Katerina:
The Gates of AQ was an interesting high concept thing on Blizzard’s part. If it had been done in Wrath, it would have been an in-game cinematic.
Honestly the AQ gate opening is the only event where sharding, or even phasing, has a very directly relevant application in Classic. For the people who take exception to that being potentially sharded, or even phased as I consider it, I have to wonder as to what their real objectives actually are. Is it to enjoy the game, or is it to find ways to cause grief for other players.
The AQ Gate opening event has potential to crash PvP “continent” servers in particular, it certainly did in Vanilla. It left Kalimdor unplayable on Mannoroth for the better part of a day, but that might just be me speaking from the experience of being on the second realm to open the gates, and the first PvP realm to do so. In theory that should have been a rather Epic PvP fight as Alliance and Horde fought to decide who turned in the quest. I was certainly down there to participate in the mayhem. Instead, all we had was a gigantic lag-fest that almost invariably turned into a server crash and roll-back. Until it ultimately turned into a race to log in and hearth/port out before things crashed again.
How that is a feature that players feel must be preserved when other options exist is beyond me. But to each their own, I guess.
Of course, World Raid Boss encounters in the right circumstances also have the ability to spawn sufficiently large PVP fights as to do the same, although such instances of that happening were very exceedingly rare(mostly because the raid boss could kill everyone). I’m not aware of any instances (on Mannoroth at least) where the fighting/crashing lasted more than a couple hours, and it rarely took an entire continent offline.
It’s quite simple. If we give blizzard the go ahead to shard AQ, that means we want them to shard any time someone views something as an inconvenience.
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