I think that Blizzard is pretty much done with truly "epic" events in WoW.

I missed out on the Gates of AQ, but I was around for the Scourge Invasion... which I personally loved. I mean, it's the lead up to the f'n LICH KING, baby! Yeah, there'd better be zombies everywhere, and mass zombie ganking, and poisoned sacks of grain, and floating citadels, and cultists wandering around, and undead dragons attacking Stormwind Harbor, and... oh man, that really set the tone for an awesome expansion.

Too bad so many people QQ'd / nerdraged / cancelled their accounts. I really feel that Blizzard "got the message" ~ why else was the lead in to Cataclysm so tame? The quest chains were alright (if ultimately forgettable), and it was nice to get the "Tripping the Rifts" achievement. But it certainly didn't feel like the world was coming to an end ~ not the way the Scourge Invasion felt. If you didn't bother doing the quests, you'd have hardly known that there was anything going on.

Personally I'd like to see more of Deathwing. He should start nuking the capital cities. We should have unkillable world bosses that randomly spawn and tear up a zone. We should have fiery meteors falling from the sky. There should be peril at every corner ~ elite cultist assassins that randomly show up to aggro guards and slay players. There should be tidal waves, hurricanes, crazy world-ending crap. That would be some quality tiger blood right there.

@dengarsw:
"""A dead server from 4.2 to 4.3 will have the same appearance and same lore as a highly populated server (again, unless I'm missing something big)."""

I see this as a positive point. It means low pop servers aren't barred from enjoying the lore.

@Hob:
The zombie invasion, for me, was the worst thing to ever happen in WoW. Nothing even comes close. I cancelled two accounts over it (one permanently, one for 6 months).
Simple reasoning. Any MMO dev wants my subscription money, they better make a game I enjoy playing. I have many other alternatives out there, and I believe the best way to demonstrate my displeasure is by closing my wallet.
Not that I dislike big events. What I dislike is any form of non-consensual PvP, as well as when I'm not given a choice to ignore the event. The zombie invasion combined those with my aversion to most things zombie-related, and a plethora of bugs, that was enough to make me really angry at the game and the developers. I swear, at the time, if I had met whoever had the idea for the event, I would be hard-pressed to not punch him.

@DarkWalker

I respect that you hated the event so much that you cancelled both your accounts, but I also have to say that I don't understand it. The PvP-zombie event was only 5 days. There have been -- in my opinion -- a lot more events or bugs or hotfixes that caused me far more problems. I didn't feel like cancelling, I did something else.

Hob, this has been said before in many ways, but I want to try to articulate it again. You're right in that certain bugs or poorly designed alterations to the game (buff/nerf, what have you) have been intrinsically more troublesome than the Scourge Invasion. But the Invasion was engineered to be *personal*. The average bug, it just exists. Its impact on you is incidental. The Invasion, though, put the ultimate griefing power into the hands of what was, unbeknownst to most of us, a huge group of latent sociopaths who took great delight in doing whatever they could to make the gaming experience hellish for other people.

Now, I know all the lines, they've been said so many times. Phrases like "comfort zone" and "only 5 days" get bandied about like crazy. And it is awfully easy for you, since you enjoyed the event, to just say "you could have not played until it was over". But for those of us who weren't enjoying it at all, that sounds pretty much like our concerns are meaningless to you. That's probably why you don't understand, and why you still refer to our complaints in such a condescending fashion. That's why, all this time later, it's still a sore point.

I didn't cancel my account during the invasion, but I was forced offline by a group of people who apparently had just been waiting to turn on the other members of their faction, and do everything they could to make the rest of the game inaccessible to those of us that were leveling, or trying to complete the holiday that the Invasion interrupted. I know that so many people think that Blizz cut it short because of our complaints. Maybe they did. My opinion is that they failed when they rolled out the event, allowing players to retain control of their zombified corpses. I wasn't playing during the Cata event, but from your comments, I assume they learned a few things from the Invasion.

I'm probably going to come off as a jerk to some folks, but here's the thing: I hate the forced factions. I'm on a PvP server, so PvP is supposed to happen, but a lot of people are on my faction to avoid PvP. It makes no sense to me, and it's upsetting when people on "my side" aren't the type of people I'd normally associate with. During the zombie event, we got a 3rd faction. I could gang up with alliance and kill people neither of us liked, and it was refreshing that, for a bit, WoW was a fun pvp game. There were social consequences, and the community had the power to do something.

If you were on a pve server and got things disrupted, that sucks. But even with my limited play time, I generally finish WoW content pretty fast and get bored, and love to have something that mixes things up a bit. MMOs, to me, are supposed to be about the community, not getting through content.

@ Glaras

Wow, does it ever sound like you really hated that event, and I'm sorry that's the case. Personally, I also loved the Scourge invasion. I also liked the AQ event back in the day, which didn't have the negatives that the Scourge did, but still felt big ... comparatively, the Cataclysm "events" seemed rather small, other than the entire world changing of course.

But I think the point is that a game like WoW should be more than just a theme park. It should be much more interactive. The Scourge event allowed for some of that interactivity (which is why a lot of folks loved it) but it did so in perhaps a not-well-thought-out manner that allowed for griefing on an epic scale (which, to me, sounds like your reasoning for not liking the event).

I don't think that just because they got one event wrong (in some ways) that they should be content to make the "new" and "exciting" stuff of the game simply a rehash of stuff they've done before ... the Firelands is the new Quel'Danas? /sigh. While fun, and I'm sure Firelands will have a bit of fun, it's the next turn in the themepark ride that is WoW.

I'm glad that Fargo and the other devs are excited about 4.2 and Firelands, but I'd much rather see them working to open up the entire world of warcraft to the entire player base than talking about how cool their latest rehash is going to be ... more stuff like the Scourge event, then, would be a good thing. They just need to do those things in such a way that it doesn't allow for mass griefing.

@Glaras

Thanks for the clarification, re: personal, inter-faction griefing. I didn't see it or hear about it during the event (or at least, I don't remember it), but in retrospect, given how often the PvP forums are alight with "PLZ Blizz let me attack that guy in my own city," that makes a lot of sense. What I actually have heard up to this point is about people who mostly stayed in the cities no matter what, trading on the auction house, and how the invasion interrupted their businesses.

For what it's worth, now that I know what the problem really was, I actually agree that the zombie-PvP event should not have happened. I recently moved servers on some of my mains to avoid a core group of former guildmates who were extremely hateful and obnoxious after I left their guild (I was burned out on raiding, but they weren't burned out on getting drunk, rolling a level 1, and whispering nasty things to me), so I can definitely see how things could get personal and out of control very fast.

I'm sorry that I came across as condescending - I didn't intend to be, and I honestly thought I was being respectful in my comments to other players. I did love the event while it was happening, and the sense of peril that it engendered. I still wish there had been more "oomph" to the elemental invasion, and more "oomph" to the current state of the "broken" world. Hellfire Peninsula is -- but more important -- FEELS more dangerous (at the appropriate level) than any "broken" 1-60 zone I've leveled through.

I sincerely apologize for coming across like a jerk, and appreciate that you explained the problem. Communication is good.

~Hob

I positively HATED the zombie event on day 1, 2, 3 ... by Day 5 I had gotten to where I could live with it.
As far as people being jerks YMMV but not all servers had jerks, but where there WERE jerks they were pretty annoying. I echo the sentiment of Please Blizz, can I attack that guy in my Home City - or at least wait for him at the gates?
Since this is about casuals, I would also like to respectfully ask that there be a viable casual PvP experience (casual means not requiring Arena or rated BG conquest points to remain competitive). Or awarding Conquest points for something in-game, or at a rate of 3:1 or something ... Because, by mid-season when the kiddies have finished grinding through their arena matches with their school buddies it stops being about skill and start being about gear and casual PvP stops being playable.

@Hob:
I don't have anything against big events, provided Blizzard gives me a way to opt-out. Even just being able to not log, BUT HAVING THOSE DAYS REFUNDED, might have been enough. After all, for me at least, the game was absolutely unplayable during the zombie event.

As for why cancelling: two reasons.
- I find the best way to communicate my displeasure with any company is to tell so by closing my wallet. If there is something happening that I really don't like, and I feel like increasing my chances of being heard is more important than enjoying the product, I will cancel my subscription and clearly state why.
- The event - and, more than the event, the dev's answers in the forums saying everything was all right and happening as they had planned - made me distrustful of Blizzard's capability for producing content I like to play, so I also took that time to look at a few of the most promising MMOs in the market. I have a few retail accounts, and a lot of trial accounts, from that time.