Holiday Questing...wha? Again?

I recently read this post by Pike, the author of Aspect of the Hare, where she talks about her feelings about being a veteran WoW player faced with repeating the holiday quests for the sake of an achievement.

Like Pike I have been playing WoW for a while. I actually got hooked by the Make Love Not Warcraft episode of South Park that aired in Oct '06. I had actually been avoiding WoW after it launched just because of how deeply I had immersed myself in Blizzard's other games.

A Small Digression
At least those games came to an end. Yeah there is BattleNet, but initially you beat the game and waited for the next hot RTS (real time strategy) to hit the market. I started my Blizz career with Starcraft, moved to Diablo II, and then lost several weekends to Warcraft III.

I new that it given my addictive nature towards RTS games that an MMO which routinely added content was just bad news for me, and I was probably correct. WoW is now so much a part of my day that performing the minor chores in game, like gathering herbs or mining, is how I wind down after work in the evening. It is also how I like to enjoy my first cup of coffee in the morning.

My morning kind of looks like this:
I usually wake up when my cat Hamlet drops whatever toy has his fancy today next to my head and starts to play. Next I blearily rise and start the coffee, feed the cats, then grab my coffee and begin my day at the WoW Auction House.

Then if I am playing that day I will decide which character I feel like working on. Lately that has been my DK Bert.

And the Point Is?
Well to make a short story long, the point is that over time I have done the holiday quests enough to really not even notice them happening anymore. This morning I realized that I have heard fireworks and rockets being set off now for over a month, and was wondering when I would be able to do my AH work in peace...(yup this gamer is just about to ding 40...get off my lawn!)

So this year we have a new twist to the holidays in the form of Achievements. It is a simple idea, do the quests and get a few achievements done and maybe earn a new title or tabard or something like that.

Now the question is do I really want to go back and do them all again?

Achievements are fun. Its kind of like leveling without leveling:
Eat a billion gumballs and Whoosh/Ding! A little tag appears, an announcement goes over the airwaves and all your guildies respond by saying "Grats".

I like that, its a fun way to affirm that there are other folks playing the game with you. Its why we all say "Ding!" in guild chat, right? Even on that new rogue alt that levels every ten minutes?

The downside is that some of the holiday content, while it was quite fun the first time around now kind of makes me want to jab a pencil into my eye. Headless horseman is a great example. When it first came out I was right there in line with everyone to do my 5 runs each day to get the new epic rings and hope for the squashling to drop.

This year...meh.
I did it to help some guildies and that was fun. Otherwise I was all about getting to level 80.

This Lunar Festival I decided to go for the elders title and you know what, I ran right into the fact that I am burned out on PUGs. I ended the festival three coins short of the title. Each coin inside a dungeon in Northrend where the way is blocked unless you down a boss.

A guild run was out of the picture given that I am part of a very casual guild of busy adult types, and thus we have two level 80 characters, myself and a friend in the Midwest that has had his hands full with his child.

So over all I really enjoy the wacky achievements like killing 15 turkeys in under 30 secs or whatever, but I just can't easily get motivated to redo the holiday quests.

And that seems rather odd to me given the number of times I have leveled through the Barrens....