No, that's exactly what the AC event did. That one server was unique because of what they did. Events and items that existed on other shards would have not existed their shard. It would have had very long term consequences if the GMs had not intervened.

Mal'Ganis has always been a fairly raider-friendly server.

I have fond memories of people sniping stacks of linen and herbs and such off the auction house as we tried to transfer them, and vendoring them while taunting me/us about how they hoped the gates would never open, how much fun it was to laugh at us as we QQ'd over being unable to get our epic loot.

Fun, right?

I remember the AQ gate opening for being a great time to be a 'war profiteer'. All the mats required for the war effort were artificially inflated so you could make some easy money for your alts.

Lets face it, none of the bosses have ever been "killed", even the ones we take body parts from for quests. Even VanClief (sp?) is still around and kicking, waiting for the next lowb group to come and "defeat" him for loot. I think this is more a semantic thing, than a special meaning thing.

And to think you still got the AQ gates open reasonably quickly (IIRC) that's my biggest concern with the idea, is that a lack of interest or level of conflict between raiders and non raiders on a server could turn a great idea into a headache.

Contrast the harassment you saw with Arthas during the AQ events, I was on horde at the time and there was a horde guild who had just gotten their first Onyxia kill who was having fun pitching in to the gates opening. Ret, Aurora, and my old guild all had little contests to get people giving materials to open the gates, and this guild who never expected to see AQ put up their own little joke contest (prizes like you would get your picture taken with their guild by the head of Nefarian that someone else killed) to get more people donating. Sure I think we had a few people who would vendor linen and the like instead of donating it, but the difference in attitude can make an event that everyone has to participate in become enjoyable, or a nightmare.

Compare to real life where not everyone supports a war movement and there are people on both sides trying to sabotage the other.

That's extremely important. If you peel back the layers of game and get to the world politics and self-policing by the players take over. It almost self regulates.

As far as my character is concerned Edwin Vancleef is as dead as her great Uncle Fizzlesprocket who lit himself on fire. I picked up his bloodied head after taking it from his body and handed it to Gryan Stoutmantle. Even if my friend runs through Deadmines again tomorrow for the 100th time and kills VanCleef yet again that little suspension of disbelief makes it irrelevant. Despite the fact there is no precedence for not killing a raid dungeon's final boss (possible exception of Kel'Thuzad because hes undead already) it doesn't mean it could not occur to excellent effect later on.

Opening the gates on Tichondrius was the dire opposite. I don't think we had any problem with the materials, but there was a ridiculous 1-2 week war to determine which faction completed the scepter questline. It was quite memorable.

On Ursin there were exactly 1 alliance and 1 horde guild doing the AQ gate opening quest line. I had almost nonexistant support from the rest of the horde population, and a laughable level of support from my own guild, and it was the same for the Alliance. It took us close to 2 months to finish the quest - not the materials, just the quest line. I've probably more hours into that quest than 95% of the others who did it.

Most people didn't care to help, and quite a few said they saw no point in helping out the raiding population when they weren't going to get anything. (Which was of course wrong since it had tons of solo quests open)

Yes, but that's also simply not what WoW is ever going to be about. You can't take social dynamics that might work well in a setting like Lineage 2 or EVE and import them into the WoW ruleset and expect anything good to come of it.

Right, now imagine that instead of just opening two raid dungeons, the War Effort had opened a whole zone with solo quest hubs, a winged 5-man dungeon *and* a raid dungeon or two. Hell, maybe even a new battleground. Why couldn't they be planning something like that? What better way to engage the whole of a server in a communal effort?

Of course, it would still need to be something that every Realm could hope to achieve - or that would auto-complete after a given amount of time, just like the War Effort did. You could even make it a race between Alliance and Horde - whoever finishes first gets a week's head start in the new zone. Again, you'd want it to be a perk, but not offensively so. A week's head start shouldn't cause too many hernias, right? <looks hopeful>

The AQ Gate opening was a disaster IMO. The infrastructure simply cannot handle more than X amount of characters in one spot...so as a game designer, why would you conspire to gather X+1000 at that spot? Makes no sense. Was there a server that didnt crash at some point throughout the 12 or so hour opening 'script'?

The actual 'War Effort' thing leading up to the gong ring was cool but they needed WAY more incentive to get people into the spirit of things. What did they offer? Faction...lol. Access to a new 40 man...not so hot if you are not done with BWL, or dont even raid to begin with. They needed to offer titles, epics, new mounts, etc. Those things would have gotten people motivated to farm/turn in.

My server, like many others I am sure, had exactly one guild on each side with Nef down when the gates opened. We were also a typical PvE server with a 2-3:1 Alliance heavy population. I would guess 30-40% of the required Horde mats actually began life in the inventory of an alliance player.

Ugh. The AQ war coincided with the Archimonde split (Mug'thol) and the transfer of most of the elite guilds, along with the Archi scepter. Mug'thol of course promptly turned into 5000 que land and some people came back, but most of the resources and the scepter - and most of the guilds capable of completing the scepter and organized enough to mass produce resources - were gone.

When the gates finally did open, the Kalimdor world server was still an unplayable mess, lag was massive in Silithus and WWIII in the sand prevented anyone from getting decent "war" progress on their Noz rep, as the word was out about the epic rings and the high value BoE purples by the point the gates opened on Archimonde. Said loot did a very good job of encouraging world PvP.

That's not even touching the infamous farm-a-thon, which felt so epic.

The other problem with this series of max-tier raid "events" was that Eranikus couldn't really be combated by anyone other than highly organized guild raids, and lag dictated not wanting more than two of those, three max.

While it least in theory it was an outdoor encounter that many people could fight against as part of this epic world conflict, in practice, you couldn't stay alive without dedicated healing and almost no one could observe it relative to a primetime server population because lag here would just kill everyone - and it did a few times.

IIRC (it's been a long time) there was also a mechanic where the nightmare shades strengthened as they scored kills, which made the influx of Level 10 druids and undergeared players even more undesireable from a perspective of actually completing the event.

Not to mention that anyone joining WoW since AQ launched has no idea of what I am talking about, which makes it further wasted content from a resource perspective. The questline is awesome, but far too resource demanding to complete on a whim.

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With all of that in mind, you can pretty much rule out a one-time server "war" event to take on Arthas. Too many negatives, too difficult to do in a fashion that would let most experience it. The Scourge Invasion was an attempt to make a more accessable, less disruptive world event, and it worked reasonably well. So Blizzard has learned.

In Burning Crusade, solo's and small group players *do* take action involving and foiling Illidan, so it's entirely possible that the same approach with more boss "face time" is what they mean by interaction with Arthas.

I highly doubt there will be any 5-man or solo confrontation with Arthas. It is true from a lore perspective, if you're not on his teir, you're an insect, so does it really make much of a difference if you have one, five, ten or twenty-five insects and it may well make MORE sense to have someone who is buffed to God-like levels by a Dragonflight confront him instead, but Blizzard seems happy with the 25-man raid model as content pinnacle.

What might be possible is to actually have Arthas visible and irritating in the world at the "overworld" Ice Crown, even though he wouldn't be killable or lootable. This has its own camping and ganking and general player jackass problems, but for the character, it's not inconceivable.

Unlike most other bosses and heavily dug-in Illidan in particular, Lich King Arthas seems to feel nothing to fear from anyone, and his tone in the cinematic trailer implies as much.

Basic free rider problem. If the reward comes from the communal achievement most people will just let a few suckers shoulder all of the burden. Look at AV. You need to reward and motivate individual action on a micro level if you want to see people act in concert.

But if you were friendly with some Alliance in the guild that was completing the scepter chain, and therefore had motivation to get the mats done as well, then maybe you got yourself on a kodo for relatively little effort beyond sitting in Tanaris chatting on Vent and clicking a macro'ed turnin.

Overall though yes, absolutely horrendous idea.

I think almost everyone would agree with something like
The Sceptor quest(minus Eranikus event lag) = good
The Farming linen to open the gates = Bad


Even though on some servers the top guilds did alot to make the farming better....(Rallying off epics and gold to people who turned shit in) overall it's just a bad idea since there will always be alot of servers full of people who will do everything in their power to grief the rest of the server.

With the exception of farming carapaces to hit Neutral then yes, Scepter quest = good.

So you need to make sure that

a) Every level 80 has an interest in seeing the effort completed
b) Every level 80 has something to gain from actually participating in the effort.

Neither of these goals is beyond the wit of man.

You could definitely combine a "one-time" world event with the new daily quest format to have an effective and interesting war-effort-type scenario. Say that with the opening of the Icecrown Glacier zone, you get both a raid dungeon and non-raid content - whether in the form of a daily quest zone (fighting scourge, taking down Crypt Lord 5-man minibosses) or 5/10-man dungeons (yes, I know that's still a raid). You could easily have a Scourge Invasion 2.0, requiring a number of these daily combat quests to be completed, beating back the scourge to allow entrace to the citadel - but KEEP the daily quests and the structure of the invasion at least in the zone itself, to give repeatable, interesting, engaging content to everybody in the world.

The AQ war effort was interesting - my server was slow, but pretty cooperative. It was seen as, well, something to do for fun, or to grind rep for an epic mount, or just something to do with all that runecloth you got in Silithus. But it would've been nice if the commendations could be gathered and used for better rewards, or if there were more intensive quests to supplement (you could turn in bandages, or you could romp through UBRS and gather Blackwing Armaments, etc.) - that is, if the Average Player had more to look forward to than, "Oh, good, some rep, a scroll, and a crappy green that will never sell because of all the hundreds of other crappy greens everyone else is getting, too." I personally enjoyed it, but it definitely wasn't all it could have been. Key points: provide repeatable, rewarding content for a variety of players; one-time events are okay, but they should provide a wide variety of experiences (Scourge Invasion), interesting rewards, and, preferably, introduce permanent content as well.

If the content that could be opened up benefits all players from all playstyles - people like you describe will be the minority.

Imaging if an Arthas like AQ event (server wide effort) would result in a new 5 man, new 25 man, weakening arthas himself, new loot upgrades from heroic bosses, ability for primal vortexes a chance to drop in 5 man dungeons (in addition to nethers), ability to upgrade your blacksmithing weapons another tier, made your heroic badge purchases a couple badges cheaper, access to server-exlusive new alchemy/engineering/enchanting patterns, access to a new death knight secret city. etc

The list is endless - there are MANY ways blizzard could make 'the arthas war' something almost every player in the game will be dying to help out - and give them personal benefits for doing so, regardless of whether they solo/5 man/raid/rp etc.

Will there always be some people that 'lol im going to do everything I can to not help!!"? Yes of course, but if the list of benefits was something like I described - people like this would be few and far between.

People, generally, want to be a part of something big in the game. They just need to be given a reason (read: a big carrot saying 'look at the rewards you will get!") to join in. The AQ effort didnt give enough people that reason.

That sounds classic.

On our server we got some people to farm us 80,000 linen for an MC run where they got every drop except legendaries.

The bad thing about realm events is that it completely depends on the type of realm you have, and it can suck immensely with drama. You should ask your guildmate Ghando about the fun he had on Detheroc dealing with Imperial Order for the AQ Event. If alot of those guilds hadn't transfered off I couldn't imagine the drama that would have erupted on Sargeras.