How can Blizzard improve World of Warcraft’s Harvest Festival holiday?

Dragonflight patch 10.1.7 has started bringing updates to old holidays, with Brewfest getting additional activities and even Pirate’s Day adding new Dragonriding armor to purchase. In addition, there is datamined Dragonriding armor for Hallow’s End and Day of the Dead, and the Headless Horseman is getting his encounter updated. Yet with all the attention paid to these four holidays that take place over a six-week period there’s one that continues to be completely forgotten: Harvest Festival. How bad is it overlooked? The official site didn’t even bother writing a new article and instead just linked last year’s.

It’s a shame, too, because harvest festivals are some of the most important events that occur worldwide. But the one on Azeroth might as well be a micro-holiday with how little attention is paid to it. (In case you weren’t aware, it’s actually already started and lasts until October 2).

Part of the problem is the schedule, of course. Brewfest and Hallow’s End are two of the biggest holidays in-game and their timing is immutable. November has Pilgrim’s Bounty which is essentially a late autumn harvest festival with several of the same activities. It also doesn’t help that the Harvest Festival in-game centers around hero remembrance for Uther and Grom, and thus players who don’t particularly care about them aren’t going to be motivated to visit.

To me the best solution is actually the simplest: Rename Pilgrim’s Bounty to Harvest Festival. The trapping of Pilgrim’s Bounty are almost exclusively American to begin with, so eschewing the pilgrim Thanksgiving origin for a more generic harvest theme would increase the appeal for players outside the U.S. You wouldn’t even have to make any other changes, although the week could benefit from a boss fight of some sort (boss fights tend to make holidays more popular). You could even start it a week earlier so that the event no longer directly coincides with the American Thanksgiving Day and instead is a fortnight of celebrating a bountiful harvest in anticipation of winter.

If you don’t want to eliminate the quests and ceremonies around Uther and Grom, introduce a new Remembrance Day micro-holiday that takes place in early September that uses the existing quests for the event. This way the work previously done isn’t lost, while also focusing even more on the faction heroes by no longer disguising it beneath a harvest festival.

What do you think? Should Harvest Festival and Pilgrim’s Bounty merge? Should Harvest Festival be expanded with new activities, or are you ok with it being ignored annually? And do you plan to partake in the Harvest Festival this year?