WoW Review - Children's Week

The eggs of Noblegarden are gone, replaced by the sound of screaming rugrats. It’s the one week each year where busy adventurers have to take time out of their schedules to show these little ankle-biters around Azeroth and Outland. Do we mind? Not at all, because we're rewarded with reputation, achievements and two vanity pets.

Unlike other in-game events in the last year, Children's Week did not receive a revamp. The only new things added to it are the achievements, one of which is probably one of the most painful things you'll go through on your quest for the Violet Proto-Drake. In fact, let's start with that. We might have gotten soft since the achievements for Noblegarden were fairly simple, solo affairs that we could run around and do without a care in the world. However, I do think one of the achievements for Children's Week is a bit too much - School of Hard Knocks.

Not only do you have to PVP (if you want to call it that), you have to perform a task that your class, spec or both may not be in tune with. Good luck being a holy priest or resto druid and capturing a flag in Eye of the Storm or taking a resource node in Arathi Basin. You'll die quicker than you can say "achievement". This isn't to mention those of us who just don't PVP. Ever. We have zero resilience and little experience, so completing that achievement is a lot harder than certain PVP-ers make it out to be.

The better route to go for this would have been allowing the player to be in the vicinity of the flag cap, or the flag return, or whatever, when it occurs. This still requires some effort in the form of joining BGs, but allows the players to focus more on working together instead of working against one another just to get this achievement. That one achievement kills this event for me, especially considering the fact that its required to get the Violet Proto-Drake. What a let down.

Other than that, this event is the same as it has been the last two years. There's a quest chain in old Azeroth and a quest chain in Outland in which you drag an orphan child around to several landmarks - which are mostly different for alliance and horde players. At the end of it all, each quest gives you the opportunity to choose a vanity pet out of three choices. If you've done these quests in past years, you may have most, if not all, of the pets available.

There was some talk about a Northrend quest much like the other two, but there are none implemented in-game right now. Perhaps the possibility remains that Blizzard will activate something tomorrow during maintenance and give us what we want - a continuation of Children's Week in Northrend and another vanity pet. This might - might - make up for the lame achievement I mentioned earlier.