Yes, but I think this fascination is as much with wanting to see whatever loot dropped, or what the next boss looks like. With the stage of datamining we've reached, where the loot tables and boss abilities are nearly much figured out before they ever fought, I think this might decrease a little. And the question is also do these people, apart from frothing EU vs US forum trolls, care much if the competition is fair?

Ungeir you got called out because a lot of people do take it pretty seriously and are not interested in hearing what someone who is not part of that group has to say about why it shouldn't or doesn't have to be important to them, you're sticking your nose where your current progression level tells us it doesn't belong. It's along the lines of people who've never seen an encounter shouldn't go around talking about it, people who aren't looking at a chance to be top X (whatever their goal is) world shouldn't be making comments about how that race is being changed. The overwhelming sentiment in Ret among those I've talked to about the gates is "Thank god we're on Mal'ganis" because there's like 12 or 13 Illidan killing guilds now.

Some of the fact that these guilds are so well known and their websites get hammered so much is because of just curiosity about the loot and the appearance of a boss sure, but a lot of it is figuring out who got the kill first, and to some people it is important. It's already cheapened enough through PTR's, videos (even streaming ones now, I can't say I saw that coming), server stability issues, and the fact that some guilds can get screwed by losing a key player at a bad time, but the fact is we don't want it to be made even worse through artificial methods, there is no value in destroying this competition for what no benefit. A gate event that effects only the guilds going for world/server firsts is unnecessarily slowing competition at a variable rate.

If it was steady and it was just like on maybe a guild per guild basis, or required completing a world event that was completely unrelated to population, but couldn't happen until a certain point, that wouldn't be a problem, but giving certain guilds an artificial block is not really acceptable to the world first race community.

It still remains to be seen, so yeah no one can say "this is a clear assault and clearly not going to work" but while it's on the PTR is the time to voice opinions to make sure it goes live properly, and not giving guilds on high population active raiding servers an unfair advantage.

As an outsider looking in I will certainly conceed that my perspective is limited, but I think I can add value to the discussion. If Blizzard scales the gates by realm population (which sounds like it might be a distinct possibility), then guilds on larger servers with low raiding interest lose out. They could scale based on the available raiding population, but how do they judge that? They could tally up the expected turn-in for a particular server as determined by the progress of guilds on that server, but that seems like a great deal of effort without a guarantee of fairness. Honestly, the only truly fair way to to do it would be for the gates to unlock on a guild-by-guild basis. This jeopardizes the spirit of the server-wide initiative to combat the Legion forces, but it does put control in the hands of the players.

I like the spirit of the server-wide collaborative for the gates, just as I like the spirit of the daily collaborative. As Elendil said, it feels like AQ done right. It has long been a request through many of the communication channels for Blizzard to make the world more dynamic - for interactive world events. Making the gates a guild-by-guild process is the equivalent of saying "we can't do it, lets go back to the old standard." At that point it becomes even more of a blatant progress block, and any sugar coating would be gone. However, it would be imminently fair in terms of the world-first race, and maybe there is enough value there to sacrifice the opportunity for more world immersion.

Blizzard logs all raid boss kills. They can just track the average number of Vashj, Kael'thas, Archimonde, and Illidan kills each week and make the requirements proportionate to that average. After all, that's an extremely good estimation of how many Essence of Eternity will be farmed in a given week.

What if the construction of the Shattered Sun city was as it is now on the PTR, but the breaking down of the gates inside Sunwell was done more along the lines of the "ringing the gong" questline from AQ? So to get the gates down would require a guild to focus their efforts on a long, challenging and involved quest chain spanning raids all over the world, but it would make no difference whether you were on a high raider population server, or the lone high-end guild on a backwater?

People cared when it happened. That's what matters to people. The thrill and excitement, that is why many people still raid and play this game. Knowing something is within their grasp, and to beat others to that point. On a large server you have lots of intra-server competition, but on a smaller one where there could be only one Illidan killing guild, where does that level of excitement from competition come from? Knowing you blew threw the first three bosses as fast as other guilds in the world, then you sit waiting to fight the twins for 8 weeks while you see videos and lootshots galore can really take the wind out of people.

Also you totally disregard the psychological momentum guilds can build up from getting first kills on bosses that aren't the 'final' boss. This can propel them to killing that final boss first, which nowadays can certainly matter in extremely large ways. This wasn't as big of a deal in the past, but with how cheap and easy you can perform a server transfer, it's very important.

Look at Wowjutsu - Many raiders looking for a new guild start there. Click on a server, see who's on top. Click on US realms, see who's on top. Once they get that first kill of that final boss, this can change their recruitment outlook for months/years. Or Bosskillers - Someone might sort by US/Alliance/PvE like I would have to do. If guild A who was on a huge server opened their gate 8 weeks before guild B, but guild B killed Kil'jaeden 2 days after guild A, who's the 'better' guild? Most people would say Guild B, but Guild A could be ranked many spots over B if there were 10-20+ guilds who got Kil'jaeden kills in between. This can drastically affect recruitment outlooks / guild health down the road. You should see what I'm getting at.

If they want some sort of immersion, put it to a Region level (Unless they could technologically do a World (US/EU) level, which really shouldn't be all that difficult). Show a counter of the amount of Essences turned in throughout that Region/World, and just have the script run to 'open the gates' on every server whenever it hits X counter. If it opens at 1pm on a Monday afternoon in the US, but it's just starting to hit prime raid times in EU... Big deal. I'd rather want that then to have the damn things open on a server by server basis. Also this would eliminate a whole lot of Essence sandbagging to try to turn in 20-50+ Essences on a Saturday morning at 9am when not a soul from competing guilds are to be found.

Unless some of the first kills are done by guilds that had the gates open first. You can be sure people would say they had an unfair advantage because they had extra time. As much as it sucks, the only way for it to be truly fair would be to block everyone at the boss before him until everyone had their gates open. Blizz may want to make overly hard bosses for several reasons, but I dont think that giving everyone the same time on Kil'jaeden is one of them. Mostly because world/server firsts are nice, but they only have as much meaning as players give them.

I think it would be great to split the gate openings down by either different time zones or battlegroups. That would make it feel quite epic and massive and feel truely the way mmo's should be. If blizzard wants to make it feel like the world inside of wow is changing the flow of content releases that would make it pretty interesting. I have personal experience with gate openings <Scarab Lord> and trust me it was quite discouraging to see firsts from other servers primarily because the rest of my server could care less about the 'war effort'.

I would personally say the smallest they could go would be Realm Type within a Region (US/PvE) for example, without the current pissed off mob we have now. Mainly due to transfers. I really sometimes wonder if Blizzard realizes what server transfers do to guilds and how they operate, and what 'LOL FIRST' can truly mean.

If they limited to a battlegroup, that could still be stacked pretty heavily (Haven't done any calculations on that).

Well spliting it by server type would take the wind out the sails of several big name guilds. PvP servers, pve servers, rp servers and rp pvp servers all probably have varying degrees of total realm progress.
i.e. how many guilds on average progress per server type.
Unlike battlegroups where there is mixture of realm-types and progression levels

At the risk of repeating myself...

Why don't those guilds who really care about the competition just transfer to higher population servers like the pvpers do with battlegroups? If your goal is really to be the world first, or the north american first, or whatever, wouldn't a small thing like server population just be remedied the same way?

The problem with that is that its a lot more complicated transferring 30+ guild members to a new server with 5+ recruits who are still on their cooldowns than it is to transfer a 2-5 member arena team to the new flavor of the month top Battlegroup.

It's not the same at all.

You can't transfer from Doomhammer to Mal'Ganis.

Many, many of our member are in transfer cooldown.

"Hi Blizzard, we're kind of upset with the way you designed your game... but that's okay, have a thousand bucks!"

It doesn't have to be the same. But if you are serious about being the top 0.1% who wants to fight for that competition, it smells pretty fishy if you aren't willing to put up. This whole race between servers doesn't matter for server first kills. It only matters for those who really care about this competition, which are (for all intents and purposes) the very, very few.

These are the people who say they are the cream of the crop. The self proclaimed best of the best. They are willing to spend weeks upon weeks of sleepless nights experimenting, wiping and raiding. They are willing to spend days with spreadsheets, calculators and other tools to plan out the most optimal and efficient path to their goals, as well as analyzing their competition. They are willing to spend countless hours gathering world buffs, consumables, and even recruiting/leveling up new characters specifically for certain fights. Yet these selfsame aren't willing to spend a little time to coordinate a decent plan to move the guild to another server for the chance at the glory they seek?

How is this different from PvPers who want better competition paying $25 per character (and possibly more) to find the competition they want? If they can do it, why can't the high end raiders looking for competition? And isn't that quote pretty much exactly what they do every month anyway? :P

Reset all transfer cooldowns when 2.4 arrives. Problem solved.

It's no different, except in the quantity.

I just happen to think it's hilarious that Blizzard has people so willing to throw large sums of money at them even when they're not giving those players what they want.

The PTR is a much bigger 'threat' to the validity of world firsts than most other factors imho. It gives guilds who manage to transfer over (which can at times be a challenge) and who take the time there a vast advantage over guilds who haven't.

And I know, and acknowledge, that world first is a prime motivational factor for some guilds. I don't argue against that. I just think it's folly to think Blizzard will give those concerns much priority in their game design. The whole existence of the PTR goes against that.

Going back to 2.4 in general, I think it's sad that the first bosses of SW25 have gone down so fast. I hope they get a big notch up before release. Contrary to what people who apparently thought browsing my armory profile might think, I do care about cuttting edge-raiding, because I used to do it, until RL circumstances made it impossible, and I might return to it. SW25 is going to have to last at earliest late summer and quite possibly until late 2008. I really hope it doesn't turn out to be another BT or MH. Make the first couple of bosses 'easy' - that's fair enough. But there really needs to be some major challenges in there on the scale of 4 horsemen.

But it's a balance of course - Blizz got a lot of flak for the timing of Naxx, and how many guilds never got to finish it before 2.4. But if there's too long of a pause before the expansion they'll have to take heavy flak for having basically no content for the cutting-edge for possibly half a year. I hope the plan B is good or Kil'jaeden is a major challenge.

It's no more flawed than feeling you are "forced" to transfer battlegroups for competition. If you only want progress, you'll get it on your server. Your server will still have their server firsts, and you won't have to do anything special about it. It's only the inter-server competition that will be affected, just like it is only the inter-battlegroup competition that is affected. Your server will eventually open those gates, and you'll still have whatever competition on your server to be the first to kill Kil'Jaeden.

And like I said before:

How about getting rid of the silly (in my opinion) transfer rules for PvP-PvE and such? Also transfering transatlantically should be enabled (wasnt in vanilla havnt checked since but I get the feeling its not)

Indeed it's not any better, and not any worse, for that matter. However, the problem is more obvious for PVE, because progression is spread around a lot more time, and is still based around those individual achievements i was talking about. If I understand arena mechanics right, any PVPer who's going through enough trouble to transfer for competition, though, is at the top of the PVP progression ladder on his realm, rather than unable to progress further in locked content... And unless they're rerolls, I would assume (but then again, I'm not keen on PVPing, so I may be wrong) good PVPers can make good progress in one reset on new realms. Good PVEers undergo larger organizational problems when transferring.

While I understand where you are coming from, please try to define "proper race". I mean, really define. Should it be fair, in other words give everyone the same chances ?

Then is it fair that not all realms have the same stability ?
Is it fair when one realm's instance server have to be shut down that not all other unaffected instance servers of other realms are also shut down ?
Is it fair that the US has one day lead in receiving patches ?
Is it fair that critical hotfixes aren't applied at exactly the same time ?

And so on.

There has never been a 100% same chance for everybody race. Never. Like everyday raiding, you have to make do with what you've got. 2 of your players can't login because login servers went down ? Tough luck, deal with what you have. It has always been that way. The community at large decided to overlook certain disadvantages and declare a clear winner of the race and pretend it was all wonderfully fair. We will have to do so again, this time, under whatever rules the race will take place.

It is as it is. It isn't fair. But then again, life isn't either. We have to deal with it.