More Levelling in SoD

I mentioned last month that I was getting back into Season of Discovery with the goal of eventually seeing the Demon Fall Canyon dungeon. Over the past couple of weeks, I got a bit distracted by some things in SWTOR, but I haven't forgotten about this project, so I wanted to jot down some notes about my most recent adventures.

In general, I've continued to be surprised by how not dead the SoD servers have remained after the launch of "Classic Classic". According to my census addon, there are pretty consistently about 1000 players online on Wild Growth Horde side, which is actually pretty close to my personal sweet spot in terms of server size: enough people to keep the auction house replenished, make it easy to get into a group for most dungeons and see plenty of activity out in the world, but not so many that you can no longer gather or quest without perceiving other players as a constant competitive nuisance.

The economy is a bit less good and feels quite inflated to me. People trying to charge one gold for a single Green Hills of Stranglethorn page feels quite ridiculous to me for example. I sometimes see complaints that prices on the era servers are inflated due to the servers' age, but at least on the PvE cluster, most things are pretty fairly priced even after more than five years. Occasionally someone will try to drive the price of certain goods up, but the thing with era players is: they've got time. If you charge too much, they can always wait and/or go farm for themselves. On seasonal servers there's more urgency to get stuff now and it's noticeable.

I also remember hearing that certain activities in earlier SoD phases really cranked up inflation (incursions awarding lots of gold or something?) and that's probably part of it as well. Either way the end result is that as someone returning after several months of absence, I find a lot of things on the AH quite unaffordable. If I find one of those lost supplies boxes, if I can't fill them with my own gathering and crafting skills, it's basically a no-go. I have managed to make a bit of gold by occasionally flogging some goods for (to me) rather silly prices as well, but opportunities for that are somewhat limited and partially luck-dependent so not really a reliable solution.

I think there's also bots? It's probably not as bad as on the anniversary servers, and I've stated in the past that people are way too quick to cry wolf about people supposedly botting, but sometimes you can definitely tell. (I remember one time in Elwynn when I saw a whole stream of low-level humans leave the village zig-zagging along the exact same path; that was eerie.) I haven't come across a lot of such cases on SoD myself, but definitely at least a suspicious number of hunters with unnamed or scrambled pet names.

As for myself, I continue to rotate through all my alts to use up some restedness and try to have them quest in different places for variety. My priest also healed a Razorfen Kraul and my mage did a Wailing Caverns and a Shadowfang Keep. The latter was a bit funny to me because I actually used the group finder tool for the first time and saw a group that was just missing a tank - with the three dps being a warrior, a shaman and a warlock, all three of which can tank in SoD. I sighed and just listed my mage by her lonesome... but within less than five minutes the other group had invited me anyway and we were off to the races.

It's also been fun to do more "discovering" of content and mechanics that are unique to SoD. The other day, I was in Stranglethorn Vale during the Blood Moon for the first time, and while I had the immunity buff on me, it was still a slightly odd experience. I didn't actually see any fighting for example, but lots of max-level allies running around killing my quest mobs. Does that give them rewards? I couldn't be bothered to do any deeper research on it. I did also run into this boss-type mob that was yelling and taking a swim in Lake Nazferiti for some reason.

In terms of questing, my hunter has offered the most interesting experience. I only noticed the other day that it's possible to place traps in combat now for example, something I'm pretty sure wasn't possible in the earlier phases. She also kind of struggles with the massive XP bonus, since it doesn't apply to pets, meaning her little tiger is currently three levels below her. I've tried to get him caught up by focusing a bit on mob grinding while unrested, but then I hand in one quest and bam, suddenly I'm another level ahead again. It's a bit annoying to be honest.

Another questionable adventure she had occurred around the AQ gate opening event. I mentioned previously that it worked a bit differently in SoD compared to normal, with the war effort completing automatically on a timer, but apparently the ten hour war - or at least the events tied to it - were extended significantly as well. I kept running into giant floating Qiraj crystals in levelling zones for days, which I think made farming Brood of Nozdormu rep a lot easier for people, but I'm not sure Blizzard fully took into consideration what this would mean for levellers. For example one of these crystals spawns right in the middle of Camp Mojache, so when I tried to pick up the flight path there, I swiftly got stomped into the ground. I couldn't even res and quickly click on the flight master, as I would instantly get put into combat and killed again. I think in the end I had to accept a spirit rez and use my hearthstone.

The other day I saw a video by WillE about what's new in SoD, and he mentioned that there are now vendors that sell all the runes for one copper each. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I was a bit concerned about how much of a grind it would be to find all the runes at this point, and this is definitely a nice solution for people who want to level more alts to raid. But I'm not looking to raid, and finding more runes was kind of part of the journey I was looking forward to? I mean, I can still gather them myself over time, that hasn't been disabled as far as I'm aware, but it does make me a bit worried whether people will be shirty in dungeons if you haven't just bought all your runes. Then again, so far everyone I've grouped with since my return has been very chill, so one can hope.

Rediscovering Season of Discovery

I wanted to take some more notes on my experience picking up Season of Discovery again:

One of the first things the game reminded of was that I made a whole bunch of alts in phase one that were all between level 10 and 20. Now, playing alts won't help with my goal of getting a single character to a high enough level to be able to do Demon Fall Canyon, but it's also fun and alleviates bag space issues (since I can just send all the cloth to my tailor and so on and so forth), so I spent some time burning through restedness on all of them anyway.

The world was busier than I expected - I'd figured that pretty much everyone but me would abandon everything they were doing on other classic realms to join the rush on the anniversary servers, but Wild Growth still seems plenty busy. Also, people were dropping Rend and dragon heads in Orgrimmar at seemingly all hours of the day, which kind of surprised me.

While going out to quest, I made the odd discovery that gathering nodes and chests were respawning at absolutely stupid rates for some reason. I first noticed it when I found a chest on my druid in Mulgore. I looted it, went to kill a nearby gnoll, turned around, and it was back! I looted it again, killed another gnoll, and the same thing happened again.

Later I was questing in the Barrens on my shaman, who is a miner, and I would almost get stuck in a loop running back and forth between the same couple of ore nodes that just kept coming back almost immediately after being mined out. As this was on the night of the anniversary server launch, I couldn't help but wonder whether some hyper-spawn setting intended for the launch day crowds was bleeding through to other servers.

The launch itself certainly had an impact as I got booted out of the game with the message "world server is down" (truly a classic) multiple times. At the time I had just killed Kreenig Snarlsnout, and coming back online in the middle of a fully respawned quillboar camp was not very fun. However, before I could properly fight my way out, I got disconnected again. This happened about five times in a row, until I decided to give up on fighting and just made a run for it. As it happened, this was also the time the server finally stayed up and I was able to make a close getaway.

My shaman also got an invite to heal Ragefire Chasm, which she accepted. I was told that the tank was new, and it was very noticeable as I did a lot of face-tanking while healing, but hey, people gotta learn somewhere. Plus it was only RFC and nobody died (I'm not counting the druid who somehow managed to fall into the lava on the way out). The group asked me afterwards whether they could add me to their friends list and I said sure, though I'm not sure how likely it is that we'll meet again with me playing my alts only in short bursts.

In terms of grouping, I noticed that there's now a manual group finder in Season of Discovery that's similar to the one we had in original Burning Crusade. I was always quite fond of that one, even if seemingly not a lot of people used it, but personally I always got good results with it. That said, I haven't really had a chance to put the SoD version to the test yet.

Another thing that happened was that I realised that with the lauch of the anniversary realms, Blizzard had also launched the AQ war effort in SoD. For a brief moment I got all starry-eyed, remembering the wonderful memories I made of the AQ gate opening event on Hydraxian Waterlords, and even wondered briefly whether I'd have enough time to level up high enough to witness the ringing of the gong on Wild Growth too. Sadly I quickly found out that the war effort in SoD is "fake" in the sense that your contributions don't matter and it just auto-completes after a week. While I can kind of get wanting to speed things up on a seasonal server, I still think that fully automating the process sucks, and I will of course not be able to see the event. Though to be fair, it's not why I came back anyway; it just would have been a nice bonus.

AQ Gate Opening Event on Hydraxian Waterlords - EU

Same event, very different experience.

For one thing, actually being a member of a guild as opposed to just timidly peeking in from the sidelines made a big difference, as I found myself invited to a raid group pretty much the moment I logged in, which was nice.

However, the timing of the event was also very different. I found it very convenient that the gong was rung at 20:35 on Sunday evening on Pyrewood Village, but on Hydraxian Waterlords the hand-ins had been timed in such a manner that it happened at 10:55 on a Monday morning instead. The guild mistress relayed that there had been some drama surrounding this, as apparently certain people had been supposed to do the last hand-ins earlier but failed to do so, leading to others kind of "going rogue" and doing it themselves.

From the sounds of it, it wouldn't have made much of a difference to the inconvenient start time though, as the idea seemed to be to start the ten-hour war between the banging of the gong and the actual opening of the instance early in the day, so that the raids would become accessible in the evening at the raiders' convenience, never mind people actually wanting to take part in the event.

Fortunately I'm working from home indefinitely now, and since I didn't have any meetings that morning, I had the luxury of moving my lunch break to a convenient time to attend the banging of the gong. One advantage of the timing being rather unfriendly towards working adults - combined with Hydraxian Waterlords' slightly lower population compared to Pyrewood Village - was that the zone wasn't overflowing quite as badly during the event. Sub-60 characters were still getting kicked out, but from what I heard no level 60s were ever teleported out the way it happened to so many (including me) on PV.

As things were actually somewhat playable and I was in a raid group this time, we got involved in the killing of the Silithid colossi. This was something I had only vaguely heard about before: three humongous, tick-like Silithid spawning in each of the three hives and needing to be taken down. Our group of course didn't get the tag on any of them, but they were so massive and had so much health that it really made you want to help out regardless.

To my great amusement, they also had a huge knockback attack that would send dozens of people flying halfway across the zone, resulting in everyone dying from fall damage who didn't have some sort of ability to counter this (such as a mage's Slow Fall). Fortunately I'm the sort of person who finds falling to their death in a video game hilarious, so I had a grand old time.

Once all three colossi were dead, NPCs in Cenarion Hold handed out temporary quests to deliver colossus samples to people in the Eastern Plaguelands, Searing Gorge and Booty Bay. These were available to all, regardless of whether you helped with killing the colossi or not, but only for two hours. The biggest initial challenge was that everyone wanted to pick up the quests simultaneously, burying the quest givers in a sea of mounts, which of course inspired some players in that pile to flag for PvP and well... you can imagine how that went.

Eventually we were able to pick up our quests though and they were quite rewarding, as each one paid out about six gold and a goody bag full of food, potions and gear. Certainly made up for my own repair bills from repeatedly going splat at least. 

We then returned to Silithus to farm some elites around the obelisks. As it was still quite busy we made a detour through Un'goro and Tanaris, but for some reason we couldn't find a single obelisk in Un'goro, and in Tanaris we killed some mobs near Gadgetzan but everyone was kind of dissatisfied with getting only five rep per kill when some of the mobs in Silithus had given fifty or more a pop. Thus we moved back to Silithus anyway, even if it meant facing some competition for spawns.

Camping at the obelisks was both pretty chill as mobs only respawned every fifteen minutes or so and endlessly entertaining due to the obelisks' mind control ability constantly turning random raid members against their friends. I'll hand it to the mages for being fairly disciplined and sheeping (or pigging, or turtling) affected people fairly quickly to neutralise them, but since it was an ongoing affair it was simply impossible to get everyone. Personally I whacked my poor pet to death a couple of times while controlled, and got killed by a gnome mage once who was standing behind me when she suddenly got MCed and blew me up with a fireball. I laughed a lot. 

I eventually had to get back to work for a while, but I did log back on in the evening once my shift was over. To my great incredulity, several of the guildies I had been grouped with earlier had kept going all afternoon and were still at it, happily letting me rejoin their little group - except that it wasn't so little anymore and eventually grew to a full 40-man in fact, as the bear druid who was raid-leading kept picking up strays.

With bigger numbers it was less of a struggle to kill the bigger/stronger groups of enemies (though the mind controls remained as entertaining as ever), and we also started elbowing out the Horde players that had also been trying to camp the obelisk. You see, the mind control also had the side effect of making you hostile to everyone without counting as PvP, so whenever we saw a Hordie getting MCed, they soon became the target of a swift and opportunistic gank.

On another amusing side note, after people had spent hours farming Silithid Carapace Fragments for our Scarab Lord, two to three drops at a time, it was funny to discover that the bugs spawned for the event dropped them literally by the hundreds. Once we noticed, I made sure to fetch my Agent of Nozdormu badge from the bank so I could collect them too, and then passed them on to the rogue who I knew was also working on the quest chain (even if he wasn't going to be a Scarab Lord).

As the last hour of the war began, a zone-wide announcement asked for all forces to gather for the final assault. This being an RP server, we were of course game for this, and people started to pile onto the NPC army south of Cenarion Hold. It took a while for them to get going, but once they did we all rode along with them.

Then we reached the gate, more Colossal Anubisaths began to spawn... and that's when it turned into a lag fest at last as the server buckled under the numbers. I didn't really do much during that last hour except aim my bow at Anubisaths while hoping that my auto-shots would go off eventually, but people were meme-ing about the whole thing in chat as if it was 2005 and it was still highly amusing. We also saw one guy finish the Scarab Lord quest chain and ring the gong about ten minutes before the end of the event, which was a pretty impressive feat.

Finally there was a bit of NPC RP at the gate and then the instances were open and even if I had no interest in going there myself right then, I felt a certain sense of satisfaction watching the first groups of players snake their way inside. That whole day was definitely one of my most memorable WoW experiences ever.

Addendum for a little bit of extra serendipity: I ended up fighting next to an orc shaman called Gnawgrim at some point, which caught my attention because I used to raid with an orc shaman of the same name back in Wrath of the Lich King. (The main thing I remember whenever I think of him was that he had his Astral Recall macroed to say "Screw you guys, I'm going home", which amused me to no end.) I did a bit of asking around and it turns out it was actually the same guy. Small world!

Recruited

Classic WoW has made me think about guilds a lot: what I value about them, when I want to be in one vs. when I don't and why. I mentioned that I felt somewhat lonely after being kicked from my Horde guild for inactivity after two weeks of not logging in, despite of only ever having had quite limited interactions with the people there. While I know this isn't necessarily the modus operandi for most guilds, I still wasn't sure whether I even wanted to join another guild at all. More recently I started mulling over the idea of maybe trying to find a casual guild with people interested in doing five-mans, since I still feel I know way too little about so many of the Classic endgame dungeons.

One morning I was standing at the Ironforge auction house with the intent to just re-list some expired auctions before work, when someone whispered me to ask if I was an alt of someone with a similar name. I politely replied that I wasn't. The other person (who I realised was a paladin in Judgement gear actually standing next to me) proceeded to ask why I wasn't in a guild. I answered truthfully that my last guild on another server had kicked me for inactivity after two weeks and I wasn't sure I wanted to get invested again just yet.

Next thing I knew we were chatting about his guild and mere minutes later I had accepted a guild invite. I briefly responded to the friendly welcome messages in guild chat before politely bowing out since I had to log off for work. All I could think was: What the hell just happened?

Contrary to my earlier considerations, "Order of the Holy Fork" is another raiding guild, if casual. In hindsight, I think the recruiter might have been looking to recruit me as a raider (all that ZG gear probably made me look way more competent than I actually am), though I was happily accepted as a social member instead. The thing that sold me was that he described their approach to raiding as "not going for speed runs or anything like that; it's more about having fun. I mean, look at me: I'm a holy paladin in full plate!"

I soon got my paladin alt invited too, but then wondered how I was going to make myself feel at home in a raiding guild - again - without actually being a raider. I figured that since I had been actively recruited, they might at least be a bit more interested in playing with me than the Horde guild had been, where I had been "that person that got invited because her friend was a new recruit but then her friend quit and she just stuck around despite not knowing anyone".

One thing that came to my aid was the fact that the chatter in guild and on the guild's Discord was all about farming elite silithids to help a member of the guild become a Scarab Lord. That sounded like something I should be able to help with even as a casual member. I asked how the whole thing worked and there was some amusing confusion as I was told that I "needed to get the item from Damaazz" and I kept trying to find an NPC with that name until I realised it was another player, namely the prospective Scarab Lord. After I had been deputised to collect silithid carapace fragments, I joined farming groups for two evenings that week. My contributions weren't great (not least because I kept getting horribly distracted wanting to skin all the things) but my willingness to immediately make myself useful seemed to be well-received.

A few days later the required amount of silithid fragments had been achieved and now the prospective Scarab Lord needed help with other tasks. I missed out on the farming of demons in the Blasted Lands but managed to join in for the same thing happening in Winterspring just in time to see the item drop.

What next? Damaazz said that he didn't think we had enough people to try the world boss he needed, but that we could go raid Undercity instead. I thought he was joking until people started seriously talking about how to best get there and I realised he actually needed to steal an item from there for his quest as well. Oh, those Vanilla quest designers!

We flew up to the Western Plaguelands and rode up to the Undercity sewers where we assembled like some sort of guerilla strike team. I had joined their Discord voice chat to make sure I didn't miss anything, and just as we started to ride in someone put on the soundtrack from Apocalypse Now - it was so absurd that I couldn't stop laughing for several minutes and recorded the whole thing (my laughing not included):

The mission was very successful in that we were in and out in less than five minutes and nobody died, though thanks to an overzealous mage we ended up with four dishonourable kills (a mark you get for killing low-level civilian NPCs and that affects you negatively if you want to rank up in PvP). On a PvP server that kind of thing would have caused some serious drama I think, but as it was people just jokingly agonised about the awfulness of their characters having killed innocent civilians. (RP server, remember.)

At this point we had a couple more people join in and decided to try the world boss on Alcaz Island after all. I had never been there in Vanilla and it was another interesting experience. We wiped once as there was an issue with the tank swapping, but got him down on the second try, though it was still a bit of a close call. I even got to make myself useful by using Scare Beast on one of the druid tanks when he got mind-controlled.

I missed out on the quest steps that involved actual raiding, but was back in business when it came to helping out with farming elite dragonkin around the Emerald Dream portals in Ashenvale and Hinterlands. I never knew those buggers had such insane amounts of health! We got lucky and got the drops in both areas pretty quickly, which delighted the guild mistress a great deal as she claimed that other guilds had supposedly spent whole days farming these without getting anywhere.

Finally I managed to snag a summon just in time to join in the fight against Eranikus himself in Moonglade, which is apparently quite an event and involved us teaming up with another guild for mutual benefit. The funniest thing about that was some random person walking in - with all the RP going on and shades spawning everywhere - and exclaimed something like: "I just wanted to hand in a quest! What the hell did I just walk into?", followed by frantic attempts by some people to quickly shoo them to safety (not entirely for altruistic reasons, as people dying during the event apparently empower the enemy).

With that Damaazz acquired everything he needs to ring the gong when the gates are ready to open. It's all been a bit of a whirlwind, joining a guild completely out of the blue and immediately getting roped into the grand adventure of making someone a Scarab Lord. I'm not complaining though.

AQ Gate Opening Event on Pyrewood Village - EU

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.

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.

The Opening of the Gates

In a strange juxtaposition of retro gaming and modern social media, I found out that the Ahn'Qiraj war effort on Kronos had been completed because a message from Kronos' official Facebook page about it showed up on my Facebook feed. It stated that there was going to be a delay of five days before the grand opening of the gates, to allow the armies to get into position. I have no idea whether that's true to the original Vanilla experience, but it was certainly convenient to have the whole event moved to a weekend, when I'd actually have a chance to poke my head in to see what was happening.

On Saturday evening I then saw another post stating that the event had started, though the gates to the raid weren't supposed to open until Sunday. I logged right in, having already parked my paladin at Cenarion Hold the day before.

Silithus was the busiest I've ever seen it in any iteration of the game, and I excitedly started to ride south, passing an awe-inspiringly huge NPC army in the process. Then I saw my first Anubisath! I stopped to take a screenshot... and a few seconds later I was dead, killed by Horde. Oh right, PvP server.

I released my spirit and watched the continuous stream of Alliance ghosts running back to their bodies for a few seconds, then logged out. My plan to "witness" the event, maybe even record it on video or something, was clearly futile under the circumstances, and I had so many more fun things to do that evening than let myself get ganked over and over again.

But you know... well done, guys.

(Tekai once again has a more informative post about what's been happening.)

War Effort Time!

Two days ago, the war effort to open the gates of Ahn'Qiraj went live on Kronos.

I have exactly two memories of this event on live servers.

First, there's me running around Ironforge as a lowbie night elf and encountering this apparent quest giver who wanted me to bring him some Rainbow Fin Albacore. I had some from trying out fishing, so I gave them to him. And it gave no XP! WTF! I don't think I donated anything else after that.

The war effort must have taken a few weeks to get sorted out, because I was in my mid-forties or so when I landed in Tanaris and there were giant Anubisaths all over the place, wrecking Gadgetzan! A friend reported seeing some in Feralas as well. We had no idea what was going on at the time but we did our best to help with fighting them off, as far as we were able to at that level anyway.

A friend also used to tell me how he was there for the opening of the gates on his server and how everything crashed.

Screenshot property of my friend Matje.

With how casually I'm playing on Kronos, I can't see myself making much of a contribution, but I'll try to keep an eye on how things develop. It would be cool if I could attend the opening of the gates, though it's unlikely that I'll be so lucky for it to happen during a time when I can actually be online.

It was interesting to see that some of the high-level targets, like 24,000 thorium bars, were already full up after only two days. From the looks of it it's going to be the low-level items, like the aforementioned Albacores, that will form the bottleneck to progress.