First, let me say how much I love Turtle wow and think they've been massively creative in ways that illustrate how badly Blizzard has failed. Love the game, have donated a fair amount across our family's four accounts.
I think gardening is a creative idea, tons of potential, and really clever.
That said...I think it really needs a lot of work.
So yes you can probably tell that I'm going to be a little critical here.
I did my first gardening tonight and it was pretty damned disappointing.
1) Gardening in general: there needs to be a pinned post somewhere that explains it EXTENSIVELY. Finding rando forum posts, or announcement posts that basically don't tell us much is hugely frustrating.
2) planters: there are small ones (which apparently let you plant 2 plants?), are there larger ones? In my planter it only let me plant a second crop after some minutes...is this normal? Random? Honestly, it felt like a bug.
3) the time investment is ass. If it was *precisely* 9 mins to get back and water or whatever that would be less onerous (ideally, a popup warning would be great) but I started a timer with my first planting and one of the plants came out on time, the other was not on multiples of 9 minutes. Not knowing when/if someone can interrupt the plant, the apparently wonky timing, meant I basically stood there staring at a box on the ground for 27 mins. Compelling gameplay.
4) how long do you have to feed/water before the plant dies?
5) the planters can ONLY be used in gardening areas? Are those mapped somewhere? The don't seem to register in the database. And just to be clear, a planter should be for doing it ANYWHERE, if you're in a garden then you should just be able to use patches of dirt in the ground. There's no clear indication when one is IN a gardening area either, as far as I can tell?
6) at least according to some of the posts, other people can steal your plant at the end if you're not there to harvest it? I know I'd be damned angry - how is a PvE player supposed to 'protect' their crop, just click madly and hope they win?
7) the costs are crazy. I haven't risked my mushroom seed yet but assuming I get 5 results for it like the others, that makes them FIFTY SILVER per food that last 10 min (hopefully nobody steals it, yah)? Those buffs are good, but not that good, imo.
8) speaking of buffs, except for the lvl 55 ones, they're basically on-tier with cooking buff food...which takes vastly less work. Their timing is also wonky - some are 15min buffs like normal food, some are 10? Why?
There could be lots of variety of food, lots of variety of buffs (to make it different from cooking, sure, make raw food shorter duration), it could feed well into cooking and/or alchemy to really make complicated but worthwhile recipes. You could have different plants with much variable timing allowing for quite valuable results from 3d or 7d 'farming'.
I think there's HUGE potential here, but what you have needs to be much more clearly presented and needs a great deal of polish around the edges.
Thanks!