The sunwell instance gating was based on daily quests for the Shattered Sun Offensive, which phased at a rate dependent on participation in those quests. It was pretty fun as a realm-wide effort, though nowhere near as grind-tastic as the mats collection for AQ.

don't get me wrong, I don't think it would be fun to have the economy disrupted for that long period of time. Say one month is a pretty good interval imo. For example, it would start when patch 4.5 drops, and as soon as the server reaches the goal, the lair is opened ONLY for that server.

It gives a sense of realism that during a war, the economy crumbles. There's no way around it. If you've lived through WW I or WW II (or read books / movies from that era) you'll know what I mean.

Also, I thought it was genius to do the cross faction thing with lean wolf steak and raptor. This way we can easily tell which servers have good relationships between factions and which servers are really at war.

if they got the servers connected (like for mailing BoA items) and made an event like that for all the wow population, it would be awesome, stuff like a count down from 5 billion embersilk cloth* and/or stuff like that.

*25 stacks per wow player