Scourge Invasion II has begun

[Ingmar]

Who needs to gear up for a WoW expansion? They deliberately underpower the entry zones and give you greens that replace your blues right off the bat - and anyone who is in gear higher than blues really shouldn't be having any problems with this kind of event.

What I meant by "gear up" was that people were coming back to level to 70 so that they could enjoy the expansion content.  

Some people like the event, some don't.  Why is this such a big deal?  I was merely pointing out that Cal made a solid point.  If you look at the event through the eyes of someone that wants to play the game in a manner which they paid to play it, that the event can be a bit distracting.  I personally like events like this.  Some don't.  Oh well.  

Ah, ok, misunderstood the gear thing. I'm fine with people not liking the event, it just seems like there's a lot of irrational overreaction to it. On both sides of the argument, really.

[Lightstalker]

What are you talking about? This is completely player driven. There was no announcement preceding it. Just boxes in Booty Bay. What the players did with it was up to them.

Whatever, it's over. Go do dailies.

Did players move the crates to other cities?
Did players add the infected roaches?

Can players destroy the crates?
Can players eradicate the roaches?

Did any action of the players in game have any impact on the timeline, scope, or evolution of the event?

Someone is pulling the strings, obviously so.  That someone is not "the players."  This event is an annoying internet advertisement with audio.  It isn't why I logged in, but now I can't get away from it.  You put something in it for me to do, other than play a griefer or a victim, and I'm down with it.  You play me like a puppet and I'm not so keen to continue.

[Lakov_Sanite]

What are you talking about? This is completely player driven. There was no announcement preceding it. Just boxes in Booty Bay. What the players did with it was up to them.

Whatever, it's over. Go do dailies.

Did players move the crates to other cities?
Did players add the infected roaches?

Can players destroy the crates?
Can players eradicate the roaches?

Did any action of the players in game have any impact on the timeline, scope, or evolution of the event?

Someone is pulling the strings, obviously so.  That someone is not "the players."  This event is an annoying internet advertisement with audio.  It isn't why I logged in, but now I can't get away from it.  You put something in it for me to do, other than play a griefer or a victim, and I'm down with it.  You play me like a puppet and I'm not so keen to continue.

You are what's wrong with online games. All of them.

[AcidCat]

You play me like a puppet and I'm not so keen to continue.

See the exclamation point over that guy's head? He'll give you a quest, and you will do what he says for the reward. Repeat x5000. Be a good puppet.

[Midama]

 I'm one of the recently resubbed people who are annoyed by this...the fail of warhammer had me taking a second look at wotlk and it looks good. I haven't played in something like 8 months, and not so much since TBC was released either.
 I gave this zombie thing a try...it was fun for about 5 minutes. If this is your definition of a fun world event then i don't know what to tell you. Its clear there isn't anything players can do to stop it from infecting them or cities, so it becomes an irritation.
 No, I'm not going to go do daily's, i want to play the fucking game without having to do multiple corpse runs every time i go to a city, i want to be able to bank or use battlemasters. Instead of pointing at the frustrated players and telling them to just wait until WotLK is released to play, I'd turn that around and say if your so bored playing WoW that this zombie crap is the height of entertainment, maybe you need to take a break.
 
 

[RUiN 427]

i think this is where i meant to say... "want some cheese?"

[Morfiend]

I gave this zombie thing a try...it was fun for about 5 minutes. If this is your definition of a fun world event then i don't know what to tell you. Its clear there isn't anything players can do to stop it from infecting them or cities, so it becomes an irritation.

I agree that it can be annoying when trying to bank and stuff, but overall I like the event. Like you I haven't been in the game for a while, but it does add a little "something" to the world.

After my 3rd corpse run while trying to organize my bank, I quickly started to realize that I should be ready to run to one of the Argent Dawn Healers really quickly.

[Merusk]

Not to mention that if you don't want to partake there are plenty of places and ways to hide while still advancing whatever your agenda is. 

You mean offline, don't you? 

No, online.  I've gotten plenty done in the last week, and the 1min-to-zombie cooldown means nobody's flying the disease out to Hinterlands, South Shore, TM or any of the other areas anymore.  Avoid the damn cities and you're good.  Who the fuck needs to hit the bank on a regular basis anyway?  I'm a fucking packrat and at most I hit it once a week.

[Ingmar]

I've been zombied all of 2 or 3 times and have been questing constantly, too, it is more a question of 'go to Desolace instead of Duskwood' than it is 'there is no place I can go and not get griefed' at least on our server.

[Gobbeldygook]

No, online.  I've gotten plenty done in the last week, and the 1min-to-zombie cooldown means nobody's flying the disease out to Hinterlands, South Shore, TM or any of the other areas anymore.  Avoid the damn cities and you're good.  Who the fuck needs to hit the bank on a regular basis anyway?  I'm a fucking packrat and at most I hit it once a week.

This is also what bank alts are for; Silvermoon City is pretty much untouched by zombies for a wide variety of reasons, including that it's a pain in the ass to get to anywhere in the city and half of the guards are immune to the disease.  I just kept my bank alt there and was never in any way inconvenienced in my auctioneering/banking by the event.

[Hutch]

i think this is where i meant to say... "want some cheese?"

/em eats the cheese

/em whines for more

/em is slaughtered by the ravening scourge invasion

/em eats your braaaaains

/em rezzes and goes to pay his repair bill

[LK]

Did any action of the players in game have any impact on the timeline, scope, or evolution of the event?

Yes.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11829528491&sid=1

Edit: fixt.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Did any action of the players in game have any impact on the timeline, scope, or evolution of the event?

Yes.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11829528491&sid=1

You fail at quoting, that wasn't me.

[Lightstalker]

You play me like a puppet and I'm not so keen to continue.

See the exclamation point over that guy's head? He'll give you a quest, and you will do what he says for the reward. Repeat x5000. Be a good puppet.

But at no point do I have to take that quest.  I get to decide how to spend my time. 

Anyone who did file a petition for any reason saw: "Due to the unusual volume of open petitions..." this weekend.  Those of you who are Exalted With Zombies might actually be in the minority.  I don't see how player interaction had any impact but to accelerate turning off an unpopular (and CS costly) event.  Certainly providing no obvious warning or method of informing their customers WTF was going on with their service wasn't a smart idea.  Doubly so with the recent server/instance, CTD, lag instability patch 3.x has introduced to the live servers. 


On the player interaction front, the wowforum thread linked by Lorekeep contains this gem:

This has nothing to do with anyone whining. The event played out on it's scheduled course =)

This certainly suggests that they don't want the impression that it mattered if the players were there or not. 
So really, Lorekeep just failed both at quoting and at showing a counterexample.  A Rep posting "Please stop freaking out, it will be over soon" isn't the same player interaction having some impact on the game.  Shit, even the crappy "opening the gates" grind had direct impact from the players on the objective.  Where was the Flawless Zombie Victory condition for this invasion?  You win with everyone stops logging in?  Haven't we already played that game?

[Xuri]

For the people complaining about the zombies.... reroll druid -> flight form 

Also, moonkin druid + retri pala = wipe out entire camps of undead invaders in seconds. There's something about seeing the damage numbers from AoEing that many mobs repeatedly that just tickles my "hey, this is fun in a morbid kind of way"-bone.

[LK]

On the player interaction front, the wowforum thread linked by Lorekeep contains this gem:

This has nothing to do with anyone whining. The event played out on it's scheduled course =)

This certainly suggests that they don't want the impression that it mattered if the players were there or not. 

It's called good P.R. Even Lum could see through the smoke screen.

[Sjofn]

Last night I had a jolly ol' time fighting zombies in Stormwind. I even had an OH GOD ZOMBIES CHASING ME moment when five of them came at me at once, and I knew I couldn't kill them all before turning, so I had to flee to some other people. It was fun.

I used the bank and AH pretty much without disruption in IF and SW so uh. Apparently Doomhammer is rad!

[Fordel]

Apparently a bunch of posters in this thread would be nothing but zombie food in the end 


Only one person has really been all QQ Zombies in our guild, but he is also the dude who can't figure out Bread+Meat+Bread = Sandwich half the time... Literally, at one point his complaint was "I can't even remove the stupid debuff!".

He's a shaman. 

[justdave]

Apparently a bunch of posters in this thread would be nothing but zombie food in the end 


Only one person has really been all QQ Zombies in our guild, but he is also the dude who can't figure out Bread+Meat+Bread = Sandwich half the time... Literally, at one point his complaint was "I can't even remove the stupid debuff!".

He's a shaman. 

To be fair, it did get a wee bit tough to purge, there at the end.  Not that I am in the boat with the

[Koyasha]

Anyone who did file a petition for any reason saw: "Due to the unusual volume of open petitions..." this weekend.

This has been the case ever since the patch.  I've filed several petitions for various reasons since 3.0.2, and all of them have popped up with that message and taken well over 10-12 hours to even leave my screen.  It has nothing (or at least, little) to do with the plague, but with the bugs the unfinished patch introduced.

As for the event running its course, I believe it.  How much worse could it have gotten?  It was getting worse each day right from the start, complaints or no.  The last day it was down to 1 minute infection time, and on the last day the disruption to the cities was actually somewhat noticeable (though still not at all serious if you use a modicum of intelligence in how you go about things, like going to the least populated city to do your auction/banking and so on) since guards and most players were no longer able to kill zombies without being instantly transformed.  The only way it could have gotten worse is if the plague became a one-hit zombie transform, and that possibility seemed unlikely from the start.

[rattran]

The fail of WAR got me to resub, and I've been having a blast with this event. If i wasn't so poorly geared after being out for 18 months I think I'd be having even more fun.

Stuff like this is fucking great. Add in the Headless Horseman stuff and the Necropolis thingies, and it's  Sadly everyone I knew on Thrall seems to be gone, any servers with a bunch of f13s on it anymore?

[Lightstalker]

How much worse could it have gotten?

Flying Zombies.

[Righ]

Stealth zombies.

[Ingmar]

Murloc invasion.

[Lantyssa]

I would re-sub for an invasion of Murlocs.

[Selby]

Eh, I had fun.  It was neat to see how WoW would handle old-school pre-Trammel UO.  Basically nothing has changed in the 10 years since UO came out, those who are ahead and can gank will, those who feel powerless for some reason or another complain and a silent majority just accepts it and rolls with it.  All of the zombie invasion except for Sunday had been fine.  Occasionally a zombie group would wander in and smack down Org, but for the most part you could avoid it if you didn't want to deal with it.  Sunday was just bad, it seemed like if you weren't in Desolace or some other godforsaken place no one ever goes, there were legions of zombies camping mailboxes, banks, and flight path masters or just about any NPC anywhere, and then if they spotted a non-infected you had to deal with 10 of them trying to get you.  Orgrimmar, Thunder Bluff, Ratchet, Crossroads, Camp Taurajo, Grom'gol\Booty Bay were all crawling with zombies and had bodies upon bodies everywhere and no NPCs.

It does show how long we'll last when the zombie apocalypse occurs ;-)

[RUiN 427]

yeah, this event felt like a nod to the old school world events of mmo's from yester year. Remmber the actual wandering plague that triggered sever resets?

[Shrike]

I liked it. True, it did screw with my usual daily grind, but it needed some screwing with. Of course, I'm a shaman and the shambling undead didn't bother me particularly. Totems are win. Hellish dps, too.

I griefed from both sides. From running down hapless orcs trying trying to do dailys to targeting low level infected PCs looking for somewhere to self-immolate (particularly amusing when they'd /shout angry expletives on /trade about how they just wanted to be a zombie, dammit! Sucks to be you...), I had it all My Way.

On the other hand, it was somewhat disruptive, especially Sunday. There weren't too many undead shennanigans on the Aldor Rise (none we couldn't handle anyway), so I spent a fair amount of time there between KZ and HH runs. Also spent a lot of time in Rainbow Six 2, but, hey, amusement is where you find it. It amused me a bit. We move on.

Looking forward to the Next Big Thing.

[Paelos]

I would re-sub for an invasion of Murlocs.

The pure thought of this made me 

Murloc 

[apocrypha]

I would re-sub for an invasion of Murlocs.

Flying stealthed zombie murlocs?

Next expansion: Rise of the Glarghlahlglarglglelalrghlgle!

[Venkman]

I miss it. I didn't realize it was shutting down until I logged into Shattrah in the rafters to see business as usual.

As mentioned, I do get why this annoyed people. Two hours a day for four years and all of a sudden how you're conditioned to play doesn't apply. At least back when UO had their invasions people weren't so conditioned to programmed linear acquisition (and this isn't a dig, because I get into that mode myself a lot).

And yet players will just go back to bitching about the competitive zerg fest that is the Necropoli camping. That I feel is a much more nichified activity I'm largely ignoring. But that's also the standard WoW experience, one that was offset well by something so many genre newbs have probably never seen before.

Waa the fuck waa.

It works both ways, so this quote is not out of context.

And so does yours' actually, so now we're in a vortex of redundant recursion! AHHH! 

[kildorn]

Apparently a bunch of posters in this thread would be nothing but zombie food in the end 


Only one person has really been all QQ Zombies in our guild, but he is also the dude who can't figure out Bread+Meat+Bread = Sandwich half the time... Literally, at one point his complaint was "I can't even remove the stupid debuff!".

He's a shaman. 

Ahem, Priest. And my complaint was the zombie camping of flight points and the disease being 60% resist to dispel. One of the two is fine, both at once? Bullshit design. At the very least put the freaking healers somewhere useful. As is, a number of people were being infected and turned while spamming dispels on themselves, because well, 60% chance to resist dispel really wasn't needed on the ability at all.

[Xanthippe]

I could understand people being upset if this was a 2 week long event, but it was what, 3 days?  The first two were a little  inconvenient, only the third impossible to conduct business and only in SW and IF, for me at any rate.

Newbies can avoid capital cities.  Non-newbies can go to the non-affected cities to get their business done.

How ironic for people to complain about an event that has occurred... never... and won't again.  One time thing! 

I don't know, maybe I'm weird, but when I'm not having fun playing, I log out and find something else to do.

[Hutch]

And yet players will just go back to bitching about the competitive zerg fest that is the Necropoli camping. That I feel is a much more nichified activity I'm largely ignoring. But that's also the standard WoW experience, one that was offset well by something so many genre newbs have probably never seen before.

With my hunter last night, I was able to snag as many of the non-elite necropolis undead as I needed. I just wanted enough of the runes to buy the tabard (Achievement!) and the banner trinket. In other words, two of the cheapest rewards.

But yeah. Anyone going for the full set of armor, or whatever else might be dropping off the elites, is going to have to get lucky.

[Kitsune]

I got a big pile of runes, all the cloth armor (for dr00d healing), and all the leather armor (for dr00d face-eating) except the chest, which I'm working for tonight.  My magical secret?

Be in a group.

Ta-dah!

All those people running around solo trying to tag monsters are doing it wrong.  Grab three or four friends, or even random people willing to not be retarded, and proceed to dominate the whole spawn area.  Profit.  I've gained a few thousand AD rep easily through scourgestones and killing shadows.  [PROTIP: Blow the dust off of your Argent Dawn trinket and equip it so you can get free scourgestones off the bodies.]

Also, shadows auto-aggro on the person who summoned them.  Short of using semi-exploits and having really good timing, you can't ninja the shadows.  A lot of people don't know that you have to talk to the NPC and hand him 8 runes to make a shadow appear, and are all pissed when 'their' shadow runs off to fight someone else.  Well, that someone else is the person who paid to summon it.  Don't waste time trying to be the first person to hit the shadow, instead work on being the first person to talk to the NPC.  It is possible for some classes to use a bug to ninja the shadows if they're a douche, so don't be lax about hitting it after it spawns to be sure you've claimed it, but you don't have to be super-paranoid about it, either.