My general thoughts on the world event:

As much as people bitched at the war effort for being nothing but a mindless farm-fest where the only real success came from staring at Defias corpses until your eyes bled, I saw it was anything but monotonous. Great world event, and executed quite well by Blizzard.

Whether intentional by design or not, it's pretty clear at this point that the best approach to the event was for the organized guilds on each server to step it up and take charge of the farming efforts, turning them into something other than sheer unrewarding grinding monotony (and digging deep into their collective pockets in the process). This meant harnessing the power of thousands of selfish players towards an organized goal and making them all independently motivated to do so. Economics and politics/social forces ended up playing an even bigger part in creating these motivating forces than the pathetic rewards plugged in by Blizzard - and this was great. We got to see large-scale politics and economics play out to fuller consequences than they ever have before in WoW, and the servers with leaders who got their acts together quickest and strongest were the ones who ended up out in front. As much as I would have liked to have had an active hand (my guild gave me the boot when I voiced my disagreement with their 'grief, camp, and declare war against any other guild trying to complete the raid quest after us' policy), it was still fascinating enough for me to keep tabs from the sidelines.

If things could have been changed:
- Tune the raid quest-chain and the farming portions of the event to finish at approximately the same time. Something requiring a number of raid groups to separately complete a challenging task would have been better.
- Shorten the overall amount of mats required by about 20-25%. It dragged on much longer than was originally planned.
- Auto-turnins were too early and too fast, obviously a panicked fix for wrongly overestimating the average turn-in rates. Should have waited until at least 15-20 servers had opened the gates by themselves, not after only two had opened the gates and two had just finished their turn-ins, or thereabouts.
- High pop servers competing on the same scale as low-pop servers was not nice, a little bit of tuning based on the average server loads would have been welcome.



I thought one of the coolest things coming out of this event was guilds willing to open up raid slots to strangers to scoop up epics. I had always thought that this was a drastically-underemployed tactic. This contest proved that you can force other people to do whatever you want for the lure of raid epics!

So I started thinking, on a completely unrelated note, how else might one use a hefty guild bank to employ the masses:
- Offer a bounty reward of 100g to the first person to accurately notify your guild of an outdoor raid boss spawn?
- Offer a warlock an extra 20g to summon your guild's warlocks to said raid boss?
- Offer cash, partial loot, or just the raiding experience to pad your thin raids with pick-ups?
- Buy mats from gold-farmers that you just don't feel like farming yourself?

And then, how might one incorporate some hefty money-making strategies into a functional raiding group:
- Set up a few high-profile auctions for Plain Letter on the AH, announcing that the winners of the auctions will get an MC/BWL raid slot and any rotting epic loots?
- Or auction off single BoP items directly, such as Head of Nefarian/Onyxia or the domo chest item?
- Rent out a decked-out main tank for the day to a struggling guild?
- Play the AH market with your guildbank as an investment pool, controlling and exploiting entire economies on a grand scale?

I couldn't disagree more. I play the game to kill shit, not farm bandages for 50 hours to open a pointless 10 hour war that not a single server blizzard has will be able to handle.

As for
Again, I play the game to kill shit, not to ass kiss all the idiots on this server.

I'd much rather have had no event than the event we got.

The event was a complete failure and a huge mistake in their design. It failed on two primary levels : Farming is not something people do for pleasure. People don't enjoy the active farming in things like molten core, and they certainly aren't going to enjoy killing infinitely respawning crocodiles to get nothing of any worth. Second, there was no proper way to exchange goods between sides to correct for server imbalances. So not only did people have to farm for their stupid shit that they didn't want to, they ended up having to suffer through hours of goblin AH bullshit just to push goods over to an 'allied side'.

It wasn't fun. I really don't care about the psychology or the methods employed by players to get the job done, it was simply a brutal, retarded grind that shouldn't have been in the game in the first place and did nothing to improve my playing experience. There were so many small or stupid mistakes in the design of it, and the event that followed, that I hope whoever came up with this shit was someone from the old team and they've passed onto another company so I don't have to deal with their moronic nonsense at any stage in the future.

I am, however, impressed with the zeal and sense of duty my guildmates feel. I farmed something like three hours average a night, but other people put in effort for the benefit of others far beyond anything I'd expect. On that side, I am happier to be in this guild - But we'd have been better if this event had never happened.

In before Slug post

2 Members: gijebus, Slug

Now, content;

This couldn't have been worse in almost every aspect. If blizzards goal is to make this game fun they've failed terribly. Even they know farming isn't at all enjoyable, which is why there's so many enjoyable and varied quest from 1-60.

Farming rant: Way too much of way too little. There were only 25 items able to turn in, 25 out of all the possible items in this game. 4 Million of these 25 items. I don't think you could be any less imaginative.

The '10 hour war': Another terribly executed idea. While the event was supposedly spread across south Kalimdor, anywhere not Silithus gave terrible rep making it less desirable and was still severely lagged. This only meant that there would be a massive count of players in one given area. Blizzard should know by now that could only cause crashes. I stopped playing for a few hours after the 3rd crash because I'll be getting decent rep in AQ40 and I'm patient so I don't know exactly how bad Silithus was. Perhaps they took some measures to boost the capasity of Silithus while damning the rest of the server which is why Feralas was lagged beyond sanity, but it was generaly a poor idea.

'A hero will rise': The effort to get Gurgthock the scepter was very well the most entertaining part of this ordeal. The quest were clever, difficult (to some extent), and enjoyable. It's a pity that just as much love wasn't put into the rest of the event as it was in this.

Hindsight: Were I to have been responsible for this; farming would have been half as much as it was, and the 10 hour war would have been more of a 10 day war, spread across the game. When the gates open I believe it would have been best if silithus was over ridden and the infestation to cover both continents with periodic attacks on various cities. It would be up to the players to sanitize the world by destroying the crystals (fiercely guarded, of course) and drive back the bugs to the gate. In its current form is was hardly a war as much as it was players frolicking around the zone killing things in a rep grind and looking for loot.
There's a few arguments as to why some of this would be less favorable to everyone in the game, but fuck 'em, it's not like this would last forever and those involved would not enjoy it.

If you want to take people out of their normal routines, you don't do so by giving them something even more trivial and unrewarding. And you especially don't cap it all off with a day's worth of horrible lag and server instability.

Well executed? There isn't a big enough rolleyes smilie to answer that question. Also,

Were the servers able to handle the AQ opening events properly, the invasion itself would have been an extremely enjoyable event. Unfortunately, the designers at Blizzard are apparently still being allowed to function 99.9% removed from the true reality of the game they're designing things for.

This event was so frustratingly annoying, it caused me to openly swear at Hellsoap in guildchat for no good reason. That's pretty bad, because I'm a mostly nice guy and I like Hellsoap. When your mate calls you up and asks "Hey...are you gonna get on for the once in a lifetime server event?", you should not have to decide whether or not it's worth even trying to suffer through.

Yeah, someone screwed up bigtime.

Some people asked me to make a "Slug post" on the topic. They were probably kidding, but I was drunk by then so I pretend they were interested in what I thought of it all. The first three sentences to fly off my keyboard upon finally making it into the game yesterday were vulgarities. If the lunar festival hadn't been in effect, there was no way in hell I'd have ever made it over to Kalimdor from UC. Good luck on the blimp during heavy server load. During the second worldserver crash, I went to the liquor store and got back before my Character Select screen had gotten around to finding my characters.

I got exactly what I expected out of the event. Minimal faction, massive repair bills, and a headache. I'd have leveled my priest, but she was unfortunately in one of the lagged up event zones and I couldn't even log her on successfully all day long. I may get around to a decent personal write-up tomorrow, because it wasn't all bad and I enjoyed some things. I need to sleep before work, though.

I was originally going to post the following in another thread, but it fits much better in this one.

I lifted what I believe to be a transcript of one of their internal meetings on this exact thing...

=====

Suit: It's gotta be big. And fun. Fun, too! I mean...we're making the alliance farm lots of linen and they have tanks and stuff, right? You can give the horde some pointed sticks or something. We're on the same page here, right? I mean...y'know...

Designer A: Oh, you don't have to worry about that. We're with ya.

Suit: See, cause my son's female Night Elf...

Lead Designer: (Shh, keep it on the DL. The engineer is in the room.)

Lead Network Engineer:: Look, about this event thing...we've been trying to tell you for months that...

Lead Designer: We're not alliance-centric! We love the horde! I have an undead hunter on another server! Quick! Write down that the horde should have patrolling wolf riders!

Engineer: No. It's not about that. It's about all these bugs and events and things you want to do. The mail and item lag from the collection stuff alone has been awful so we need to...

Designer B: Oooh, yeah! Lots of bugs. LOADS! When they open the gate, they'll just swarm out! I can see it now! We'll do some scripted events at the gates and the whole server can come and it'll be AWESOME!

Engineer: No...see, the whole server can't come. That's what I'm trying to explain.

Designers & Suits: Huh?

Engineer: You can't do stuff like that. It's stupid. The server will take a dump, guaranteed.

Suit: Speak English, for God's sakes.

Engineer: Dumping is bad.

Suit: For servers?

Engineer: Correct.

Suit: Oh. Whew. Okay.

Engineer: So, if you'll just give me a minute to explain...

Lead Designer: Well we don't want our servers dumping all over the place. Okay. But why has this problem not been addressed already? This game has been going for over a year. Why are you just bringing this information to us now?

Engineer: We have brought it to you. Multiple times. You just never listen.

Lead Designer: Oh.

Suit: Hey! I was just looking at this planner and it says there are warlocks in the game as a playable Blood Elf class!? I can't wait for the expansion! They'll get pets and everything!

Designer A: I think warlocks are in the game right now, actually, sir.

Suit: No shit? Wow. How come I never noticed them?

Engineer: Night Elves can't be warlocks, sir.

Suit: Oh. That's why, then. Somebody get on that one.

Designer A: But sir, it doesn't fit the lore.

Suit: Then bend the lore. It's not like people read all that stuff, anyway.

Engineer: Ready to listen?

Suit: Yes. Sorry.

Engineer: See, we figured out from Orgrimmar and Ironforge that if you get more than 72 players in the same general area at the same time the server starts to take a dump, right?

Lead Designer: Then why did you tell us we could have 80 in AV?

Engineer We knew that at any one time, no less than half of those 80 people would be afk in town leeching honor instead of actually fighting, so we okayed it just that once. It was still a bad idea.

Lead Designer: Ah.

Suit: Okay. 72 people isn't a lot in this game, is it? I know that. We have like 5 million subscribers. I read it somewhere. So who cares if those 72 people get inconvenienced once and a while?

Engineer: At 72, it's unstable, yet manageable. Any higher and it gets really bad very quickly. When the number gets to a certain point, we reach critical mass on player characters in an area and the server dumps. It crashes the whole continent.

Suit: Did you notice that big word? Inconvenienced. I used a big word. I even know what it means. You're not the only nerd in the room, you know.

Engineer: Yes. It's okay. Now...

Designer A: That's bull, anyhow. If we were crashing the whole continent, someone would have contacted our ISPs or something to tell us. I'd think the US would notice their internet dumping.

Engineer: The continent in the game.

Suit: There are continents in the game?

Engineer: Yeah.

Designer B: (Told you there were continents! Pay up.)

Designer A: Dammit.

Suit: Whole continents? How do you...

Engineer: When it goes down, everyone gets bumped off and angry.

Suit: Angry is bad.

Lead Designer: Aha! So it's more than 57 people that cause it to crash! Okay. We understand now. We'll want to avoid that in the events, right? Dumping?

Engineer: 72 people. Right. Thank goodness you're finally listening to us. We've got it all laid out, see...

Designer A: I know how to fix it! Maybe if we reduce the number of scripted events they won't break so often and people can enjoy it more?

Lead Designer: Scripted events are cool. People love them. We can't take them out because it's one of the few things people universally love about the game. Sometimes they break for a bit, but you just restart the servers and all, right?

Engineer: No, you have to spread people out. Give them a reason to be anywhere BUT silithus or it's going to be a total disaster.

Designer A: How? Why?

Engineer: I don't know. Just do it. If you let the whole server go to the same place at the same time, it'll be like the TM/SS lagfest zerg wars all over again.

Designer A: I still maintain that the TM/SS zerg wars were the high point of PvP in this game. BG's are awesome, but the TM/SS stuff was REALLY awesome if you weren't trying to level there and it didn't even have a point to it. Sure, it lagged and crashed and was very nearly unplayable some evenings, but it was neat.

Suit: Zerg is from Starcraft. I know Starcraft. My kid played Starcraft a lot. They had these little dudes in armor and when you clicked on them they said stuff like "Gotta move!" It wa...

Designer B:I've got an idea! This is AWESOME! How about if we spread the bugs out in all the zones they're already in...somehow...maybe with a spaceship or a warp field or...

Engineer: Yes, they should be spread out! This is good.

Lead Designer: So that'll make people spread out and the server won't dump, right?

Engineer: Theoretically it could, yeah, but...

Suit: Great! So, it's decided. We'll do that.

Designer A: But the main event is in silithus because that's where the gate is. If there are bugs all over, nobody will bother to see all the sweet scripts and things we set up for the silithus invasion. I worked for at least 8 days on the Uldaman boss and 98% of the people in the game have never even seen that encounter. Most people don't even know where Uldaman is. I demand to be heard!

Designer B:We'll put the best stuff there...you know. Events, monsters, all that stuff. That way, everyone will want to go out there and see it. It'll be AWESOME!

Lead Designer: How about if we make the ones in Silithus give lots of rep and rewards and the ones everywhere else give 5 rep and crap loot? We can also make them spawn really slow, by comparison. Put the super cool monsters near the gate, itself. It even fits lore, since they're weaker the further you get from the main source. Kinda give the players a nudge in the right direction without actually forcing them, you know?

Engineer: No, wait...see, this won't fix anything... Good lord, you derailed within 10 seconds of having a good ide...

Designer B: Thanks for your input. This'll be AWESOME! Woah...it's 4:20. That means times up, guys.

Engineer: But...

Suit: Meeting adjourned, or whatever that phrase is. Time to hit the bar for some long island iced teas. Great work, everyone. Raises for the designers for coming up with such awesome content. Keep it up!

Designers: Sweet!

[top]
Our heroic, yet downtrodden Network Engineer returns to the batcave.

Engineer A: So, how'd it...oh...you reek of alcohol.

Lead Engineer: Overtime. Next three months. At least. Here. Vodka.

Engineer B: What did they say about the new servers?

Lead Engineer: I didn't even get to talk to them about the database servers and the tradelag or mail issues. Now there's bugs and spaceships and the alliance get tanks and laser beams or some shit. I've got a headache.

Engineer B: Mal'Ganis instance server just crashed. 4 guilds were trying to do Razorgore at the same time or something, I think. It's cool, though. We're rebooting.

Designer C: Don't worry guys. I'll give the horde guards cool armour and axes and make the Ironforge guys look weak. My buddy will make sure the horde gets a little love in the scripting and stuff.

Engineer B: Doomhammer just crashed again. Part of it, anyway. Looking into it.

Designer C: You guys don't tell any of the design guys I hang down here with you like this, do you?

Engineer A: Nah. It's cool. We appreciate that you look out for us. Underground 4 lyfe, yo.

Designer C: We do what we can. Cheers. What's with the shoulderpads, there?

Engineer A: I'm going to get blitzed on this vodka, go over to the designer's cubefarm dressed like Harod, then do "Blades Of LIGHT!" on their asses with this cardboard tube. It'll be great and they won't even know I'm doing it because I secretly hate them.

====

(If you find the above far-fetched or silly, you obviously haven't spent enough time working in a corporate business.)

Real version of a fake-edit: (Okay, confession time. I didn't "lift" a Blizzard meeting transcript, I made it all up. I'm probably much closer to the truth than any of you would care to think, though. Cheers.)

As the event went on, the servers crashed less because there were people (like me) whose game experience was poor enough to convince them to stop trying.

so it seems that most people's feelings were that it was poor execution and poor planning. Honestly I think the farming part could have been fixed by just having the 3% a day of automatic turnins happen right from the beginning this would keep it from wasting people's time too much but those really motivated servers could have gotten 3-4 day headstart on the rest of the servers.

As many of you stated I feel the rest of it was very cool and would have been even more cool if it didnt feel like you were looking at pictures instead of experiencing something. I havent seen the gates open yet but I am sure it will be more of the same. This whole AQ thing will do 1 of 3 things. Scare the developers away from ever having something like this again. Improve code or just improve hardware. My vote is on the first solution since I dont know how much improving the code will help and improving the hardware would be frowned on by the mother ship(vivendi).

I for one, really enjoyed the farming at a very basic level. To say nothing of the monetary rewards, I liked the feeling of hauling ass to help others. I think that sensation peaked on monday night when I was flying around STV like a bat out of hell butchering trolls. I always work best under a deadline, and I was having a blast. Then again, I'm crazy. Probably just that the way I like to play for the group is the inverse of my being a recalcitrant prick in real life.

As for the farming requirements, I think your idea is really good. When the war effort loaded on patch day, I was level 49, I think. I happened to have one stack of runecloth I had bought previously for the sake of leveling First Aid. It really kind of sucked that by the time I hit 58 and was actually able to farm runecloth at a decent clip, I had to turn it in to cloth quartermasters. I still lament over how much closer I could be to my kodo, if I had only leveled faster.

By comparison, it was absolutely infuriating to see that hauling ass over Durotar for peacebloom netted be 1 token each time, even though it was harder to farm than something like Firebloom or Purple Lotus. I wanted to cry when I found out that I could sneak through an instance and farm AT in such a closed (and with some help, controlled) environment. Monotony works in my favour, the greater degree of control I have.

PS: Slug, you are like a modern Pope, with less annoying Latin tendencies.

I still believe that this whole gate-opening thing was implemented to a) stall before having to add new content (and make the content "last" longer) and B) to get rid of a lot of gold from the economy.

A ton of gold was put into the economy from returns and rewards.

I think I personally would have spread the balance out more over the two continents and had the level 60 elites attacking all the major capitols.

If they had managed to be able to split the playerbase over the two continenets and given big guilds enough room to spread out, they could have managed the server capacity much better and resultingly not lagged us all to hell.

As it stands, we tried to do the event for like 1 hr and then made a beeline for AQ20.

I don't know about you lot, but my total repair bill on the day was over 50 gold, due to inopportune crashes, general mayhem, getting MCed and MELEE'ing people when I should have been oneshotting the entire raid with souped-up hellfire and/or shadowbolts. Bulldozing through AQ20 in a fun group of people while mildly intoxicated also contributed.

Worth it? Somewhat. The AQ20 group made up for most of the BS in the actual event, which I think says quite a bit for the quality of the AQ20 instance. It (and the group) singlehandedly turned around a day I was fully prepared to write off as an abortion of an attempt to enjoy gaming. I went into AQ20 grumpy as all hell, almost not wanting to bother. I came out very satisfied and having enjoyed myself a great deal.

I didn't even see the opening or closing events. I slept through the opening, because the thought of the lag and crashing made me nausious. I AQ20'ed through the closing, because instance server was lagfree and happy.

Why over 50 gold in repairs? Due to ZG, engineering, being a warlock, and now...AQ20, my bank and bag space is so sufficiently raped that I had to delete buff items and scrolls to make room for my NR gear and items I might want to loot. You can't remove armour to reduce your bill when you've got absolutely nowhere to put it.

On the bright side, I muled all my AQ20 stuff and ZG stuff over to another character for storage, so I have room in my bank for some of my stuff again.

I think Durga was one of the non-suiciding death record holders, though. He racked up about 35 durability deaths on the day, at least.

Agreeing with Rambar on this one. I play the game to kill shit and not be lagged by Blizzard's horrible fucking server architecture.

PS: Hurry up with this shit or make Vivendi foot the bill on these http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/02/01/blizzard_opteron/ Tigole

Last night, I was guessing that my repair bill was around 60g for the day. This morning I realized I was off, in a bad way, by at least 20g.

From now on, I learn bosses in my blue feral gear.

If this rumor is true about the AMD servers I cant wait. Hopefully this fixes crap once and for all. Yesterday was awful :(

You know what is really going to suck? When all of the servers http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wareffort/servers.html that are on 90-100% right now finish their resources and ring the gong on the same day.

Yeah, next weekend is going to be a disaster.

The farming was okay to start with, everyone pitched in a lot when we first got running. As time wore on it became obvious that it would take increasingly high levels of personal effort from an increasingly smaller player base to get the turnins done for items like silk/linen/etc, which reduced the war effort to a raiding guild effort. This has already been covered, but I'd like to express how mind numbingly stupid it was to have a bottom heavy grind for predominatly mature servers. I can see how they'd make that mistake, in fact I suspect they thought that farming runecloth would be more difficult than linen, had the numbers been switched. This is true, but as Gurgthock and others have stated, you accumulate runecloth while questing at 60, and the rewards for runecloth and other high end turnins made them worth doing. However, i'm really not surprised that the eventual bottleneck wasn't linen or runecloth level materials, but silk/herbs. Silk (and other materials of around that level) was the most tedious to farm because it's the most difficult to do efficiently. Linen? AoE grind RFC, sure it hurts but you can do it. Runecloth? The number of runecloth bandages required made it easy, and not only that you can run high level instances (that you would probably be running regardless) and end up with plenty. Silk on the other hand is just around the level that makes it fairly innefficient to farm, you run the risk of dying as you try to increase your solo output, or run the risk of wasting too many level 60's by locking groups of them into the same 5 instances per hour. In short, I hate silk, and anything to do with farming it.

The event was a giant piece of shit, that even had the servers been perfectly stable would have still been stupid. The most intelligent thing I watched happen was a group of Advent kiting the named crystal mobs into the guards at Cenarion Hold, and people tagging the waves of destroyers running up there to engage the guards. There weren't enough high rep mobs to go around to make it worth sitting in Silithus, but it was worse in other zones. In the time It took me to get 5k rep (running around tagging mobs, dragging them to the roaming raid group), the people in other zones putting in a similar amount of effort got something in the region of 150-200.

I can't recall having played any other game where the designers/implementers of the various parts of a game are so divorced from the reality of those playing it. Hey guys, lets have a crystal spawn inside Gadgetzan. Cool? No, not cool, it just adds to the lag you idiots. Hey we don't want to make it easy to farm reputation in lower level zones, so we'll make the mobs in those zones give no rep. No, you design a reputation system that scales the reputation reward based upon the level and effort required to kill the mob. Level 60's shouldn't be spending 5 minutes in a 10 man group clearing a spawn in Tanaris only to gain 5-10 rep out of the entire thing. That just forces them to Silithus to compete with even more level 60's for crystal spawns that are already being kited into guards to be killed.

I was looking forward to the war, but in the end I wish i'd not bothered to waste my time farming and just let the automatic turnins take care of my share.

if you're lucky, you'll never find out how well it plays out in game. make plans to go out and have fun irl the day your gate opens.

Well, material prices also skyrocketed for the duration so anyone that wanted to make something would have to pay out of the nose for them.

The enchanting materials market was flooded, though.


Then again, this is just my opinion and I don't really have any facts. B)

Is the 72 number empirically derived or something you made up Slug?

It would be interesting to see how performance scales with more people (linear, logarithmic, exponential or what not). I was sometimes computer/graphics bound on my end for the "lag" but it did seem to start to get pretty bad past 40 (which may be why they chose that as the raid size as opposed to the supposed "average guild") and "unplayable" past 80. But the servers could mange many more than that before finally crashing.