^ The vast majority of people (imo) care most about progressing their character in wow over drama and that kindof shit. Its just blizzards responsibility to provide them with the appropriate incentives to want to take part in any future aq-war type effort.

Just because a few big guilds on a few servers caused huge drama doesnt really mean the realm-wide participation idea itself is bad. Its a symptom of a bad design model for the AQ event.

But if the design was changed , perhaps by adding things like dailys that thousands of people on the server have a genuine reason and interest to contribute to , any sort of drama-mongers or shit-stirring from a couple guilds will have negligable impact.

Really, imagine if opening up ice-crown glacier zone not only allowed raiders access to Arthas's instance - but all sorts of other new goodies. Trade skill upgrades, new heroic badge loot, new 5 mans, new skill upgrades, - so many people would want stuff like that and love to be a part of it.

Quest based server "events" is the way to go such things, though I cant blame Blizz for giving the war effort idea a try, to see how it would go, and it was quite interesting to see the effort many guilds and servers had together to be first. It was quite interesting to watch imo, even if the grind was overkill^2.
Anyway, the quests. The one with the green dragon in Moonglade could be a fine example of a server quest in WoW imo. Maybe requiring 1-200 players showing up (or less if the people hav geared enough up etc). More than what a single guild could possible do at least, which should be the point in server quests. Obviously not requiring more than a small server could do.
They could even making it a scaling quest, where you could do make it easier by doing more other quests first (thus choosing between speed and difficulty, to fit all servers).

And I agree with Tyrian. Daily quests seems like an obvious option for AQ type events.
You couldnt have too good rewards in the big AQ Grind, since some would just turn in endless amounts of stuff then, daily quests solves that problem, and can also flatten out the speed a bit between slow and fast servers, by having a natural limit on how fast servers could possible be (daily quest limit x players).

The question came up during one of the Blizzcon class panels:

I don't know if that was everything said or not; I haven't seen any other coverage.

(My first 70 was on Zangarmarsh alliance. God, what a hellhole.)

Well, and that's the big thing - people need to have a fun incentive to do something - grinding out 800,000 linen certainly wasn't fun and likewise for any of that failed farming that they had in place. The auto-completion of the event (first half at least) was a positive idea though as it made it so that it didn't have to be done, it just accelerates the event.

Granted, the downside to that is the whole ego thing on the internet - Guild X on server Y is now able to get "World Firsts" because of their server performance instead of their guild. On our server, we had the ugly situation where the guild that turned in the Scepter took the day off from work and turned it in at 6AM or something (essentially a "screw you" to the rest of the server) - the event still crashed our server multiple times, just like everywhere - they really need to work at these things to spread people out and spread it out over time.

I liked the idea they had behind the Undead Invasion event, though the execution again was flawed (I don't see why they haven't left the bosses up in the dungeons where they added extra ones - it really fleshed those dungeons out all the more; hopefully with Wrath of the Lich King, they'll make 'em permanent additions) - people farmed the things a bit, but the items were lackluster and the city attacks were just boring and pointless.

Hopefully the Dalaran Event and other such events manage to capture those needed things:

Give everyone a reason / reward for participating
Gold is always nice as is a large jump start on a new rep grind (Dalaran Magocrats or whatever) - people enjoy reward tabards and pets have continually been popular (a miniature Arcane Elemental Pet or choice between a few miniature Magical things); they've also got the system in place for Gems or Enchants as rewards; just something substantive for completing any event encourages people to participate. The other rewards such as a New Dungeon (5-man or raid or whatever) are also excellent, but everyone gets to reap those rewards, so they should ensure people are encouraged to help with the process too.

Make the event itself fun
Never again with the farming or pointlessly killing a couple skeletons wandering around a ziggurat.

Spread out where we do the event and get to witness the event
If everyone just has to go to the bubble and watch it vanish or whatever, you'll see the server crash repeatedly as everyone clumps up on it. Also, with the Bronze Dragonflight things, they give the opportunity to put in "In Game Cinematics" where we could be shown an event that occurred giving everyone the ability to witness or replay an in game event like this (so that it doesn't have to trash the server AND everyone gets to see it).

I really hope they do a good job with these - they have a lot of potential.

Well we know Blizzard has the ability to split and merge realms, but they haven't gone about doing it yet, at least I don't think they have.

I do know they merged a Battlegroup recently.

The problem with Blizzard's world events is that they don't involve enough havoc on the player.

The Scourge invasion was pretty lame, I did it to get my Argent Dawn Tabard, and it was cool hearing Kel'Thuzad yell when you destroyed one of the points of destruction, but it all stopped there, because Blizzard refused to allow the Scourge to actually attack cities.

Now the Burning Crusade opening? That wasn't perfect(lol @ 100 Alliance/Horde on your server camping the portal). But it was VERY cool to have Kazzak running around certain zones decimating everything and everyone in sight. I've absolutely love to see more of that.

Where the war basically had both sides just chain-crashing the server because it couldn't handle 100+ people fighting each other in a single zone. I'm kind of surprised the GMs never stepped in to do something about it. Until WoW shows it has the ability to handle that kind of server load, I'm not looking forward to any huge server-wide events.

The guilds on our server had a lot of fun with this. We all took turns trying to kill him but people kept running in range, dieing, and healing him back up. The best attempt we had was 38% or so which was the best of the night!

If a world-destruction event is to take place, I want more of that, rather than random scourge spawn points. That was kind of underwhelming =/

The problem isn't technical; it's social. If they merge two servers, they can't have two people both named Death or Legolas or even the cheap knockoffs like Gandalff. People WILL complain, and finding a way to fairly arbitrate these issues is tricky.

AQ opening was not really a server effort usually as I see it. Sure a "normal" player turned in some stacks for rewards and perhaps farmed for an hour to get some rep from the turnins. But generally it was 200 guys high end guilds on the servers that sat and dotted defias in westfall to get cloth. Not very epic and nothing that really felt like a server effort.

When it comes to getting people feel like they are doing something does not necessary have to imply server wide changes. Just involve Arthas more in quest lines and instances. And get high level instance quests like: Arthas really need X, you need to destroy it before he reaches it and then a counter starts to tick. If you reach it before arthas then he will show up (or a shade of him) and there will be some brief fighting until he says he does not have time with it and disappears + traps the players or something.

Instance quests like that would give a feel that he is really a boss you are struggling against here in Northrend even if you don't outright kill him. I think instances in general should have more quests involving lore as those are usually the one people get and you have the options of explaining a lot of why you are going into this dungeon. I missed that in TBC.

I think he understated the number of people. It was probably closer to 100 horde and 400 alliance, all fighting within a hundred yards of each other at the duskwood boss. Eventually, the alliance devised a strategy of sending a wave of one full raid at a time to prevent the crash.

Really, Mages excelled at it - I can do a complete Shadowfang Keep run from start to finish in about 6 minutes 30 seconds (killing everything) - I've run so many alts through that place it isn't funny (frapsed it a few times) - doing clears of SFK, VC, or RFC were the best ways to get ridiculous amounts of cloth - just having a friend on an alt scooping it up. I did more than a few runs to get some cloth for turnins back during that - it still sucked to have to do it though, just plain tedious getting the final stuff.

I think the very last thing to be completed on our server was the wolf flesh one, which was pretty much Duskwood only. That event was so terrible for that stuff.

Obviously that differs from person to person, but on my server at least Outland in general was fairly unstable for the first week. A lot of my follow Blood Elf rerollers went to level in the starting areas of different races for that purpose, and I can remember wondering multiple times why I didn't just set my Hearthstone to Undercity and use the Paladin trainer there after was I done in the Blood Elf newbie areas.

Though on the other hand, Blizzard has learned from that, considering they're having two different areas available as "starting" zones for the second expansion. And I expect it'll be needed; there won't be at least some of the population funneled to new races, as there aren't any, most likely truly all the high level population of a server capable of playing will hit Northrend at the same time.

Sure mages are insane. I was however hinting at one of the more or less instant respawn camps(might no longer exist). A warlock for example could use the appropriate level on a dot and kill a mob each global cooldown for infinite time, or well until corpses started to stack too high so it became hard to loot.

Scourge did in fact attack cities. There were those skeletons, and lvl60(or was it 62 or something) elite, escorted by some lesser undead. Granted, they'd eventually get overrun by tons of summoned guards(that lovely "save the civilians" mechanic breaking the "invasion"), but they were there.
Now, if only they were made red instead of yellow and actively hunted players, instead of just guards and civilians - but that wasn't really possible in starting cities, too many low level characters involved. Since Northrend isn't a lowbie zone, they might actually go for it.

Well hang on, the war effort also offered a box with a random green in it for every turn-in. Remember, so many greens flooded into peoples' hands that the market for enchanting mats was depressed for months.

Songster already offered the suggestion of the "effort" opening a zone with solo quests, 5-man instances and a raid. Make the effort required offer rep and cash and rewards, like the current daily quests, so any freeloaders who aren't interested in contributing are missing out by not doing so.

Also, you'd probably want to focus the effort rather more on high level content. I can see what Blizzard were trying to do with the war effort, letting even lowbies help out by farming copper and linen and stuff, but it simply didn't work, it just led to level 60s getting bored farming the lowliest of turnins.

I can't imagine that something like this wouldn't be vastly more successful than the AQ war effort.

You'd probably also want to be able to do rep turnins even *after* the goal was completed(maybe at a slower pace?) so that if you contribute what you can but can't match the hardcore, you can still eventually get the nice item(assuming the item has gameplay implications - if it's just cosmetic make it require effort during the event)

On a side note, anyone notice the commendation officers for the AQ war effort are still around? They even added ones for Silvermoon and the Exodar. Kind of pointless.

On some servers that came out after Tbc was released , the gates for AQ arent open yet . As such the entire opening event has to be done - and people can take turn in the commendations to the new npcs for Silvermoon or Exodar .

Pretty much what everyone seems to want is an event like the one from the end of the Wow1.0 beta? Or like the PTRs where the GMs spawn bosses in the citys?

I'd love it if the server first wipe on the lich king would resualt in him killing every player currently on that server. Just the first time though. Would be an awsome world event. The raid wipes on first try then Arthas says something alon the lines of "You've failed to stop me. Now feel my wrath!"

I'd settle for an event that felt like the npcs were trying. Patchwerk + Stormwind = invasion.

While the people just hanging around the AH or out questing might be amused, I kind of doubt the guild that has a raid boss at 10% would be very happy.

And as for having an event similar to the close of WoW 1.0 beta, there's no question that events like that are adored by players - it's just that arranging something like that for hundreds of servers concurrantly becomes a problem.