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Role Playing (Games)

The Ahn'Qiraj Tailgate 72

Posted by Zonk from the do-cows-even-drink-beer? dept.
AFK Gamer reports live from in front of the Ahn'Qiraj gate on the Medivh server in World of Warcraft. Folks on that server became the first in the game to complete the grueling quest to supply the Alliance and Horde with supplies. The supplies (food, bandages, and ore) are slated to be used in the upcoming war with the insect-monsters of the Silithus Zone. Now that the quest is complete, it will be almost five days as the supplies make their way to the front lines. At that point, the Gate of Ahn'Qiraj will open and two new dungeons will become available to the community. Players from all servers have been flocking to Medivh to witness the event, which has prompted a response from Blizzard. From Foton's report: "We had a difficult decision when players started gravitating towards Medivh. In the end, we had to make a choice between: 1) Letting everyone show up in Ahn'Qiraj until the realm crashed, thus allowing no one to experience the event whatsoever; or 2) Remove the low level players from the area, thus allowing the players who worked for the event -- the true residents and community of the realm -- to enjoy it." As a result of yesterday's events, they've disallowed new characters on the Medivh server.
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The Ahn'Qiraj Tailgate More

The Ahn'Qiraj Tailgate

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  • This is a shock why? When several web-comics began new guilds on a server thousands of people flocked to that server, crashing it on a regular basis. Blizzard needs a better way of flood control that will prevent this same thing from happening (such as if new characters > 300 this hour, temporarily shutdown new character creation, or limit the number to 100 or 50 per hour.)
    • Eh, let 'em on. There's an easy way I've seen to prevent crashing. Let players temporarily stop seeing others players of less than X level. Thematically, they're "too unimportant in the war" to be noticed by a Mighty Dark Blademaster such as yourself.
      • Will the inverse of that be true as well? i.e. Will the low level players stop seeing players above level X?
        • Well, the MUD I saw it implemented on had it as an option, designed for higher-level players. I guess you could use it as a newbie character, but what would be the point? :) No maxxed people to beg "u get weps 4 me??!?" from...

  • Something's still missing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Z0mb1eman ( 629653 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2006 @02:43PM (#14502757) Homepage
    That's great, but still no mention of the ridiculous queues that most realms have seen since December. Half an hour to an hour login queues are now common - even on new servers. One of the Blizzard moderators posted something to the effect that every single day for the past few weeks has set a new record in terms of people online - which is great for Blizzard, but it means the game is practically unplayable for so many people, especially those who only have something like 2 hours to play every day and spend one of them in queue.
    • I'm on Twisting Nether, and started playing right after christmas. I've logged over 100 hours in the game since then. I've never once been in a queue on the server.

    • I play on Hellscream, one of the most populous servers, and this simply isn't true. I play about every day, and I'd say I get a queue maybe half the time, and it's rarely over 15min. Usually 6-10, when I get it.

      Don't get me wrong, I'd love to never see it, but "30-60min on all servers all the time" is just untrue.

      Doug

    • New servers always have longer queues. This is because the cap on players is lower on said servers, so that the newbie zones aren't flooded.

      I'm too lazy to search WoW's forum for the Blue post that stated all this, but I know there was one.

    • Fileplanet has been offering a 10 day trial for anyone who's interested. I don't know when this started, but I'm sure this is part of the cause.
    • Actually, I bet it's not that great for Blizzard. They make less money when more people spend more time online (assuming they didn't gain new accounts, of course).

      I imagine they depend on only a subset of their total subscribers being online at any one time for load balancing and bandwidth costs and so forth.

      The only benefit they'd gain from it is bragging rights.

  • Deja Vu (Score:5, Funny)

    by ReverendLoki ( 663861 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2006 @02:44PM (#14502768)
    First they came for the low level players, and I said nothing, for I am not a noob. Then they came for the Horde, and I remained quiet, for I am Alliance. Then they came for the Paladins, and still I said nothing, for they were a bunch of assholes anyways. Then they came for me...
  • What are they to do with all those linen bandages (800,000 of them!)? They are basically useless for upper level characters.
    • Well, think of all the Port-a-potties that have to be set up? Do you think they are just going to have a town or a gas station set up overnight so you have a nice place to relieve yourself before the battle? AND those lvl 60s are going to have to wipe with something. The peacebloom should keep them smelling nice and flowery also.
    • They will be used to heal the wounds of many Level 1 alts as GMs teleport them into the lava pools of Blackrock Mountain to keep them from crashing Silithus.
    • Nothing! The AQ "world event" is basically a time sync to get people to run around and farm items like linen to make bandages for the war effort. You turn in the bandages (or cooking, mining and herb items) in exchange for war effort tokens. You can turn the tokens in for either a reputation increase in the faction of your choice (limited to character race factions such as Human, Dwarf etc. on Alliance) or in exchange for a package with a few scrolls and a green item. The item level being relative to the d

    • Re:Linen Bandages (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They are going to use the bandages to makea giant blanket to cover Anh'Quiraj and smother all the bugs. Duh. Lern2speculate.
  • They should have seen this coming and had a policy in place before it became a "difficult decision."

    I don't currently have an account so I'm not sure about the locations of the new dungeons and details of the whole event, but I think one basic thing they should have done is make event off-limits to lower-level characters.

    I know they want to encourage everyone's participation but I would think a cap of 20 or so would dissuade most people from starting a new toon just for the sake of watching. They could hav

  • Option 3) Put more physical servers into the cluster that runs the (virtual) Medivh games server.

    With 4-5 million subscribers, they sure as hell have enough money to be doing the "right thing" and upscaling this particular cluster for the event.

    The WoW server system *IS* scalable ... isn't it?
    • WoW runs on HP Superdome Infinities. Yes the architecture is scalable, but its not something that is quickly done so simply "upscaling" a single cluster for one event would be a HUGE waste of money/resources. It is better to just ban all the low level alts who are coming specifically to see the event because they don't want to wait to see it on their servers Blizzard could not prepare for this earlier because Blizzard themself did not know who would be first server to complete the event and quite frankly
  • As a low-level character on a different server, I'm very disappointed. I had been donating what I could (copper bars, linen bandages, lower-level stuff). I figured it was a community thing and, even though the dungeons will be old news by the time I finally got there, I would at least be helping the world event. But now I find out that, despite helping, I'm not allowed to witness the event? Even if I managed to survive walking the way there? My last linen bandage has been donated.

    People in the forums w
    • They didn't block off lower level characters. They just stopped allowing people who didn't already have characters on the server from creating characters there, just to witness the event.
    • As a low-level character on a different server, I'm very disappointed. I had been donating what I could (copper bars, linen bandages, lower-level stuff). I figured it was a community thing and, even though the dungeons will be old news by the time I finally got there, I would at least be helping the world event. But now I find out that, despite helping, I'm not allowed to witness the event? Even if I managed to survive walking the way there? My last linen bandage has been donated.

      Feel free to witness the ev
    • No one said that. These restrictions are being applied to MEDIVH and MANNOROTH because THEY had severe problems last night. The queue reached upwards of 2 hours because a bunch of idiots decided to create alts named "Icrashmedivh" and "Aqueueforyou". Many on Medivh had been working very hard to get the gates open the past few weeks, and some couldn't even log on to the server to see the results of that work. Instead, there was a bunch of idiots trying to crash the damn thing.

      They were porting people out
    • People in the forums were complaining that lower-levels weren't helping the collection effort. Seems the lower-level people were in the right this time.

      Of course the lowbies were right. Everyone whos read up on the topic knows its going to be all high level content thats unlocked. Unless Blizzard plans on making the unlocked areas 'neutral ground' (as in no open PvP allowed even on PvP servers), low level players would just be ganked on sight by the sheer number of the level 60ers running around. Its a for

  • Wow... a tailgate party. How (yawn) exciting. Almost as fun as camping outside Best Buy for two days for a small chance to get a XBox360. I'm glad... that this... (yawn) made the games sectionnnn... ZZZZzzzzzz
  • According to the War Effort Ranking [worldofwarcraft.com] page, even though the resource turn in is complete, the gates are still not open. It now has a green box and a number 1/17. Can anyone enlighten me as to what happens AFTER the turn in is complete but before the gates are open? What does that number mean?
  • Hooray, another breathless story about a non-event in WoW. Here's a hint, guys: this sort of thing happens every day, in every MMORPG. Meanwhile, the continued success and acclaim of Eve Online goes unreported on Slashdot, despite yesterday having won 4 of 7 of MMORPG.com's top awards, including Best Graphics (which really are several notches above the competition), Best Company (2 *free*, major content expansions last year, and another one forthcoming), Best PvP (how many other games actually give you bu
    • And there was a story about the MMORPG awards (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/17 /2222204 [slashdot.org]).
    • This sort of thing happens every day in every MMORPG? Are you kidding, or just lying to draw more attention to Eve Online (which in my opinion is bleh) When was the last time Eve had people clamoring to one server to see an event that took tons of questing/mats to complete? When was the last time Eve could say they had 5 million customers worldwide Next reason you won't find eve mentioned is because more players overall like the fantasy genre vs the space genre. So it doesn't matter how many awards Eve
    • I tried Eve Online before I ever played WoW.

      The graphics are nothing short of stunning. The UI is a little different than most games, but I picked up on it in no time.

      I played for the one free month that came with the game and I was done. I spent 30 days flying between a space station and random asteroids so I could mine ore and return it to the space station to sell and upgrade my equipment so I could spend less time travelling and mine more efficiently. But that was it. There were no quests, no adve
      • Hate to break it to you, but you didn't get into it. Eve doesn't spoon-feed you content. I'm sorry if you expected that. Eve is VERY focused on player interaction, not PvE content. I highly encourage anyone new to Eve to find a corporation to work with. It completely changes the game.

        • I did find a corp, two of them in fact, and I'm sorry to say, my game experience was exactly the same as the parent. The only real difference was that I had people to chat with while I was doing, essentially, nothing. And I had to relocate everything I had a couple times as they changed home systems.

          I also played for about four months, so I paid for it, but it was just boring. So much potential, and stunning visuals... Frankly, yes, I do expect a game to "spoon-feed" me content. I'm paying for it, I expec

          • Your points are valid. Eve has crappy PvE content, I'll be the first to agree to that. But no other game has the potential for complex player interaction Eve does.

            That said, it can be difficult to find a corp that's doing something interesting sometimes. This is one of the pitfalls of a game that relies on players to make a brunt of the content. Find the right one however, and it's a totally different game.

            Eve does what it does very well, which is to provide a complex 'sandbox' for the players to in
        • I'm sorry if you expected that. Eve is VERY focused on player interaction, not PvE content.

          You're right, Eve has virtually no PvE content, so there isn't much to do if you're not the social type.

          I highly encourage anyone new to Eve to find a corporation to work with. It completely changes the game.

          I tried joining a corporation. I was told "go out by yourself and mine more ore (so we can build a great big ship that you'll never get to actually fly)". It reminded me of the times growing up when my ne
      • COMPLETELY agree with you. I beta tested the game and basically had the same observations. Graphics definitely are great though. But as we all know, it's all about the gameplay. Love your sig btw
    • Massive numbers of players attempting to flood a particular server to witness opening of new content...I don't think it's fair to characterize that as something that happens EVERY day on EVERY MMORPG.

      Although this is hardly breaking news, in that it does happen in other games, I think the reason this is being presented as news is the number of people involved. WOW is working on a scale that pretty much blows away the 14,000 or so people regularly online for Eve.

      So this is one of those "can we handle the sc

    • "Meanwhile, the continued success and acclaim of Eve Online goes unreported on Slashdot, despite yesterday having won 4 of 7 of MMORPG.com's top awards"

      Bah. Those awards are meaningless -- they are determined by which game has the best mechanism for promoting itself to the most fanbois with the most free time.

      Give me juried awards, or don't bother handing them out.

      Here's an idea -- require referrer statistics for votes, and publish them along with the results. Or give me a random sample of MMORPG p

    • Meanwhile, the continued success and acclaim of Eve Online goes unreported on Slashdot, despite yesterday having won 4 of 7 of MMORPG.com's top awards, including Best Graphics (which really are several notches above the competition), Best Company (2 *free*, major content expansions last year, and another one forthcoming), Best PvP (how many other games actually give you butterflies in the stomach from *traveling*?), and the big one, Favourite Game.

      Out of curiosity, how many people play Eve Online. Compar

  • Slashdot spelling (Score:5, Funny)

    by Aaron Denney ( 123626 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2006 @03:19PM (#14503226) Homepage
    Ahn'Qiraj? Even people not from Alasksa should know it's spelled _Anchorage_.
  • If you want to see the event soon and you're on a realm thats 50% or less done... make a char on the number 2 server now and get it up past level 10 or 15 before they finish.
    • I had the same idea a while ago. I've got level 15 alts planted on a couple of the top servers. I was planning on watching on the first server to finish, but after this, I think I'll wait. The second or third should be a bit less flooded since people will have been there and done that already.

      I was hoping that my server would be done early, we were around 10 in the rankings at first. Now, we're down around 30 or 40 in the rankings, but unless the alliance side gets its act together and getting stranglekelp
  • .. watch out fer l. bob rife, and keep your katana sharp, monkies!
  • With Community Moderators like this: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=w ow-off-topic&t=1179358&p=1&tmp=1#post1179358 [worldofwarcraft.com]

    It's no wonder Blizzard has idiotic policies that end up hurting their users.
    • Yeah, and the CM's aren't human, they're automated reply bots that went wonko. Right. It's a bloody forum, people communicate, it's the OFF TOPIC FORUM. Good Lord, learn2think.
    • What the sibling post said, plus, the policy on Medivh and Mannoroth was the right decision, because Ahn'Qiraj will open on all the servers eventually. The folks on Medivh who worked hard to see the quest completed don't need a bunch of looky-loo rubberneckers crowding their server and making it so that nobody can see anything when the server crashes.

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