival over the course of a few evenings. Then I did it for my wife's main (she's been busy with work), then I did it for a second character. Only got one Runebox but I got all of the other items that I wanted and nearly 400 of the crafting style components.

In contrast, the New Life Festival sucks and it's really turned me off playing ESO while it's going. It took me three days to get most of the achievements done. Through trading, buying, and gifting, I managed to get one of everything (plus lots of extra style pages and a few extra Runeboxes of bath towels and hats)... except the ... bloody... Hissmir Fisheye Rye Recipe. The festival is almost done and I haven't gotten a single gold item since the 25th. After over a week of grinding for it, I took a day off and just played through some more of my story quests along with my DP and TG dailies. But the... bloody... achievement was like a sliver in the bottom of my paw.

I've been hunting on my guilds' stores for it (I'm only active in trade guilds since it's the only way to get enough Auction spots)... and scouring all the other guild stores I cross... the gold recipes from the Witches Festival don't typically break 1,000g. The Hissmir recipe will sometimes be in the mid 30s but is usually around 45-60k and up. And has been since the third day of the festival. If I drained all eight of my characters and my bank, I could afford to buy one and then I'd be broke. All for a recipe that I don't actually want except to finish the... bloody... achievement. So while I don't know about the drop rate of the Hissmir recipe overall, the Guild Store prices would seem to be indicating that it is at best around 2% of the drop rate of the Witches Festival gold recipe.

This compounded with the ridiculous price for the cash-grab Elk (which, between the holidays and my wife's PSU dying, I would have been too broke to buy even at a reasonable price) has left a real sour taste in my mouth and not in the mood to play ESO.

I enjoyed the Witch's festival more because I could grind out the skulls by doing content like dungeons and trials. In this event, I was limited to 8 on one character and had to run around and do nonsense for boxes.

At first blush, I felt New Life had a lot more variety to it. It took you to many different places on the map, including some you hadn't yet been to, and some you hadn't been to in quite a while (Betnikh). With there being a quest and a separate achievement for each leg of the festival, there was a sense of progression as you repeated the quests, finding shortcuts, discovering little hidden aspects of the quests/achievements, figuring out what you were doing wrong on previous runs, and trying to figure out how to succeed on the achievements that you couldn't complete the first 20 times you ran them. But once you completed the achievements, and had the various quest runs down to a set of movements for fastest completion, there wasn't anything more but to pursue any missing motifs and recipes and since there was no variation beyond the original set of quests/achievements, it did start to become tedious. I won't say boring, because I still think that they did a really nice job of making it feel like a celebration across all of Tamriel.

In Witches, although you had just one thing to do, you could pick and choose anyplace on top of, or underneath the map, in which to do it, so there was less a feeling of repetition despite being more repetitious. Also, during Witches, I got a lot of gear from boss drops that I was able to massively deconstruct and research, as my chars are still lower level, and will still be deconstructing/researching for a while to come. I liked that a lot. with New Life, although I was working toward completion of the achievements, and collection of the motifs and recipes, my focus and interest was the XP buff, considering that the XP for each of those small quest legs was pretty good compared to other mini quests from crafting writs, or small side-quests from the alliance story lines.

However that very thing is what tipped me slightly toward Witches, for the simple reason of how they handled the buff. ZOS had the little bug that (to their credit, they fixed quickly) the buff died if you did. But making every festival participant in the game world funnel through one spot to get the buff instead of a collection item you took with you, was IMHO rather absurd, with the negative impact on game performance. the other thing that wasn't talked about much but I talked to whomever listened, was that the clock on the XP buff doesn't pause when you log out. At first, I thought this was a bug and reported it on the bug forum here. But apparently that this was due to the fact that at the end of the festival players may accidentally or intentionally get an extra 2 hours of XP buff, after the festival ended. I think that they could have figured out a good way to avoid that, but I'm not a programmer.

Finally, I wonder if they're going to leave the kiosk in the game, as an empty shell with discarded chicken legs and mugs of mead strewn all over, as a remembrance of the good time we all had. The Witch's little cove is still there, but only as a door that you can't pass.

WhiteCoatSyndrome wrote: »

fgoron2000 wrote: »

the other thing that wasn't talked about much but I talked to whomever listened, was that the clock on the XP buff doesn't pause when you log out. At first, I thought this was a bug and reported it on the bug forum here. But apparently that this was due to the fact that at the end of the festival players may accidentally or intentionally get an extra 2 hours of XP buff, after the festival ended. I think that they could have figured out a good way to avoid that, but I'm not a programmer.

I wouldn't mind the buff expiring while I'm offline if we didn't have to port in to Eastmarch to get it. I have a number of bank alts now, and some of them I usually just log in - do Writs - log out, rinse and repeat for the next one on the list. But as it is I now have to log in to Eastmarch, port to wherever the Writs for that character are located, then either port back to Eastmarch or be prepared to port back there before running them the next day. It's an extra two loading screens leading me to usually just skip the buff.

fgoron2000 wrote: »

Finally, I wonder if they're going to leave the kiosk in the game, as an empty shell with discarded chicken legs and mugs of mead strewn all over, as a remembrance of the good time we all had. The Witch's little cove is still there, but only as a door that you can't pass.

I think this is likely, given that the empty tent was there before the event started.

Ahh, I didn't realize it was already there...cool...and also good point, the buff expiring offline would have been less of a hassle if there was a collections item that we could use instead of having to go to Eastmarch each time...