Elder Scrolls Online: Jester's Festival and Second Anniversary event

This post was originally meant to be only about the Jester's Festival, but as time passed it also became about the Second Anniversary event, which ends today.

The Jester's Festival was the first event that I didn't fully participate in or for which I didn't complete all the achievements. Partly because work got in the way, and partly because I didn't feel it was as much fun as the other two events (Witches Festival & New Life Festival).

For the Jester's Festival you could purchase the free quest starter scroll from the crown store and then follow the directions to the starting point, which is always the first zone of your home alliance. I started outside Vulkhel Guard in Auridon of the Summerset Isles. The other two places were outside Daggerfall in High Rock and outside Ebonheart in Stonefalls, Morrowind. At these places you talk to NPCs dressed as jesters who pretend to be one of the three alliance leaders (Queen Ayrenn, High King Emeric or Jorunn Skald-King). They give you quests to liven up the people in the cities and cause some mayhem.

In Auridon it was all about throwing flower petals on people so they got flower crowns above their heads. In Daggerfall you had to go through two delves to collect a couple of ingredients needed to make fireworks and then fire off fireworks at certain places in the city. In Ebonheart you had to steal some apples to feed to a pig and then steal the pig from under the butcher's nose and bring the pig safely to the Jester without being spotted by the butcher.

After every completed quest you got a container reward in which you could find collectables, new recipes, and some new housing items. To get some extra achievements you could throw flower petals on other players to give them flower crowns, use a total of 50 fireworks, and also fire off some fireworks at each of the Undaunted Enclaves. There was also a pie of misrule memento that you could use during the festival for an XP boost.

The Second Anniversary event started on the same day the Jester's Festival concluded on April 4th. It's an odd name for the event. It's ESO's third anniversary, but since it's only the second event to celebrate it's anniversary, then that's what you get ;) It was basically the same as the last event, which means buy the free scroll from the crown store - go talk to the chef - get the ingredients - get the cake. The cake became a memento just like last year and using it gave you a 100% XP boost for 2 hours, at which point you could eat some more cake and get some more boost. A new thing for this year was that the daily and weekly quests gave you one extra reward in the shape of a container. In this container you could find most anything; crafting items, household items, recipes and crafting motifs. I had a lot more fun combining my daily crafting writs with these reward boxes and finding out what was in them than I had with the Jester's Festival.

The fact that the anniversary event was almost exactly the same this year as it was last year is a little bit of a hint that the old festivals from last year are going to come back in mostly the same form later this year, which I'm actually looking forward to!