The Opening of the Gates
by Poj

Hello Bandits, it's Poj--official eyewitness reporter for the guild at the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj!  What follows is a blow-by-blow (literally) account of the opening of the gates of Ahn'Qiraj, as I witnessed it and documented it.  I wish I had taken more screenshots, but hindsight is always 20/20.  I wasn't thinking of making a recap at the time, but it seems like a good idea now that everything's all over.  Anyway, here goes my account:

I suppose my interest in the Gates started a bit earlier, when I first heard about the event.  Being a self-proclaimed PvE noob, I figured I should go on site and find out what exactly this gate thing was all about.

No matter.  At least now I knew Plinko and I didn't have much of a chance of blasting it open on our own.  Not even [Large Seaforium Charge] worked :(

Zoom zoom zoom zoom zoom..... two weeks pass before I think about the gate again.  I donated a fair amount of mining/cooking crap to the war effort, and I got my PvP on.  Then, one day, I read "uh, did we just finish the turn in stuf" in Orgrimmar general chat.  Hooray!  The war effort was finally done!

A few more days passed, and the day before the gate opened I just happened by chance to be questing for phat epix in Silithus.  I logged out in the inn in of course, so that I could receive my *rest experience bonus*.  When I log on the next day, the inn is JAMMED and there's a dwarf sleeping next to me.  They way overbooked, I guess. 

Unfortunately, I didn't get a screen shot of how many people were at the inn.  This is an artist's rendition, where every black dot = 10 to 100 people.  Almost 100% accurate.

Then, seconds after I log on, literally everyone at the inn got on their mount and started running!  Running toward the gate!!  I didn't know what else to do, so I started running as well!  My kodo was so excited!!

It might be worth a mention that while all this was going on, the lag was simply incredible.  I didn't capture it, but almost eveyone shown in the above picture appeared  to continue running straight into that cliff.  Of course, Silithus general chat was full of wonderful, conscientious people saying "IF YOU AREN'T NEEDED HERE, GET OUT!!"  Pff, I'm Poj, Supreme Taco of the Burrito Bandits!  Of course I'm needed here!  Onward I ran.  About five seconds later, the server crashed.

A few minutes passed, and finally I was able to log in again.  Weirdly enough, everyone had been ported back to the inn again.  I guess mounted travel doesn't count when the server can't keep track of everyone.  Regardless, I shrugged it off and did what any dedicated tourist would do--I got back on my mount and tried it again. 

Everyone else had the same plan.

Long story short, I had to do this three whole times before I was able to even make it to the gate.  The server kept crashing, and I had to start over at the inn every time. 

But finally, I got to the gate!

The gates were crowded!  Who would have thought?  I was getting 2 frames per second when this picture was taken.  Even if I had been able to recognize anybody in this crowd (which I couldn't, was too choppy), I wouldn't have been able to move over toward them.  This was about as good as my view was going to get.

Suddenly, all sorts of crazy text started zooming across my chat log.  Various important NPCs were yelling at each other, and then...... 

BOOM!  This is a flash of light!  It was apparently Forik, a rogue of <The Evil Empire> that opened the gate, but I got to see neither the hitting of the gong or his actual name.  Rats :(

The gate burst open and huge dog-things (Colossal Anubisath Warbringers, if you're one of those "just the facts people") started running out into the crowd of awaiting spectators.  The fighting lasted all of 5 courageous seconds, and then the server vomited up its intestines.  I wasn't able to log on again for another hour or so.  I was able to get this before the server crashed:

I spent the rest of the day (after I could log on) scouting the world for the huge crystals that had spawned, and doing PvP.  

We are very serious about our PvP! 

Shortly after the above shot was taken, I flew to Silithus again to see the final stages of the world event.  I was excited, because we were finally going to see those awesome elite armies in Silithus kick some ass. 

The above is a picture of the armies kicking "preliminary ass".  I'm the one in the foreground, sizing up those Tauren marksmen. 

We followed the big army to the Gate, where lots more NPC yelling insued.  It was pretty spectacular to see all those awesome NPCs standing there ready for battle. 

The suspense was killing me! 

What happened next seemed to me pretty similar to what had happened earlier with the opening of the gate.... minus the crash.  Throngs of Colossal Anubisath Warbringers poured out into the army of onlookers and NPCs.  I don't know how many of them there were that spawned, but they came in waves and I thought for a while that they would go on forever.  I was in a puny little 4 man raid, but we were actually able to tag 2 of these things before they died.  Our loot:  about 4g per head, and a couple of potions.  All of the gold went toward armor repairs afterwards, from dying so much.  The lag wasn't actually do bad during all of this.... movement was fairly normal, cast times were just ridiculously slow.

For the record, these Warbringers make pretty much the most annoying sound on the planet.  Sort of a "growlth!"  sound.  They made it every 2 seconds, and there were about 2342938749 of them.  I had to turn my sound off after a while.  This screenshot was taken shortly after I lost Plinko to a Warbringer :(

Well, that pretty much sums up my AQ experience!  Luckily, the whole thing ended before server maintenance, so I was able to see pretty much all of it.  Again, sorry for lack of screen shots.  I did what I could. 

This has been Poj, reporting directly to you from AQ.  Next time there's a server event, expect me to be there.  With a camera.