There’s a certain madness that goes along with achievements in games. Something about those virtual badges makes people display the kind of behavior normally associated with rats in addiction experiments, except unlike the rodents, the players aren’t being fed narcotics pellets.

World of Warcraft’s newest holiday event, the Easter-themed Noblegarden, is only the latest example of this.

During Noblegarden, chocolate eggs are hidden around a handful of towns. You can eat the chocolates, or you can turn them in for various rewards. There’s maybe thirty or forty eggs per location. Once someone picks one up, another appears in its place fairly quickly.

The thing is, to get all the achievements and thus the title of “The Noble,” you need to find and eat at least a hundred eggs. To buy some of the rewards needed for other achievements, you need up to fifty or a hundred more eggs each.

Those items can also pop out of individual eggs, but it’s a low chance, so you’re looking at picking up a couple hundred eggs at minimum.

That’s a bit much, I think. In real life, I get tired after finding a few dozen.

On each server, there were hundreds of people at a time trying to collect eggs. Some people would pick a place where they spawned, sit motionless and stare at it intently, wait for one to pop up, click on it, and repeat.

As the number of “free” eggs dwindled, the only way to get them was to do the same thing. The egg hunt became an egg camp.

Looking over the notes, it seems like Blizzard expected the eggs to respawn fast enough to satisfy everyone. If so, they underestimated their player base.

It’s strange to walk into a town and see all these people staring, unblinking, at a window ledge or shrub, all for an intangible reward. For an activity like gaming that’s supposed to be fun, that doesn’t seem like a lot of fun.

Fortunately for the more casual players, the numbers of campers seem to be thinning out as the week-long event continues. It’s looking like people won’t have to be a trained rodent just to take part.

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