World event

The scarab gate of Ahn'Qiraj opened on my server yesterday, and I was there! And I learned the important lesson that unless MMORPG technology improves substantially, world events are not a good idea. Because while I was there, I didn't really see much. The gate suddenly wasn't there any more, there were a couple of nice looking Anubis-style mobs, some lines of texts that scrolled by too fast for me to read, and that was it. Ah yes, and two world server crashes. But mainly there was lag, which made it totally impossible to fight those mobs in front of the gate.

After people had dissipated a bit, and more mobs had appeared in Feralas, Tanaris, and even the Barrens, the lag got a bit better, and my guild managed to kill some of those Anubis guys. But except for 250 points of reputation they didn't give anything, and you need 36000 reputation to reach the next level up from "hatred". The level 22 elite mobs in the Barrens only gave 1 reputation point, happy farming!

I don't really know why these games are called massively multiplayer. Because if ever you assemble a massive number of players on one spot, either the game crashes or at least you get unbearable lag. Which makes world events problematic.

So in the end the most interesting part of the world event was the human factor. On my server the biggest Horde guild had achieved the sceptre first, and they had negotiated with the big Alliance guilds that it would be them who would be allowed to start the event at a certain hour. But the sceptre holder of a big Alliance guild didn't keep his word, and banged the gong half an hour earlier. Which was okay for all the other players, who had never trusted the announced hour anyway and had been waiting at the gong for some time already. But the big Horde guild who had thought they knew exactly when the event was going to start, hadn't had all members there yet, so they missed the opening of the gate. I'm afraid the Horde-Alliance diplomatic relations on my server won't be the best for some time to come.