AQ and Paladin Update

It's been about ten days since the war effort started and as I predicted, the rate of progression slowed down a lot after the first day on both of the servers that I play on. If it had stayed the same, Pyrewood Village would have been done after four days and Hydraxian Waterlords after seven. Needless to say, neither server is actually there yet.

We get all these headlines about how some streamer/super hardcore server got everything done within hours but I'd be highly dubious of any claims that this is the sort of pace at which the average player experiences the game. Things may go faster than they did back in the day, but I suspect that most people who choose to play Classic still play at a much more casual/old-school pace than those reports would have you believe.

Anyway, I plugged the numbers into my percentage calculation spreadsheet, and as it stands Pyrewood Village is three quarters of the way towards being done, while Hydraxian Waterlords is almost halfway there. I like that the two servers' progression rates are so different, as it means that I'll have not one but two chances at potentially seeing the gate opening event!

One thing that was interesting to note was that despite the faction imbalance on both servers, the war effort progression percentages are now almost identical for both factions. Since both servers are PvE, I wouldn't be surprised if some Alliance raiders had made an effort to even things out a bit - it's not like it's difficult to roll up a Horde alt and farm some wool cloth in the Barrens (or transfer things via the neutral auction house if you want to be more organised I guess).

In terms of material progress, the low-level hand-ins continue to be the bottlenecks, with linen and wool bandages sitting at 18 and 31% completion respectively on Hydraxian Waterlords. On Pyrewood Village it seems like someone made a concerted effort to get bandages up - while they still have a long way to go, they are not the least provided items anymore. That honour now goes to light leather on Alliance side and Peacebloom on Horde. Alliance is actually 100% finished with herbs, well done!

All the extra demand for low-level materials actually makes this a really good time to play lowbie alts, because you'll get a lot more bang for your buck than usual when putting stacks of linen and the like up on the auction house. This inspired me to spend some more time playing on my human pally, but for some reason it's just not clicking this time and I don't know why. Everything just feels so slow and I keep dying! 

Which is all the more ridiculous considering that when I levelled my pally on Kronos (which was supposedly much higher tuned than Classic), she didn't even die once until a Defias Pillager got her in a cave in Westfall. Though now that I just went back and looked at that post in its entirety again, I did mention dying a lot around that level range too. Anyway, in one play session about a month ago I died so many times to fireballing dragon whelps in Redridge that I eventually just logged off and didn't log that character again in weeks. This time around things have felt a bit better, but casters are still a major pain and I just feel weak. I fear that levelling two easymode hunters in a row may have spoiled me a bit for difficulty.

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.)

All Quiet on the Western Front

You may have guessed from my recent silence on here that my Vanilla WoW playing has been put on the backburner again. Both Neverwinter and SWTOR have been demanding my time due to the draw of group play, limited-time events and promises of new content. Despite of the uncertainty inherent in playing on a private Vanilla WoW server, I actually feel quite safe in leaving it for a while now and coming back later. The whole Nostalrius drama has shown that there is a clear demand for Vanilla WoW, and I now think that in one form or another, options to play it will actually be around for a long time.

The one thing that won't be around on Kronos forever is the Ahn'Qiraj war effort. I actually found myself wondering today whether I had already managed to miss it and logged back in purely to check on this. As it turns out, it's still going. At the time of writing this, the Alliance is missing 3720 purple lotus, 2860 linen and 97700 silk bandages, while the Horde is short on 2840 firebloom, 1700 purple lotus and 37500 wool bandages. Who'd have thought that silk bandages would be such a bottleneck?

This means that the war effort has been going for nearly five months now. I was going to wonder out loud whether that isn't quite long, but as it happens Tekai pointed out only yesterday that on retail, 90 percent of all realms had opened the gates within three months. So yes, it most definitely is slow.

I'm starting to think that I might want to log in at least once a week to keep an eye on the event's progression. Slow or not, things are getting very close now. There's a chance that I might actually witness the opening of the gates yet.

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.