04-10-2008, 05:17 PM
Yup they are open.
Worst pacing mechanism every BTW. The original idea was somewhat interesting, with a possibility of some unique interactions between guilds that hasn't been seen since the (poorly thought out) AQ gates. While the war effort was a boring grind, I found the various raffles, etc. thought up by eager elite guilds to be fascinating and community enhancing.
The essence based opening could have had similar impacts for a bit of variety in play. Sure you can do Vashj... but can you do it twice in one week with your best priest trying to tank on his feral druid alt? Can you do it with 10 people from a less-progressed guild... who will then use the experience to help the rest of their guild next week?
The reason the essences were scrapped was that very good guilds on fairly low population servers would be denied the chance to compete for world firsts. Frankly, there's only a handful of guilds who have a serious shot at it anyhow. For those handful, you could imagine a quest so difficult that only the guilds who truly have a shot at world firsts could do it. Off the top of my head, maybe a 6hr clear of the first half of SWP, hyjal, and BT. Completing this quest could give you an item that deactivates a gate for one guild, not the whole server.
Worst pacing mechanism every BTW. The original idea was somewhat interesting, with a possibility of some unique interactions between guilds that hasn't been seen since the (poorly thought out) AQ gates. While the war effort was a boring grind, I found the various raffles, etc. thought up by eager elite guilds to be fascinating and community enhancing.
The essence based opening could have had similar impacts for a bit of variety in play. Sure you can do Vashj... but can you do it twice in one week with your best priest trying to tank on his feral druid alt? Can you do it with 10 people from a less-progressed guild... who will then use the experience to help the rest of their guild next week?
The reason the essences were scrapped was that very good guilds on fairly low population servers would be denied the chance to compete for world firsts. Frankly, there's only a handful of guilds who have a serious shot at it anyhow. For those handful, you could imagine a quest so difficult that only the guilds who truly have a shot at world firsts could do it. Off the top of my head, maybe a 6hr clear of the first half of SWP, hyjal, and BT. Completing this quest could give you an item that deactivates a gate for one guild, not the whole server.