The Time Has Come (for the AQ War Effort)

For someone who's "into" MMORPGs to the degree that I am, I'm surprisingly rubbish at keeping up with what's happening in Classic in terms of tweaks and patches. I guess that makes for a more authentic experience, considering that I had no clue what was happening to the game as a whole back in Vanilla either. Back then, every change came as a surprise to me.

Fortunately for me Wilhelm pointed out in a post that the AQ war effort started yesterday - I would have been disappointed if I had missed that. I wrote about my memories tied to the opening of the gates when the event first started on private server Kronos.

After reading that some guilds are apparently super prepared and have stocked up on enough materials to basically complete the collection pretty much instantly, I was curious to see how the two servers on which I have characters would fare in comparison. As a reminder, I play Horde on Pyrewood Village (PvE), and Alliance on Hydraxian Waterlords (RP-PvE).

 I could hear the sound of lots of people making bandages when I arrived.

I checked progress on both this afternoon, at which point it must have been about 24 hours since the hand-ins started, and while they were nowhere near done they were well underway. Pyrewood Village was about a third of the way there, while Hydraxian Waterlords had only handed in about 15% of the required materials - but then it has a notably smaller population.

One thing that was interesting to me was that even though both servers have an Alliance-Horde ratio of about 2:1, Horde on Hydraxian Waterlords isn't far behind the Alliance in terms of progress, while on Pyrewood Village, the Alliance has already done almost twice as many hand-ins.

On both servers there was a similar pattern of the high-level materials being provided much more quickly than the low-level ones - on both servers the Alliance was already full up on Thorium bars for example, while the bottlenecks on both appear to be linen bandages for Alliance and wool bandages for Horde. Those materials may well be easy to come by, but which raider wants to spend their time farming linen for hours?

My initial reaction was a brief surge of delight when I visited the Ironforge military ward on my night elf hunter and realised that one of the hand-ins was Spotted Yellowtails - I had just been fishing the day before to feed my pet and had several stacks of them, but was happy to donate them to the war effort instead. Of course, then I realised that all I'd get in return for my hand-ins was a piddly bit of rep, which I don't really care about, so...

I might just see if I can make a bit of money off people keen to do more hand-ins by farming materials. I had already been wondering why prices for Runecloth and wolf meat were suddenly noticeably higher than they'd been previously (before I had realised that the war effort had started).

And of course it would be cool if I could be there for the actual opening of the gates. On Kronos it was a bust for me due to the open world PvP, but fortunately I'm on two PvE servers this time around. Of course, the question remains of how soon we'll get there. The initial progress seems to indicate that the gates should open quite quickly, but then Kronos was full on Thorium bars on day one too and then ended up taking more than five months. While I don't think that things will be this slow on either of my servers in Classic, I do expect progress to slow down as people get rid of their stockpiles and find themselves having to do actual farming of otherwise fairly useless materials to advance the cause.