September 19 is “Talk Like a pirate Day” and World of Warcraft has a minor event in world celebrating the event. Travel to Booty Bay on the south tip of the Eastern kingdom and meet with Captain DeMeza to get a special “Buff” and an achievement. The “Buff” is basically “You look like a pirate”. It can be cancelled and reactivated if you decide you want to drop the look and doesn’t add any other bonuses. It lasts for 12 hours.
I’d never been to Booty Bay before, so I had a few new experiences. Firsly, Booty Bay is the first neutral town I’ve been to. At least I think it is neutral. There were a whole boatload of Alliance folks hanging around in town for the event. I learned a few things. One, you can flag yourself for always on PvP but otherwise, you are untouchable by the opposing side. This seems like something that would have been good to know before I had set off to hunt newbie dwarves.
I also had some experience with Instanced areas, though I’m not exactly sure that is what you’d call it in this case. More on that in a bit.
The bulk of the time I spent on Pirates Day was doing Booty Bay quests. All of these quests were nicely pirate themed and wearing pirate garb from the Pirates Day Buff was a nice bonus. It’s kind of odd as well to see Alliance folks doing the same quests. I kind of wish there were more avenues to do cross faction quests. You can pay money to change factions but that also shifts your race to a matching opposing race. I want to just continue being a Blood Elf Alliance character.
Ok, not really, I like the Horde way more than Alliance and both of my Alliance characters have barely been played.
Anyway, the climax of the Pirates Quest features an invasion of Booty Bay by an opposing Pirate Clan. This places a ship in the middle of the town and puts the place under constant bombardment by cannon fire. I am really curious to learn how this works for other players. The huge crowd surrounding Captain DeMezo was gone. In face, most Player characters were gone, replaced by mobs. Except there were some Player characters still running around. I don’t understand exactly how the game accomplishes this. I mean, I get the programming logistics but, do these other players see the mobs? Do they get attacked? Do they see me? Maybe they are there because they are also working on fighting the Pirate invasion.
I may never know. Sure ly I didn’t spawn a city full of mobs for everyone to deal with. Yeah, there were lots of high level players who would have no problem fighting them off but there were some lower level folks too. Also, thinking of monsters killing people, these quests seem to be a bit buggy as the quest givers kept getting killed.
I don’t know if I’ll really bother next year, if I’m still playing WoW by then. The Buff doesn’t add anything and there are no significant prizes to win (like some other events I’ll get around to writing about).
