Naturally this would be great, but i'd imagine it would take too many resources to make npc's across the [i]world [/I alive in this manner. Now if they condensed it into one city it might be more practical. Say Stormwind:

Maybe infected NPC's could try to make a run for the Cathedral of light. Infected civilians could run through the city gates and make a bee line to the keep and /beg the King for aid. NPC's could go crazy in the Stormwind city centre and begin to /cower and scream as their timer begins to count down to their death. If your a paladin/priest, NPC's could /beg you for a dispel. NPC's could follow you and harass you for a dispell. NPC's you ignore might start attacking you. The ideas are endless.

If you try to do this to too many places (read: every capital city) you run the risk of dilution of resources. Having only a couple npc's flee across each city would be a little silly, but having a entire city feel like theres civil chaos would be fantastic. If you just did what WAR did (focus on two cities initially) and pour your resources into that, it has more potential.

I would like to see the event again next year. I don't think its realistic to bring back the server-wide FFA again, so i'd propose the following changes:

- Just 1 Alliance city and 1 horde city and their neighbouring zones are FFA zombie/npc chaos at a time. This would for example mean Stormwind+Elwynn and Orgrimmar+Durator become FFA zones. People who wish to avoid the zombie plague simply visit another city.
- The plague lasts a few days in a city, gets 'cured', then reappears in another city. Just to keep the world alive and people feeling they have to move back/forth across the world to see/avoid it.
- A complete suite of Zombie related achievements and vanity rewards are implemented to give people a strong reason to want to infect/defend the plague. I'm sure some smart people could think of some nifty achievements/rewards to fit in here. (Eg "Complete 10 daily quests to capture 20 plagued rats and receive your own Cure Disease Potion. 2min cd, lasts for duration of even")
- Allow non-dispellers easy access to a means to dispell (Maybe an NPC item, or when you kill a zombie you get a reagent to cure X people of the disease)

In essence, id like the plague brought back as a seasonal event in future. It needs to keep the FFA chaos, thats what made it special - even if it's brought back in a new form. If server-wide chaos is too much, I think having only a couple major cities at a time in ruin is an acceptable alternative. The key to making it work would be giving people a compelling reason to want to get involved - through mechanics such as achievements, vanity rewards and daily quests. It would not be fun to be part of an invasion that had no player resistance.

People play this game for a variety of reasons so I can understand that not everyone was happy with the event. Those of you that are calling this event 'annoying', however, have to realize that was the entire point. If you could ignore this, then it wouldn't be a real 'world' event, but rather an peculiar event. It would be as lame as the super retarded lunar festivals everyone goes gaga over except there would be no loot involved and players probably wouldn't go out of their way to form zombie masses or suicide bombing runs on the AH.

For the first time in WoW, your behavior as a player,whether you're ultra casual or ultra raider, was forcibly changed. Ultra casuals couldn't ignore this like they did the AQ war materials event or actual AQ gate opening while hardcore raiders couldn't just sustain their usual bank--->AH--->raid--->Ah--->log routine. Orgrimmar resembled a warzone with skeletons everywhere, silvermoon actually had players as it was the only city that zombies couldn't easily sack, and shattrath resembled a scene from 28 days later with roving zombie squads and players afraid to do anything but hover on their flying mounts.

You also have to consider that the zombie infection and mechanics were so simple and so easy to grasp that players were able to participate in zombie warfare everywhere and not just in isolated areas. The ability of having the plague so widespread not only reduced the overall server lag from where it could be, but really created a sense of siege for all players, horde and alliance.

I'm glad people's daily routines were disturbed, and they couldn't just ignore this and continue with whatever RP, economic, or raiding side game they do every other day in WoW. This has set a new standard for the beginning events of the next expansion pack even if the zombie infestation is the only interesting part of WOTLK events.

The fact that so many people got pissed at this event is something I take as further sign of the event's success.

After we saw the WOTLK intro cinematic, with Arthas standing over a legion of Undead and sending Sindragosa out to the wild blue yonder, most reacted with "Huh? So what?"

That in itself was a repeat of TBC, where we really had no impetus to go after Illidan besides his shiny Warglaives. Hell, Pathaleon the Calculator was a better villain than Illidan ever was. And Kil'Jaeden? He just decided to pop in, only to be shoved back out.

But the Scourge, oh my, the Scourge. This Zombie invasion is the part where every goes ARTHAAASS!!! *SHAKES FIST* and marches off to kick in the doors of the guy who ruined a weekend of your life.

Raiding gave us the means, the Northrend boat gives us the opportunity, and the Zombie Invasion gives us the motive.

Personality profiles. I believe it's the P vs. J part of Myers-Briggs. Some people like to be open-ended, some like their activities planned. I'm a strong J and I hated the event.

Yeah, or, everyone goes off to find another game that lets them ignore things they don't want to participate in. That's the danger here. If there were something this intrusive for three days out of every month, I'd certainly be leaving the game. And as much as many players would say "good riddance", I don't believe Blizzard can/will have that attitude.

Hopefully they can use phasing to implement a "best of both worlds" scheme in the future. But they have to permit players who want to ignore this stuff to actually do so.

Heck, I'd be happy if this was a PvP/PvE mechanic split -- if you're on a PvP server, you have signaled that you're willing to have your gameplay disrupted. But many folks are on PvE servers precisely because they're completely unwilling to suffer such disruptions. Go ahead and extend that to how world events work, especially now that PvE to PvP transfers are available (so people can switch back and forth).

Anyone who up and completely quits the game simply because of the event wasn't likely to stick around for much longer anyway. I'm sure you can give me 10 pieces of anecdotal evidence of people who say this event made them quit but I'd be money on the fact that if you looked at account subscriptions before the event and then again after the event, they'd hardly have changed as a direct result of it.

It was less than ONE week of disruption. The worst of it was essentially 3 days where you had to avoid capital cities. People who quit over that, like I said before, were in no way a large portion of the player base and were probably bored/about to quit soon anyway and just happened to have their dramatic excuse fall into their lap.

In extraordinary times, human behaviour is bizarre and non-conventional. Things that happened in the WoW plague would very likely happen in a similar IRL plague. Though perhaps getting infected on purpose would be more likely replaced with infected people stupidly/carelessly trying to escape, knowing they would needlessly infect others in doing so. The civil unrest, polarized anger/frustration/excitement/ from people in times like this is very real.

If they wanted to shift player focus more towards the lich king, they could've easily made him more visible during the event. Zombies could've chanted 'For Arthassss' as they died, for example. Or zombies could debuff people with a 'Grip of the Lich King' debuff that did something to your character (80% run speedonly , inability to mount for 2 minutes - something essentially cosmetic, but mildly annoying). Arthas could whisper something to people with the plague when they get cured, in spite. I know essentially it'd still be players causing the chaos, but theres a few ways to make it more transparent that it's the Lich Kings meddling which is creating the mess in the first place.

In hindsight, the Zombie event was nothing more than a little annoyance at worst. Although I realise this is due to gameplay reasons and limitations, but there was no permanent change that'd justify a full-scale invasion to another continent. As a result, the real 'kick in the nuts' is probably the next event of the prologue.

I think even disregarding the whole prologue there is as much reason to assault Northrend as there was to BC. That said, there isn't much, except what remains of the people of Lordaeron, most of which are either shambling around as ghouls (or worse) or the Forsaken. Hence a good roundhouse kick in the balls is what's needed for real motivation.

Edit: Oh, and the Blood Elves have a definite grudge, too.

You don't think a few weird people would consider the plague the next evolution of mankind? Would actively go seeking it out? I sure do.

How much more 'invasion' related content are we going to see? This zombie event was amazing, but possibly mistimed. Had they done this more along the lines of November 6-13, possibly included a good questline to 'psych' up the players for invading Northrend, would have been more effective. The Dark Portal events were not that invigorating, and the quest to go thru the portal was a mere single quest from an NPC outside the portal.

I really hope there is more to come.

I am sure there is more to come with more disruptions as we get closer to the Wrath release date.

Why is everyone so angry about the invasion in capital cities when it affects banks and battlemasters? The only reason Ironforge or Orgrimmar are popular is historical. Go to Silvermoon or the Exodar. The Exodar is a small, reasonably tight city that makes a fine home away from home.

We don't need beta info to support that, Blizz has flat out stated that the event isn't over and that we'll be seeing more


As for the issue of driving people away from the game, I'd argue that every major class nerf Blizzard has done has pissed a lot of people off at least as much as this event did, and nerfs don't just last a weekend. Was it a risk for Blizzard to do something this aggressively disruptive? Sure, but I don't think it was an especially large one all things considered.

However, I do think that the event could have used some more flavor text from the Argent Healers, etc, about what was going on, the efforts towards a cure, and so on - and a sense of progressively getting closer to a cure, with any sort of rough time table, might well have helped alleviate some of the dislike for the event, as there would at least be an end in sight for those hating it. While some may have had an idea of how long it would last, and the decreasing infection timer was a decent guideline, guessing that there wouldn't be, say, a 30 second infection day, and an instant infection day beyond what we did have pretty much required following the blue posts on the matter out of game, and few people do that, and fewer still want to follow something they are hating already.

What I'm wondering is what would've happened if comparable havoc had been wrecked among the same cities, but solely by NPC with no player involvement at all. Near enough as I can tell - in a "I don't get it, but it looks like this" kind of way - what a lot of people find fundamentally offensive about PvP servers isn't so much the time wasted, which usually isn't anywhere near as large as is occasionally suggested, but the whole idea that you can end up in situations in which someone else can force you to change your behaviour. Battleground PvP, arenas, is perfectly acceptable - even fun - because of the choice you make to participate, on your own terms. But having someone else dicate the terms is, well, judging by a fair few people I've encountered over the years, offensive. Whether it's world PvP in WoW or having your Jedi hunted down by a Bounty-Hunter in SWG.

Would having the AH/bank/flightmasters/whatever cleared by a scourge of NPCs rather than players have caused the same polarization?

I think so. While I think that people were (rightfully) irked that they were being griefed and the mechanics of the game actually rewarded griefing for a brief time, I also think the primary issue was the disruption, especially of lower-level players who couldn't reasonably avoid it. If the same disruption happened as an invasion and caused lower-level quest hubs to be unusable, it still would have been a bother.

Interestingly enough if they had done it this way I think it would have been a bit more successful in terms of making it an event; what you saw on various servers in an ad-hoc way where people defended certain strategic points over others could have been actually rewarded with quests and items from AD, similar to the necropolis events and the attacks on cities were. Having whole raids come together and work to fight off the oncoming zombie horde (with, perhaps, a doomwalker-like debuff that makes you unable to res for a while as your 'zombie' goes and attacks things) would capture the same danger and urgency while taking away the feeling that it was other players doing bad things to you, and rewarded 'good' behavior.

But realistically, it's tough to both make the event meaningful and affecting while also making it so that some people can participate if they choose while others opt out.

I for one would've liked if they'd at least have put in some aftermath. Even npcs that talked about it, some zombie and normal bodies, and a guy walking around with a cart yelling "Bring out yer dead!" would've been enough to make it a ton more believable afterward.

You must have missed my comments. I loved the event (as a zombie "Griefer"), and talked with another fellow who was playing the defensive side of things on general chat that was also defending the event against whiners. We both enjoyed the event immensely. I even played defense for a while as well, and of course, wehn turned, played the zombie side again. I have to hand it to Blizzard that they created an event that really brought the effects of a Scourge war to to life in a way that was exciting. Sadly, on a PvE server, it resulted in many folks not enjoying it because their normal WoW routine was disrupted because the invasion was too... Invasive. We're too used to not having to worry about such things. It's be better if Arthas would just let us in to Northrend with no real fight, and give us his epics. I'm so glad they made this a much more epic feel than BC opening. I'm still hoping we see a real razing of Stormwind and show of force before the events are over.

I would have been considerably happier with the event if that had been the case (though I still would have been irritated with Blizzard).

Or even if when we were turned to zombies, we wreaked havoc on an instanced version of the major cities populated only by NPCs instead of players.

I can't stand people being dicks to each other. I can't stand griefing. If there's a reasonable probability that my taking part in an activity is going to result in griefing someone else, I'm very unhappy about that. I wanted to wreak havoc as a zombie during this event, but the griefing aspect made me hold back, and left me angry at Blizzard for putting me in that situation.

It's the difference between "act of god" and intentionally malicious behavior. My gut reaction to a school destroyed by a hurricane is very different from my reaction to a shooting spree in a school.

I have no idea how many other folks feel the same way about it as me.

While I can respect how you chose to spend time in a game you pay money for, I have to question the logic by which you compared the loss of real human life to a make-believe event in a world that doesn't exist. There is no permanent damage caused by deaths in warcraft, and the only real inconvenience to anyone is time. If you're having difficulty differentiating imaginary creatures taking over an imaginary city (zombies and orcs don't exist by the way) from a real catastrophe hitting a real city and causing real pain, then I implore you to get immediate help.

Furthermore, all inconvenience caused by this event could easily have been avoided by going to a capital city thats out of the way from everyone. I'm on cho'gall, its a packed server, and yet I was never infected unless I particularly wanted to be infected and even then there were enough dispellers around org and shattrath to get cleansed.

I won't disagree that if the event had stayed around longer, it would have started to become a real annoyance as the novelty would have worn off but to claim it was anything less then extraordinary with regards to everything else in the game world is just nonsense in my opinion.

Seconded. If you dig, you can find some great, interesting lore in and around TBC, but the problem is that you do have to dig, and it's quite easy to completely ignore it and just progress through, killing each set of mobs because they're bigger and drop better loot than the last set. Take the Thrall quest chain in Nagrand: for those of us who enjoy that sort of thing, playing messenger between Thrall and the Greatmother, culminating in Thrall walking his green butt through the portal and sitting down with his grandmother, was great fun. Unfortunately, it wasn't a major plot line in TBC, and unlocking it required you to do a few random, basically unrelated quest chains in a zone that's only use was leveling and singing Hakuna Matata.

In WotLK, we're being given damned good reasons to be pissed off at Arthas and his minions. By the November 13th, I think a pretty major portion of the population of Azeroth is going to have ample reason to rush off to Northrend and put a stop to the war he's brought to us, as opposed to just seeing a new zeppelin and deciding to see what's on the other side, and what 'phat epix' they can get there.

Was the zombie event perfect? Of course not. How much new Blizzard content hasn't required at least a mini-patch or two to get balanced and working as intended? If some of the results were unexpected, no one should be surprised, but realize that it only lasted a few days, and it's obviously sparked plenty of conversation and interest, be it positive or negative, and that reflects heavily on the design philosophy of the coming expansion.

The zombie event is the sort of thing that people roll on PvE servers to avoid, speaking as someone who rolled on a PvE server. I was rather shocked that zombies are default attacking/attackable on a PvE server, and I can empathize with Douglas that it destroys the point of being there for everyone. However I, personally, was able to forgive all of that because this was a special event instead of business as usual. I didn't participate that much, and even ended up griefing myself by accident (some goblin partiers infected a flightmaster I wanted to take) but I still thought it was an excellent event that, while not perfect because there are improvements that could be made, was still better than most other world events I've seen. I stand firmly in the camps that "It's ok because it's temporary" and "you needed to feel affected for the event to matter."

Douglas, how would you have felt about joining a pack of zombies in storming a fortified position in a capital city? The fact that people are fortifying instead of avoiding means that they are choosing to participate in the event, so it's not griefing randoms.

I sort of felt that way with Kael'thas. Doing the quests in Netherstorm really made it clear he had gone nuts and was going to blow the place up. Kael was really the only boss I actually felt had a decent backstory for. I'm still not sure who Gruul was or why we killed him, and his sons. Vashj, I sort of know that she was draining the marshes, but it wasn't made clear, and by the time you get to the point of killing her, you've probably forgotten the Zangarmarsh quests. Illidan, yeah, he seems to have gone nuts and is probably a real bastard, but despite being "Lord of Outland", I sort of got the impression all he really controlled was the Black Temple, which he seemed to be hiding out in, sort of like a bunker.

Archimonde was neat, but it was made clear he has absolutely zero (present day) story. Magtheridon, I felt, we could probably have just left there, banished and all.

Mostly, though, (even though I personally haven't killed him yet), I was disappointed with Illidan. They made him out to be the boss of the expansion (and Kil'jaeden is probably an unplanned bonus boss), but he seemed far less powerful than Kael. Other than being a real jerk to Akama, I'm not really sure why we go and kill him, rather than leave him holed up in the black temple, hoping he gets some anti-psychotics or something.

Anyway, I love the way they're making Arthas a part of WotLK. Heck, the expansion is 2 weeks away, and I've already felt his influence more than I ever did Illidan.