It's a bag full of non-binding stuff, a lot of which one guild member or another could use directly to support their raiding. The only sensible way to handle it imo is to use the systems you have in place for patterns, epic gems, and marks, and hand out each piece individually according to those rules. Rolling on a collection of unknown tradeskill stuff, gems of unknown color, and flasks of unkown type as a whole seems kind of silly.

Even if you're at a point where you'll just sell everything in the bag sans new patterns and spinels, i don't see why you wouldn't split up the procedes instead of just lumping them all in one place.

Access to Ahn'qiraj was much more restricted, even on the test server. The zone did not receive a whole lot of testing from what I remember. It had more encounters than SP, and many of the encounters were changed drastically after the zone went live. We didn't participate in AQ on test at all, and we still did very well in that zone. We could not afford to do the same thing with SP if we wanted to compete for server firsts, much less world firsts.

Also, it's been 8 or 9 months since BT was released and there are a ton of bored guilds right now. Because of this I think SP is going to receive far more testing than AQ ever received. It's possible that many guilds will have the entire zone on farm before it even goes live. Basically if you can learn the entire encounter before it goes live, killing it first once it has gone live is fairly meaningless. Don't get me wrong, The AQ "firsts" were fairly meaningless themselves. Especially C'thun. I just think SP has a chance to surpass even AQ in this regard. Or maybe it won't. It just depends on how they handle the testing for the last three bosses in the zone and what they end up releasing.

I doubt diplomacy and negotiation will play any part in any of the SP firsts. I'm not even sure how they could.

Well, if you want some more solid numbers, according to Wowjutsu, there's an average of roughly 3 Illidan killing guilds per server (~1400 guilds across 460 servers on US and Europe combined).

No.



I think people need to post relevant information, then other people need to seek out that information by reading the thread or performing a search.

Dentarg-EU, 3 Illidan guilds, one of the top 10 guilds on the first Illidan kill. The server is far from dead, just low to mid pop and growing.

Im not debating that it wont matter to 99% of the raiding population, but it still takes away one of the higher competitors simply by game mechanics rather than a fair race.

The ways to prevent this have probably mentioned here already, cap the EoI's handins per week or adjust the total amount to server population.

Some of our guild members already suggested to transfer of this perfectly good realm for a high end raiding guild and transfer to a crowded (and most likely much worse) server simply to be able to be somewhere in the top 100. This my seem e-peen to you, but for some guilds its reputation and their base for fast progress as the recruitment could take a blow if you are not anywhere in those lists.

For some it will be "that much of a problem", not to rectify this is careless.

That caught my interest, and I did a little bit of research on wowjutsu. I had a look at the wowjutsu ranking of EU servers, assuming that the rank is an overall fair representation of server progression. I then checked for the number of guilds who have killed Illidan and for those currently progressing through BT for certain servers.
There are a total of 237 EU realms. Ravencrest is ranked 12, just at the bottom of the top 5% of servers, and has 13 guilds that have killed Illidan and another 7 which are in BT registered. Hakkar is ranked 119 and should hence roughly define median realm progession. There are 2 Illidan guilds in Hakkar, but another 8 BT ones. Finally, Sporeggar sits just above the bottom 5%, at a rank of 224. Here, there are no Illidan kills registered whatsoever, although 2 guilds are currently progressing through BT.
That's just pure data, but it seems the view from Frostmane might be a bit rosy-tinted, and the overall imbalance in individual realms' capacity to collect the essences appears considerable. I guess the main issue are very ambitious guilds that are stuck on a low-progress server and may feel unfairly treated at not being able to compete for first kills, if collection of essences is indeed the only factor in opening the gates. One way to balance it somewhat may be to set an earliest possible date of opening for each gate that could at least theoretically be achieved, say, by a server with 4 Illidan guilds.

Well, remember that that only really matters to people who care about the race aspect of the raid game. And certainly, people will be filling up on Tier loot much faster now with three tokens - I think you'll be seeing the vast majority of guilds eager to get their "free" gems, flasks, and patterns. I doubt much of any of the guilds on our server will hold back.

Hah! We wish

This notion is totally at odds with the idea I frequently see here that Vashj and Kael have been nerfed into triviality. If that's true then there will be plenty of mediocre guilds in t6 who could get stuck at any number of places. Like mine, which has been killing fewer bosses each reset for 3 weeks due to falling attendance and crippling server lag on mondays.

We have 4 Illidan-killing guilds on Kel'Thuzad US and I don't expect that number to change before 2.4, despite some 6-10 guilds at various stages of t6 progress.

I refuse to believe that the issue of zomg world first and the competition it spawns never turned up in design meetings, considering Tigole once said on these boards, ad verbatim, that 'Once the "world first" drama dies down'.

Yes, I guess there needs to be some sort of balance (i.e. tying completion/essence to server population) so that gates don't open dramatically differently on different servers. That being said though, perhaps this is Blizzard's subtle way of laughing at the whole idea by taking the power of a world first out of the guild's direct control, saying "look, the game isn't a race - enjoy the content individually while it's there".

Just saying. That's my take on things, at least, and before you say anything, yes, it's pretty controversial.

The problem as I see it is that there are servers like mine (with our second Illidan killing guild downing him for the first time last night, and my guild only having killed him five times) that have high populations but low numbers of endgame raiders. If they balance the number of EoI's based on server population its entirely possible we won't see anything past Felmyst for a very long time. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, since we still a have a lot of loot we can use from T6 content, but I'm sure there are other servers out there with the same problem with people who actually want to try to get into the top ranked guilds list.

Coming from an EQ PVP background (Sullon Zek), it was easy enough to know how overpowered warlocks eventually would become. Dots + Fear + Pet + Snare + Life drain is the exact same combination of skills that necromancers used. All that was required was enough scaling of abilities before warlocks, in order to remain competitive in PVE, were given abilities that completely overpowered them for small-group PvP. As my warlock started to reach 700 spell damage at level 60, it just began to reach ridiculous levels of power, where a single warlock (myself) would be able to stop 20+ alliance players from advancing in AV by simply dismounting and casting COA+Corruption on them all as they rode past me on the way to the snowfall graveyard. Within 10 seconds or so they would all have to dismount and begin healing or risk being 1-shotted by any other ability.

I do have to congratulate Blizzard on their resilience changes to include dot ticks, it was certainly one of the most glaring scaling problems at the start of the first arena season. All it takes is a bit of scaling of each dot individually for the entire class to become overpowered since everything is so front-loaded.

And while it's almost pointless to speculate without knowing what skills/abilities that Deathknights will have in particular, If they are anything like shadowknights in Everquest, you can expect a class that is not going to have many issues hurting it in pvp. Plate wearer able to tank with a 2hander + High DPS + Lifetaps + Snares + Deathtouch was a great combination for balancing nightmares in EQ.

That would be a true two face game played by Blizz considering how hard they're trying to promote PvP competition. The game never was something to enjoy slowly for top end raiders, it always gave competition and they never showed any intention towards removing PvE competition since it's a totally retarded line of thought. They really have to work very hard on giving every guild on every server the same chance at competition, even if with +-1 day due to patch day and timezones. Let the essences do something else, build the town, whatever. Anything else is unfair for a race that at this point has 1500 potential competitors.

Another simple solution might be to have the guilds that are competing for firsts be able to petition a Senior GM to unlock the gate in their Raid ID once that gate has been opened on any realm. If enough guilds express interest, they may set up a policy for it. It's hard to believe they want guilds on lower population realms to transfer to high population realms in order to compete, rather than potentially draw more blood to the lower population realm with their successes.

Such a solution would pretty much make the gates redundant. Why would there be a gate if the guilds killing 3/6 get the gate open by a GM anyhow?

Maybe they should just make a global effort. Gates are closed but after a number of essences (1000-10.000) turned in on any of the WoW servers (EU/US/Asia, w/e) the gates open for everyone. This would help the purpose of the gates to build anticipation for further bosses, provide the necessary lore activities and at the same time, level the race for the top guilds.
As it is now, the race is between servers not guilds and there is little one (guild/person/community) can do to affect this.

I highly doubt they would do this. What would be the point of the opening event, if guilds could get access merely by petition? They obviously want this to be a server-wide effort among high-end guilds. Even to the extent that the 'fairness' of world firsts is lost.

I think it's fine this way. Yes it means some guilds have a problem because they are on a backwater server. Deal with it. Most of these guilds don't have a shot at making a world first anyway. And I don't think whether guild X on some low-pop server gets rated 45 or 188 in the world on some non-official ranking site should impact game design at all. This setup will give some interesting interaction among endgame guilds.

Servers are different. They have different economies, different recruitment bases. I don't see how adding a server-wide instance opening like this is that much different. The recruitment base is a much bigger issue in how well a guild can perform, anyway.

Though any guild that is 2/6 Sunwell (aka has sufficient raid dps for v3 Brut) should be 3/6 within a day or so as Felmyst is currently tuned. I can't believe I'm saying this but it seems like in this instance the AQ gate model would actually have been beneficial - by tucking a 10 man zone in with the 40 man there was much more incentive for a larger base of the population to open the gates sooner rather than later.

This is all speculative of course as there is still a great deal of tuning to be done on the PTR, but as it currently stands I expect Kalecgos to be a major roadblock for many guilds who aren't 5/5 MH 9/9 BT (and Brutallus as well). The most unfortunate part of requiring realm-wide activity to open content for a small subset of the population, in my mind, will be that many guilds will get frustrated working towards the relatively marginal upgrades of Kalec and Brut (compared to current t6 content).

I think you forgot to read who is complaining here. Last Resort and Forte were respectively World 2nd and World 3rd on Illidan. They both killed him on the same day, in fact. I think it's safe to say they are 2 big players when it comes to the World first races.

Now check the server Nihilum is on, compared the one they are on. It would take Boulderfirst an extra week to unlock the first gate compared to Magtheridon. 2 extra weeks to open the 2nd. And another 2 weeks to open the third.
That's 5 weeks in total that they will be behind if you add that up. That's a big fuck you to them, imo.
I kinda liked the idea suggested on the EU boards; have the gates be linked continent wise. Have one for the US servers, one for the EU servers. Increase the amount of EoI required massively. That way the whole continent can work towards a common goal. I believe this would work out.

I've seen RP realms mentioned here as benchmarks of low progress. Now, being from one myself, I can say that they're nowhere in the race for world firsts, but as it stands now on Moonglade, we have 2 guilds farming Illidan for quite a while, and another 6 (I think, as of last night) guilds ranging from 4/5 and 5/9 to killing Rage. Then another awesome guild who killed Vashj in their third week of 25 man raid (this week), I think. All of these are in a position to farm at least 2 EOI dropping bosses a week, by the time 2.4 comes live. that's an output of 18 EOIs a week, if need be.
Also, Argent Dawn has 6 guilds killing Illidan, another 6 in BT and quite a few more that only need Kael to move into tier 6.

Now, I'm sure most of the progressed guilds won't go back to farm all the bosses, due to progress nights, but an average of 2 EOI bosses can be expected for most of these guilds. Or, who knows... if you get to the point where you're waiting on the gate, you may have BT in 2 nights, MH in one, SW in one, and another one for Kael + Vashj.

Ultimately, it depends on the amount you'll need to turn in. If they could actually calculate the amount needed for each realm, and timing it so you'd have the same average unlocking week for most realms, that would be the closest thing to fair. However, it's an unrealistic prospect, given the current number of factors that influence this (as in not only hard numbers, but also random setbacks to guild schedules, and willingness to go back through old content).

However, I must say the best way to tackle the gates would be by inter guild coordination and cooperation.

I think that would totally destroy the incentive for blizzard to do such a gate in the first place. I think they created it -not solely but mostly - to create another way of communication between the guilds on one server. Communication between ALL guilds of Europe, even only those involved in the endgame is not really possible. Making the gates continent-wide would ruin a fascinating new aspect of endgame raiding. They could instead just build in a timer if simply delaying the fast guilds is what they intend.

Of course, they should work something out for the likes of forte, but this is not a good way.

Maybe they're hoping to get people to transfer from "dead" servers, in hopes of faster gate opening, and earn a little extra on PCT, quite a clever plan. What I don't like is that this might indeed end with even more "dead" realms than we already have, and maybe it's just me but I prefer slightly quieter but not completely empty place, than server where everyone is T6 and farming Illidan for half a year. Maybe it's something they'll work on in WotLK, as rerolling/transfer is not an option for everyone(especially with PvE/PvP pct restriction)

Personaly I think they created the gates as a way for normal guilds to feel they're part of something big and unice, and have an impact on it, even though they're not progressed enough to participate themselves.

They're also fairly clearly a pacing mechanism designed to increase the longevity of the content and prevent what happened with BT where the whole instance was cleared a week after people first entered it.