The AQ Hangover

Here’s the fallout from last night’s grand tour of Warcraft’s Medivh realm … no new character creations on Medivh or Mannoroth (currently 2nd place in the war effort). Caydiem wrote:

We’re aware that many realm communities are becoming excited as the War Effort nears completion. Several players, wanting to see the event, have created alternate characters on the realms closest to completion and have trekked out to Silithus in order to bear witness. While we respect your enthusiasm, we do need to take steps in order to allow the realm communities who have worked for this completion to be able to enjoy the fruits of their labors.

As such, we are temporarily shutting down character creation on Medivh and Mannoroth. If you have characters there already, you will be able to create new ones without a problem, but those without characters will not be able to create new avatars on these realms until the event is complete. We may implement additional measures as the situation warrants. This should hopefully cut down on the latency experienced by large crowds and allow the industrious communities of these two realms to experience the opening of the gates.

Keep in mind, also, that there’s more to see than just Silithus when the event unfolds — there’s no need to gather all in one place. Keep your eyes and ears out for events around the world!

‘Tis true! There are other events/scripts around the world after the turnins are completed. You just can’t go see them on Medivh or Mannoroth unless you’re already a resident. I would have gone to watch the NPC march out of Orgrimmar, for example, but at level six, I was kinda short on cash to catch a flight outta Silithus.

The AQ War Effort:

The War Effort Progress Chart — the update lags actual completion by several hours (bleh)
AFK Gamer AQ Convos — Flickr set of the convos from last night’s War Effort completion on Medivh
AFK Gamer Medivh War Effort — Flickr set of the tailgate party on Medivh

A few more shots will be available later today on Flickr as I edit and upload.

EDIT: Other screenshots from last night to view at Gaming Horizon as collected by Tim Grube, aka Psxtim, not a very RP-ish name at all if I must say so. P.S. There’s the AFK Gamer team hanging out in the herd of cattle. Won’t see us running around with fancy mounts and repaired equipment at these events. We’re phantoms.

17 thoughts on “The AQ Hangover

  1. Wow, no new characters on both those realms huh?

    You mean like what should have happened to the realms with 600 queues a year ago?

    Transfers have failed, new realms have failed, what other solution is there aside from a hardware upgrade. I have to remote desktop into my computer from work and log in so that I can be on by the time I get home from work. Mabye crying more would help, I don’t know.

  2. Sorry, but the no new characters isn’t a solution for overcrowded servers. Sure it stops new accounts from joining the server, but you already have a population problem that is not measured in terms of the numbers of Gnomes running around. All you’re doing is affecting the existing players on that server that now can’t roll alts. Just imagine the exodus at that point.

    I’m playing on realms with 500 and 150 queues every night and would like a better solution, but that restriction doesn’t help at all.

  3. If your account already has a character on the server in question, of course you can make as many alts as you want, You can only play one char at a time (don’t know about 2 boxing from the same account, never tried).

    I’m talking about preventing people who don’t have a character on a server from creating one there. As far as friends who buy the game and want to play with people they know, Final Fantasy has a great system where established characters on a server can purchase a pass for in game currency that allows friends to create a character on their server. The cost and requirement of the pass would be prohibitive enough to prevent exploitation.

    Now one problem that was pointed out to me today is that Blizzard has stated that they are unable to create new realms, so theoretically the 6 new PVE realms could fill up, and then what. But by then they should have their datacenter problems squared away and have the ability to create new realms again.

  4. I emailed this to the blog poster, but it should probably be posted here as well.

    “I wanted to comment on your posts about attending AQ. I play on Medivh. I’ve been playing on there since the first day the game came out. Your posts pretty much exemplified the attitude of people who attended that night who honestly DIDN’T CARE.

    Medivh players spent many, many hours working to complete the AQ event. It was perhaps the best collaboration and organization on a Wow server since, well… ever. We were very excitied to come down to the final stretch well in the lead. We had people ready to fraps and take screenshots for every other realm. And then hundreds of you guys created alts on the server and pretty much ruined it.

    Do you realize, by doing what you did, you actually prevented people who worked on the event from being there at the end? That people were stuck in queues over an hour because of your actions? I saw characters named “Icrashmedivh” and “Aqueueforyou”. How was this not griefing our realm?

    I’ve read the arguments that “everyone pays $15 a month so they should get to see the content”. Well, guess what? We also pay $15 a month, and some of us never got to the content because of your actions. DO YOU THINK THAT’S FAIR?

    You say you’ve been playing MMOs for 10 years. Then you should know what a “first” is. Many people don’t get to experience a first because they’re not part of elaborate raiding guilds. An event like this is a rarity, where thousands of people get to experience a first without being part of the raiding set. Instead, thousands of players who didn’t put any time into opening AQ at all had to ruin it.

    For this and other reasons, we’re not ringing the gong to official open the AQ door on Sunday. We’re going to wait until you guys dissipate, or do it an awkward late night hour. You’re pretty much ticked off an entire realm, and people will think twice before working together again if this is the reaction.”

  5. Please. Most of the tourists on Medivh were quiet, respectful and well behaved. There was a group of asshats, true, but they were not in the majority.

    Server performance during the largest crush of observers was surprisingly good, better than I would have expected, actually. The queue was large, but I’ve seen larger. In other words, much ado about nothing.

    There is a difference between “the event was ruined” and “people were inconvenienced”. Server crashes for hours and doesn’t roll back to the crash point to rerun the scripts = ruined. Some asshats telling Medivh to “work harder” and natives waiting in a queue = inconvenienced.

    While I respect your differing opinion and do appreciate that you took the time to email and comment here, I disagree and think you (and some of your brethren) are overreacting.

  6. So Photon, you believe that “inconveniencing” the people who were signing on to actually get the gates open was fair? Essentially, what you’re saying is that you’re being there to SEE the gates open was more important than another player being there to help OPEN the gates.

    Just think, if only the people who were on that server were the ones who were there in the first place, and NO alts who were only there to see the gates open were on, how much smaller would the que have been? YOU may have simply called it an inconvenience, because you were only there to see the gate open, but to those who were there to actually open the gates, or the lower level players who simply wanted to get on and play WoW, you were taking up THEIR space and THEIR resources. I’m not even on their realm, and I can understand what they’re thinking. This isn’t YOUR event, you contributed nothing to the opening of the gates by simply standing there, this is THEIR event, they’re the ones who’ve been working hard for it.

    You say you’ve been playing MMO’s for over 10 years, but from the attitude you’ve taken, you still sound like a NOOB to me.

  7. Actually we were there to watch all of the people, we couldn’t care less about the gate opening itself. You should direct your bitching to Blizzard about the queue’s because it’s hardly anyone elses fault that their servers can’t handle the load. The worst the queue got that night was in the 800’s. Plenty of other realms have a 600 queue daily, so get over yourself.

  8. Anyone who’s played Wow knows about the queues. They’ve been around since the first week the game was out. People show up en masse to a realm — you get queues. This was not a surprise to anyone.

    It’s fairly obvious that EVERY person who created an alt KNEW THIS. And THEY KNEW they were putting people who had worked on the event into the queues. We asked on the forums for people to refrain from creating alts. They didn’t. We asked them in game to refrain. They didn’t. GMs ported people. They came back.

    Even if they weren’t trying to crash the servers, they were preventing people from orchestrating the event from getting onto the realm. Medivhians had queues upwards of 2 hours. Some who had spent hundreds of hours moving materials from one side to another never got to see the end. Why should your “peoplewatching” prevent those who actually worked from seeing the end result?

    Look, we wanted everyone in Wow to see the results, but that just isn’t possible. In lieu of this we’re offering screenshots, videos, etc. Respect our requests to stay off our realm so the people who worked hard to get here can actually see the finale.

  9. And keep in mind, Blizzard apparently agrees with us, as they took fairly strong steps to prevent people from coming back.

  10. this is a reflection of our crap for crap no accountability society in general.
    “if you’re mad blame blizz, etc….”
    PLEASE……..you spineless, no honor, insensitive loser.
    Have some accountability for your actions.
    Yes blizz should address the server issues, but the fact is you KNEW you would be taking away from the experience of those who earned it.
    There is NO excuse for your actions other than selfishness, end of story……flame me all you want, but there is no other point of view.
    you are selfish people for doing so, and if the roles were reversed, I’d love to see how you would feel. “oh, i would understand cause I know about Ques” is prolly what you would say. This forum talk has made it easy for you to say things like that, because you wwill never have to be accountable for what you say on here. and we all know you would pissed if you spent the time and effort to do something like this and you missed it do to someone’s blatent disreguard for you.

    bottom line is you knew people that had worked for this would be affected in a negative way by your actions, and you chose to do so in spite of that.

    i am NOT from that server, i just had to post based on my general disgust.

    Cathbadh
    LB

  11. In case you haven’t noticed, this is an MMO blog, and has been focused on WoW for some time now. What happened to Medivh is MMO News. Every other major MMO blog out there covered this event to some extent, and Foton took it one step further by actually covering the event from ground zero.

    This is the kind of crack reporting work that keeps me coming back here day after day, and I would expect nothing less from the staff at AFKGamer. Hundreds if not thousands of people flooded the Medivh server to get in on the hysteria surrounding the first server to open the gates. At least Foton took the time to document the happenings on the server, and was able to provide his readers with an entertaining account of what went down.

    Coming here and acting like he’s responsible for the decline of western civilization because he joined the hunderds of other people who flooded Medivh is retarded, and in fact, the only reason I didn’t try to make a character there and check it out for myself is because I read about what was happening here and knew that I didn’t have to. I wouldn’t be suprised if the posts on this blog actually saved you guys a few queue spots. And regardless of what you say, Blizzard was only entity in a position to do anything about it and of course they dropped the ball. I know you can’t stand to hear that, but they are the one’s who fucked up, the author of this blog.

    People on Warsong have been bitching about the same exact god damn thing since battlegrounds came out, we’ve been dealing with the shit that Medivh put up with for a few days for over half a year, and every time we bitch people tell us to STFU.

    Welcome to the internet, cry more.

  12. Y’see, when you use adjectives and other descriptors well out of proportion with your argument, then you blow credibility, e.g. the Medivh invasion is a reflection of societal moral decay. C’mon man, you can do better than that.

    You are right about this much — I do not care. I was there to get a story: the mass influx of tourist alts to witness Medivh’s AQ War Effort completion, what the GMs and Blizzard would do, what the residents would do and what the tourists would do. I even took various measures to ensure that I would get the story because I could tell, it was gonna be good.

    I don’t care about the one guy that was in a queue because I was online. I don’t care about the dialup people that lagged because my cow reporter was visible on their screen. I was there to get and I got.

    The next time there’s a freakish gathering on a server, I’ll probably be there too. And I’ll take similar measures to ensure that I’m there to get. I won’t care about Jimmy in the login queue and I won’t care about Sally on dialup.

    But I do so enjoy real life crusaders, who weren’t there, that try to lecture me about griefing and server performance at a public online event in a public area. Now that shit gives me wood.

  13. your attitudes supports my point.

    thanks.

    enjoy going through life not being accountable for being an ass.

  14. To angry people: *points to window* fresh air! fresh air out there! a whole real world! and the queues are shorter.

    I found it quite funny 🙂

    Please keep up coverage of events if possible.

  15. Oye people!

    I’ve watched many, many hours of this drug-like game and can half understand your level of addiction. However, it is only a game. Witnessing a “first” is not the end of the world, a digital world at that! You should all take a vacation and chill.

    ike

  16. i don’t see why everyone complains about the aq gates as ‘being a first.’ if they missed out on their server, there are plenty other servers that will be completing the same thing sometime soon and it won’t be any different. yes, i’m sure i’d be a lil upset about missing it, but if u have a rl friend who’s watching it, then go over to their place and watch it instead of getting frustrated about not getting in. really, complaining about blizz or other ppl taking your spot is not going to do anything at all. that’s about all i have to say. glad my servers gates won’t open any time soon. g’bye all.

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