I too am usually confused by the dates.. the thing is, that the official Events Calendar I use for reference doesn't use the word 'until' in any way.. it simply states "21 June - 5 July". By now I know that I should consider the second-to-last day as the last day to do my things, because I never know when the event will end on the last day.. Valentine's Day ended somewhere halfway through the last day, not even at around 3:00-4:00 as was said in the blue post. So to be honest, I feel that the Events Calendar is misleading in its information.

As for the blossoms, I also am left with a few and am a bit disappointed that I couldn't spend them in time. But they were leftovers that I gathered by doing dailies, and I spent them on buying sausages for the spell dmg buff. The blue post said that they wondered why we waited until the very last day to purchase things.. well, in case of the buff food, that has a duration on it - the longer I wait to buy it, the longer it'll last me after the event has ended. Of course I made sure to buy the things like the Brazier and the outfit as soon as I had the chance, but the whole duration part of the sausages made me wait.

I wish they just removed the duration from those things, so that you can use them for a longer time.. I still have Mistletoe, Winterveil Cookies, and Lunar Festival Dumplings in my bags, they don't have a duration either.. not fair to let other ones expire.

I twigged when I saw all the Kegs and the Toasting Goblets. Almost got stuck with 198 Blossoms myself, until I Desecrated the Crossroads fire. :)

As for the wording... you would normally see holidays inclusive of, on the dates shown. But they can be taken other ways. 'Until' and '-' can be taken as up to. And 12 midnight is the next date.

The one thing that I didn't like was that the expiration date on the blossoms seemed to imply that the festival would last longer than it normally would. Otherwise, I just think it's a little funny and a little sad that some people cry so hard when they couldn't take care of it sooner. It sucks, but you did have a few weeks.

The primary annoyance goes to what Marlous says, that other holiday items don't expire. It'd be nice that the blossoms could be saved for following year, or some other alternative. As for the end date, One poster did note and I agree, every end date on calender matched event page too, except midsummer. Referenced by post 58
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=7736596141&sid=1&pageNo=3

It did suck trying to collect 350 blossoms on a level 25 mage (which got to level 30 from putting out flames btw). Was 20 away and literally standing in front of a flame when it disappeared at 4am server. Waiting til last minute was simply how long it took between work and soloing level 60 mobs at level 30 to get the blossoms.

Guess here is hoping that the pet is around next year.

I checked it up to make sure...then saw all the kegs and revellers around and figured I better blow my blossoms.

Festival dresses on 7 characters, hot sandals (disappointing) on 1, brazier on 1 and spirit of summer on another means I fully emerged myself, I guess :)

What an ass! 'That would mean that we went for a walk and stopped at 5:00pm. We did not stop at 5:30pm, nor did we stop at 5:01pm'. L2 speak English. The correct analogous sentence would be more like 'we went for a walk until the fifth hour'. In which case you could indeed be walking at 5.01 or 5.59.

Yeah, I know, thats a pretty dorky thing for me to say. But fight fire with fire! Reythur could've just said 'There was confusion over the exact end-date of the festival. Tough luck - worse things could happen. We hope you enjoyed it anyway.' But no, he had to go and try to be a professor of language or something.

That kind of thing has happened before btw..with children week ending a day to soon and some major bugging of brewfest events (the dark iron attacks). Resulting in failure to aquire brewfest mounts (or rather enough tickets for your average to slightly insane players).

So if you have rewards out that either mean concentrated farming of tickets for them (brewfest) or a duration on the reward (midsommer food - no wonder ppl waited to the last minute with food of 14 days duration) it would be nice towards us players to either give us some leeway or have the vendors around an extra day (as the Earthen ring Elder hung around all saturday).

Also what is so hard of having the bleeding festivity commoners give you some status on how long the fest still runs? So, while we did have 2 weeks for this event, it is still shoddy the way Blizzard handled the different and contradicting calendars and the end of it.

Yeah, I was caught out. No biggee, but the fact that blossoms had an expiration date on them seemed to imply that you could use them until then. I'm not sure of why they had an expiration that runs past the end of the Festival.

"Yes, these aren't expired... but they can't be used."

And that's the crux of the complaints I think - not that people had no idea the Festival would end, but the items that you got as rewards seemed to suggest they'd be useful past the end of the festival, as if the vendors would remain for a bit after the rest of it was gone.

Oh and the ribbon pole was still in shatt last night. And the fire... so um...