Well, the hotfix was applied and rolling restarts took place in the early hours of the morning, and … now there’s no Dark Iron Dwarves invading every hour, and to /wave at a Barker doesn’t get you a Complementary Brewfest Sampler anymore.

Apparently not only was the Pink Elekk quest I was fortunate enough to do twice yesterday was NOT meant to be a repeatable quest, it was also problematic in that level 70’s could not see the quest, but those under 70 could.

The ‘barking’ quests that have you ride the Racing Ram through Ogrimmar work only in you being able to practice and refine your route - when you run past the flags, the automatic bark-out doesn’t happen anymore like it was happening yesterday.

So, while we wait for another emergency hotfix that will correct some of these problems and re-introduce ways to get Brewfest Tickets in the game, I guess we…

*gasp*

… go back to doing whatever it was before Brewfest came out!

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Brewfest has been active for 18 or so hours on my realm now, and I’ve participated in five or six Dark Iron Dwarf raids of the festival.

Three or four of them were a lot of fun, if not chaotic, but with all that was going on, the game stayed pretty smooth and continuous throughout the whole invasion (which lasts what, 5-10 minutes?).

One or Two of them were ‘griefed’, which caused significant lag during the event, or annoyance afterwards.

I’m hoping that tonight there will be an emergency shut down to apply a hotfix to two major issues:

1. The Beer Barkers
2. Visibility of Blix, turn-in NPC for after event

Griefing The Beer Barkers

Beer Barkers are griefed by setting up a macro that executes as many /wave as possible, and spamming it. The Beer Barker’s job is to respond to each /wave with the attempted delivery of a Complimentary Brewfest Sampler. The Sampler is thrown at your toon, bonks you on the head, and is in general kind of funny to obtain.

The Sampler is SUPPOSED to be ‘used’ by a player, resulting in the player drinking the beverage and then throwing the mug out ahead of them, as if at someone. Once the beverage is thrown - and throwing has a cast time on it to prevent spam-throwing - the Beer Barker throws the player another Sampler to repeat the process.

Having two or three /wave x 500 spammers outside of an event is annoying and spammy, but during an event it impedes players who are actually taking part in the event from getting THEIR Samplers which are an integral part of ’slaying’ the Dark Iron Dwarves. The Beer Barkers are too busy responding to 500 /waves from someone who isn’t even taking part in the event.

And of course, most of the griefers are level 1 toons with names with illegal characters - in other words, OBVIOUSLY set up for griefing.

Once 4 PM rolled around, my event partner guildmate and myself decided to finish the Quest given to us that required us to go to the Grim Guzzler in Blackrock Depths. Competing with the growing number of evening players logging in and attending the Brewfest invasion event didn’t sound like fun and we were right - when we returned shortly after another event had ended, outside of Orgrimmar was SO INCREDIBLY LAGGED it was hard to turn our BRD quest turn in. Finally, I was disconnected entirely.

Griefing The Turn-in

Another place that has been griefed is after the event - ‘Blix’, the NPC who makes suggestive remarks to all the players walking by, is a Goblin, and thus is very small.

He’s also standing on the ground when I think he should be standing up on a pedestal.

After a Dark Iron invasion event has completed, everyone involved rushes to Blix to turn in their marks (which have a time dependency so they cannot be hoarded from one invasion to the next) in order to get the Brewfest tickets that can be turned in for the Brewfest goodies.

Some people (usually more than one) are finding it funny to mount up on their big Tauren mounts with their huge equipment, and stand right on Blix.

That, combined with the 75 other people swarming around trying to turn in tickets makes it nearly impossible, even in first person view, to find Blix and interact with him to turn in your tickets.

My fix for this one was just to stand near Blix during the entire event itself, and when I notice that the event is dying down (one of these times I’ll pay attention to the clock), I go and do my turn-ins before the crowd descends. The griefers are generally also looking to get tickets so they’re not in Grief Position yet if you’re fast enough.

I think I’ll let the event go on its own for the evening, however, and pick it up again in the morning when the population is the lowest and competition and griefing hopefully at its lowest.

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