Noblegarden: First Impressions

First off, some info about the eggs, this will help explain the results I've seen so far. There are a certain number of spawn locations for eggs, something like 30. At any time there are a certain number of eggs up, around 5. So what do we get from this?

1) Eggs respawn in a set location. In other words, stand somewhere long enough and you'll get an egg.
2) Eggs respawn as fast as they are picked up. In other words, your best friend is someone who picked an egg at the other side of the town. Or, the faster you pick, the faster they can be picked.
3) These come together to mean this: If every spot is camped the eggs will be picked almost instantly, leading to the maximum possible eggs/second in the area.

Hunting is discouraged. Camping means faster eggs for everyone. Hunting means lots of travel time and longer delays between picks. After all, only with perfect timing will an egg pop up right as you run there, whereas with standing, you're always there.

People seem to have realized this and the result is a lot of people camping a spot or two. It's very efficient. It's also boring and looks weird.

It's not all bad though. While there are random achievements, none of the meta is random. If you get nothing you need from eggs, you need hundreds of chocolates to buy the items used for the parts of the meta. But that is doable. Perhaps three hours? It's a grind, but at least it is doable. In practice it's likely to be faster since a rare egg drop means 25-100 fewer eggs to farm.

Perhaps that is bad. What does it indicate of the influence of the Love is in the Air fiasco that I can see a holiday as an improvement because it is boring, but at least it's not random?

So there we go: Noblegarden, it's boring but it won't screw you out of the drake. Good luck with Children's Week!

Second Impressions
It's a matter of how many people are around. During the weekend it was terrible because there were far too many people. Now on a weekday afternoon there aren't a ton of people around. In Bloodhoof I estimate 10-15 people. That's enough to keep eggs picked up and spawning, but it's not too much so that it becomes faster to camp. Basically you don't want so many people that every egg can be watched. This means that people have to run around to get all the eggs. When this happens it's actually a good bit of fun.

Don't forget to get the daily before you start picking up eggs. I keep getting it after I've already picked up 15 or so eggs.

Overall it's a decent event, it's just not so good when there are tons of people. With this in mind, Blizzard should have expanded the area (this risks putting people into aggro range of hostile mobs, though it seems to be a 18+ event anyway) or added more towns, perhaps by adding the starting zone itself or the cities. Imagine an egg hunt in Orgrimmar! Or even better, add 'super eggs' to Wintergrasp with double the chocolate and a higher chance of rare drops.

I recently had a nice pay it forward moment. While on my way around southern Kalimdor to plant flowers I remembered I needed to drop by Un'Goro for the egg playing. I did a /who and sent a tell to an 80 to see if he could help me. He said he could and after a quick plant in Tanaris I was in flight. While there we helped each other with the blushing bride achievement since I completed the tuxedo and got the dress this afternoon. In thousand needles someone was looking for a rabbiting wand, so I invited him and he joined us. The end result was a few more achievements for me and I got to help some people too. That made me feel good.