I noted in my last post about the war effort that Pyrewood Village was close to being done, and sure thing, the next time I checked, the coffers were full and the NPCs were just counting down the days to the actual opening event. Consulting the server Discord allowed me to narrow it down further: apparently the gong was going to be rung at 20:35 server time on Sunday. Not a bad time to join in for a fun world event!
I made sure to take my tauren hunter down to Silithus in advance to beat the inevitable crowds. This seemed to have paid off when I logged in with about half an hour to go and watched a pile of horribly lagging wind riders pile up on the wind rider master, seemingly unable to land.
As I hadn't been removed from my old guild's Discord and I could see that lots of them were online and in voice chat, I hopped on to listen to what they were talking about. Apparently the raid leader had his own sceptre ready to bang the gong and there was much excitement, though they were also talking about people forcibly getting teleported out of Silithus due to overpopulation. As it turned out my own hubris about having been clever enough to log out in Cenarion Hold before was also about to be punished with an appropriate fall, as I suddenly found myself among a pile of other people teleported to the graveyard in Thousand Needles.
We rode to the nearest flightmaster in a giant train and flew back. The wind rider pile in Silithus was still laggy but it did land people eventually. Acutely aware that I was likely to get teleported out again (apparently only sceptre bearers were immune - or something like that) I mounted up and ran south to have a look at the gate itself. The crowds were real. The game clearly couldn't cope and would basically show me a blank landscape in any direction unless I stared at it intently for a few seconds, which would then result in more and more people loading in as time went on.
The next time the dreaded loading screen appeared, I found myself with a pile of similarly afflicted people in Ratchet for a change. Again we were off to the flight master and flew right back. Again I rode south to mingle with the crowds, hoping that maybe I'd be able to hang in there until the big event, but I got ported out for a third time at half past, once again to Thousand Needles. Others on Discord reported landing in Un'goro Crater and Tanaris.
I flew back a third time and my wind rider was just approaching Cenarion Hold again when the broadcast text went out that the first person to ring the gong had been an Alliance warrior called Moatty. Once again I rode back down south, hoping to see some of the Qiraj invaders, and I did! There were a whole bunch of giant Anubisaths about, but everything was so laggy that they didn't even seem to move. I did see people fight them, but again as far as my game was concerned, players were mostly running on the spot. I observed this for a while, until I once again got teleported out to Thousand Needles.
People on my old guild's Discord were now talking about trying to find some invaders in other zones. The crystals apparently spawn in zones all over southern Kalimdor, so there were people hunting elite silithid even in the Barrens (though the mobs were levelled down appropriately for each zone and also dropped lower level loot accordingly). Listening to my guildies on voice and reading chat channels however, things weren't quite so simple in other zones either. I made my way over to Feralas and asked if there were any groups hunting Anubisaths, just to be told flatly that they had all been wiped out within seconds.
I rode back into Thousand Needles, remembering that I had seen an Anubisath from the back of my wind rider earlier, and found a seemingly untouched crystal with lots of mobs around it - I soloed them down for the heck of it. Then I rode on and found some more crystals - it was only at this point that I realised that the mobs did respawn, just on a timer. One crystal I encountered looked abandoned and then all its silithid spawns repopped at once just as I was about to ride past. I killed a few more there but quickly got bored. Health potions and greens may be useful drops, but not so much when scaled down to the thirties (plus my bags on that character were already full too), and I didn't really care that much about getting Brood of Nozdormu reputation in increments of five.
On my way down to Gadgetzan I saw huge groups of players camp more crystals in the Shimmering Flats, I'm guessing because the mobs spawned there were at least in the fourties and therefore dropped slightly better loot.
And thus, the gates on Pyrewood Village are open. I still plan to see the event on Hydraxian Waterlords as well if I get the chance - at least now I'll have a bit of an idea of what to expect. Blizzard seems to have found a workaround to prevent the servers from crashing I guess, but I can't say that getting teleported out of the zone every fifteen minutes because it's considered too busy makes for the most fun experience as a player either. I'll concede though that I don't really know what else they could have done if the servers just can't take that many people in the same spot, even in 2020.
Sad that their server tech isn't better able to cope with the crowds, just being an onlooker for battles like these would be well worth it. Hydraxian is still so far off, most of the mats are pretty low, linen cloth only 300k of 800k; copper bars only 62k of 90k. Does the gate event not happen until all these are done?
ReplyDeleteYeah, spectating was really the main reason I went, so from that point of view the repeated teleportation was disappointing, though I guess it was still an adventure of sorts. I'm hoping that maybe it will be a bit better on HW since the server is only tagged as medium as opposed to PV's high.
DeleteHW isn't that far off either, if you look at all the mats it's actually 70% done. Everything that's missing is just low-level stuff that could easily be farmed if people put their minds to it. The server is just a bit more casual about the whole thing. And yes, the event doesn't happen until it's all done.
I didn't want to read this until after Myzrael had their event, but I missed a lot of it because it was during the day, and there was this thing called work I had to deal with. However, I did jump on an hour before and during lunch and a bit after work. Mostly all raid groups farming, but there was enough chaos that I jumped on and helped to kill whatever was nearby.
ReplyDelete