Pilgrim’s Bounty ends tonight at 1 minute before midnight, server time. That means today is the last day to do the following:

Get really frustrated fighting people for wild turkeys.
Hit people in the head with cranberries.
Crash the opposing faction’s dinner parties.
Coerce a druid for a chance at the Raven Lord while wearing Puritan attire.
Go from 0 to 350+ in Cooking quickly, easily, cheaply.
Even if you aren’t interested in chasing turkeys and looking like a Mayflower reject, I highly recommend taking advantage of leveling Cooking. To get the Winter Veil Gourmet during the Feast of Winter Veil, you’ll need 325 cooking. And of course there are all of those yummy food buffs.

For a complete list of Pilgrim’s Bounty achievements, please see our OverAchiever Guide. Have fun with your last minute, food-related fun!

Help! Where do I go to get started?

Go to any of your faction’s major cities and find the feasting area. For Alliance, head to Stormwind, Ironforge, or Darnassus: for Horde, head to Orgrimmar, Undercity, or Thunder Bluff. While you can start the holiday in either the Exodar or Silvermoon, it’s a little faster to start in any of the “classic” cities because you don’t pick up any quests in their BC counterparts.

Where are the feasting areas located?

Alliance

Ironforge: directly outside the main gates to the city.
Stormwind: directly outside the main gates to the city.
The Exodar: directly outside the main entrance to the city.
Darnassus: in the small courtyard directly west of the city gates (where the training dummies are located).

On PvE servers, Horde players will not get flagged visiting the tables at Ironforge and Stormwind for Pilgrim’s Peril. You will get flagged at the Darnassus and Exodar tables.

Horde

Orgrimmar: directly outside the main entrance to the city.
Thunder Bluff: directly below the western elevators.
Silvermoon: across the road from the main entrance to the city.
Undercity: above the city in the ruins of Lordaeron courtyard.

On PvE servers, Alliance players will not get flagged visiting the tables at Silvermoon or Orgrimmar for Pilgrim’s Peril. You will get flagged visiting the tables at Thunder Bluff and Undercity.

Where do I get the recipes I need to cook?

Any Pilgrim’s Bounty vendor in any city will sell you the Bountiful Cookbook, a collection that contains all 5 Pilgrim’s Bounty recipes you’ll need.

What Cooking skill do I need?

In order to cook all 5 recipes you will need to have at least 330 280 Cooking.

Where do I get all the ingredients for these recipes?

All of the ingredients you’ll need (with the exception of the Wild Turkey) are sold by Pilgrim’s Bounty vendors located in the feast areas of each city.

Sweet potatoes = Darnassus (Alliance) or Thunder Bluff (Horde)
Cranberries = Ironforge (Alliance) or Orgrimmar (Horde)
Pumpkins = Stormwind (Alliance) or Undercity (Horde)
Wild Turkey = Elwynn Forest or Tirisfal Glades, a 100% drop from the Wild Turkey mobs that spawn during the holiday.
Spice Bread ingredients = any Pilgrim’s Bounty or regular Cooking vendor
Honey = any Pilgrim’s Bounty vendor
Autumnal Herbs = any Pilgrim’s Bounty vendor

The daily quests and the non-daily questline will take you to all of these cities anyway, so you don’t need to worry about making a special trip.

Where do I get the Pilgrim clothing and Turkey Shooter I need for achievements?

They’re rewards from the 5 Cooking dailies you can do during the holiday. Compared to the clothing you needed to buy for the Midsummer fire festival and Brewfest, they’re absurdly easy to get.

Help! The table isn’t working!

We’ve received complaints about the Stormwind and Undercity tables bugging out, and I’ve observed the same issue with the Undercity tables on my realm (and Alex Ziebart’s had the same problem with the Stormwind tables). I don’t yet know whether there’s a particular Stormwind table that works, but I found that the table directly north of the UC Pilgrim’s Bounty vendor worked OK. If you’ve hit a table where all of the “eating” options are dark and you get an error message trying to pass a dish, it’s not you — it’s bugged. Try all of the other tables.

How on earth do these tables work?

Each of the five chairs around the table is a vehicle, and specific to one of the dishes; if you mouseover them, you’ll see them labeled the Turkey Chair, or the Sweet Potato Chair, etc. Sit at one, and the following options will pop up on your UI:

#1 is passing a dish, so if you’re sitting at, say, the Turkey Chair, #1 will be passing the turkey. #2 is eating turkey. #3 is eating cranberries. #4 is eating stuffing. #5 is eating sweet potatoes. #6 is eating pie. All of the options you currently have available will be brightly lit (and if you’re sitting in the Turkey chair, eating turkey will always be available, and so on and so forth); any option you don’t have available will be grayed out. For example, in the above screenshot, I’m sitting in the Cranberry chair, so #1 allows me to pass cranberries to other players at the table. Other players seated at my table have passed me turkey, stuffing, and sweet potatoes, and I can eat cranberries anytime I want because that’s the chair I’m in, but no one has passed me pie, so that option isn’t lit. In order to get pie, I need to ask the person sitting in the Pie chair to pass me some, or get up and sit in the Pie chair when it becomes available.

For “FOOD FIGHT!”, it doesn’t matter which chair you pick, but you will need another player to be sitting at the table. Target the player and use the first option; instead of passing them the dish, you’ll bonk them over the head with it.

For Sharing is Caring, you’ll need to sit at each chair and pass each dish.

For Pilgrim’s Paunch, you need to go to each capital city, sit at a table, and eat each food item 5 times. It doesn’t matter whether you do this by being passed dishes or getting up and sitting at each table.

For Pilgrim’s Peril, you don’t need to worry about passing or eating dishes — you just need to sit at an enemy table and that’s enough.

How many turkeys do I need to kill for The Turkinator?

40. Make a /tar Wild Turkey macro and run around Elwynn or Tirisfal spamming it. The nearest mob will light up, so head over, kill it, loot, spam the macro, and keep going until you get the achievement. Each turkey kill will give you a 30-second buff called Turkey Hunter, and you can’t let this drop for the achievement. So essentially each kill gives you another 30 seconds to find and kill another turkey until you’ve amassed 40. If there are a lot of people out hunting turkeys, try to wait for a slower period or find a slightly less popular hunting spot.

These cover the most commonly-asked questions I’ve seen in my own server’s chat channels, but if you have any others, please drop them in the comments below and we’ll try to answer them!

The Harvest Festival is kind of the garbage holiday. It’s the holiday that all the cooler holidays like Hallow’s End and Brewfest make fun of, trip along the hall, and ostracize in the cafeteria. Harvest Festival is the weird kid who doesn’t have any friends, smells funny, and whom teachers forget when making a headcount on the school bus. As far as holidays go, it’s kind of the nothing holiday. It’s there, but nobody really knows what it’s all about and very few people bother to participate. I mean, hey, feast table outside of Orgrimmar! Then what?

Then nothing! Well, you see all sorts of ghosts all over the place (which is creepy, but hey, it’s almost Hallow’s End, anyway), but there’s really nothing that stands out. At least the ghosts from the Lunar Festival had those cool moonbeams. No, Harvest Festival is the half-baked holiday that doesn’t even have an Achievement. Yep, it’s so bad that even a one day event such as Pirates’ Day trumps it with an Achievement, and was even cool enough for WoW.com to organize some shenanigans around it. No wonder nobody hangs around that smelly kid!

So today, on the beginning of Harvest Festival, let’s dedicate a word or two to World of Warcraft’s most unimpressive holiday. What are you planning to do? Without any Achievements, you can even ignore it! If you’re Horde, there’s that quest to visit Grom Hellscream’s monument in Ashenvale, but his son Garrosh has been such an unbearable asshat that even that has lost its charm. Unless Blizzard plans to hotfix the event and dredge it from the murky depths of suck, here’s a Breakfast Topic to welcome the holiday that’s so uncool that even artwork of a Harvest Golem looks better. And man, Harvest Golems are ugly mothers.

Wow, okay, we didn’t see that coming, at least not this fast. European Blue Wryxian announced this morning on the official forums that the PTRs are back up for testing patch 3.2.2. Character copy is up for both pre-mades and your own characters (the wait time is currently an hour but this is definitely going to change). There are four realms being offered, two PvP and two PvE: Remulos, Brill, Fordring and Naralex. So far, the PTRs seem limited to EU-only but we’re sure America can’t be far behind. We’ll update you with more as we have more but in the meantime, if you have a European account, click here to download the client and copy over a character.

WoW.com is currently hopping onto the PTR as quickly as we can to find anything and everything we can, so keep an eye on the site.

Update: Patch notes are in the process of going up. We’ll have them over here on WoW.com as well as soon as we’re able.

If you’re looking for a way to relax this weekend, why don’t you hie off to Houston and get tickets to the Gamer MusiCON ’09, an all-day event celebrating music from the video game industry. If you’re familiar with the Video Games Live, the whole event has expanded somewhat with the help of Blizzard Entertainment and will now have a full hour-and-a-half Blizzard Live! to go along with the traditional Video Games Live! concert.

Blizzard Live! will feature music, both old and some never performed ones, from Blizzard’s different game worlds – Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft – paired with exclusive game footage and synchronized lighting. The Video Games Live! segment features music from other popular games like Chrono Trigger or Mega Man.

Of course, just like any great geek and gamer event, Gamer MusiCON will feature a lot of fun in between, such as costume contests, Guitar Hero faceoffs, a Q&A with Blizzard’s composers, autograph signings, and lots of swag. The event, conducted by Jack Wall and hosted by Tommy Talarico, comes to life with the help of the Houston Symphony. It will be held at the Jones Hall in downtown Houston. You’d better get your tickets today! Oh, and don’t forget to bring a date.

Live PvP competition is old hat. 2009 appears to be the year of PvE (if you ask me, every year should be that year). At the Games Convention Online, in Leipzig over the weekend of July 31 – August 2, two of the strongest PvE guilds in the world, Ensidia and Method, are competing in a timed run of Ulduar.

It’s going to be on 10-man, which is kind of strange, given that most people (and especially hardcore raiders) seem to think of the 25-man version as the “real” version of the raid. Maybe they wanted it to be easier for spectators to follow the action.

Points will be awarded for killing end bosses of a “zone” faster than the other guild, with points increasing from zone to zone. I’m guessing that by “zone” the press release refers to the Siege, the Antechamber, the Keepers, and the Descent into Madness, but the translation is not perfect – I could be wrong.

The Ensidia/Method matchup is going to be on August 2nd; as a prelude, two German guilds (Irae AoD and For the Horde) are going to compete on the same event on August 1st. Apparently the raids will be streaming live on allvatar.com, although I can’t really get very far on that site – WTB English translation. Does anyone know if it will be free to watch or not?

The dominance of Rogue/Mage/Priest continues as SK Gaming defeated eMazing Gaming’s faceroll Unholy/BM/Holy comp in the Major League Gaming Columbus Grand Finals 6-3 (best of 11 counting previous matchups). SK Gaming took home the $9,000 Grand Prize in the first leg of the MLG 2009 pro circuit, proving that the US still has a competitive RMP team. Europe’s RMP contingent, Ensidia, barely missed the Finals after dropping to eMG in the prior round.

Some of the teams didn’t do so well despite expectations, such as two-time MLG winners Fnatic, who were playing without their Warrior, Rhaegyn. Fnatic did rather poorly, playing a Rogue/Warlock/Shaman comp that simply couldn’t match up against the dominant RMPs or even eMG’s Death Knight/Hunter/Paladin. Evil Geniuses also played below par, but there really have to be teams that occupy the bottom of the standings. The good news is that teams collect points through all MLG legs to tally at the end of the season, so we might see some changes in the next MLG stops.

All the matches were streamed through three different sites via Octoshape, but the streams were choppy and often stalled more than it did in the first two days of the tournament. It came to the point where the matches were simply unwatchable, which is a shame because there were some pretty good games on the last day. The shoutcasters did an excellent job commentating on the matches but camerawork and the pace of the games were just too fast at times to appreciate. Arena Tournaments could benefit greatly from instant replays, slow motion, and camera angles beyond the third person view. Replays should be available on GotFrag soon.

For those of you worried about the return of Failoc, or just interested in how the BlizzCon ticket process is going to work this time around, Blizzard has posted a FAQ on buying tickets on their BlizzCon site.

Interesting information includes:

You should make a Battle.net account ahead of time, and make sure the payment information on it is up-to-date.
If there are enough people on the site trying to buy tickets (and trust me, there will be), there will be a queue to join.
Once in the queue, you’ll get an ETA for how long until you can get your tickets. Do not close or refresh the window. If tickets sell out before you get to the front of the line, they’ll let you know.
When you get to the front of the queue, you have 15 minutes to buy your tickets before you get booted and have to join the queue again.
You don’t need to give attendee information until after finishing the ticket purchase.
They also note that this queue system will remain in place for future Blizzard items “whenever a certain number of people are making purchases simultaneously,” so get used to it – you’ll almost certainly be seeing it when StarCraft II and Diablo III come out.