There need to be some very minor restrictions on the Plague Event. From reports, there are few places you can go (aside from offline) if you don’t want to interact with this. In addition, this thing is getting game-crashing levels of stupid, and however much ~wacky chaos~ you want to introduce to the world, annihilating the game client is a no-go. So, solutions then:
There should be some manner of questline or toggle (more ideally) to indicate ‘Yes! I want to fight on the front lines of the Zombie Plague and am OK with being set upon by the legions of enemies that will result from it.’ Then you get sharded into ZPlague realms for the full PvP experience. Otherwise ‘opt-out’ shards have small indicators of the event (smatterings of ghoul NPCs running around, some NPCs get infected and turned, but no one quest-giving or otherwise ‘essential’, the player debuff has an internal hour cooldown or so, and you get sharded to the ‘PvP side’ when you get Ghouled but only then. Not the most difficult fix to implement, and lets people interact with the Plague on their own terms.
There need to be population limits and Ghoul limits because, again, crashing systems is a BAD THING. I have no idea how finicky the hamsters running WoW’s wheels are nowadays, but there have been reports of people getting hard-lagged and crashed out because dozens or hundreds of ghouls swarmed their area. That said, this also gets mitigated by the ‘opt-in’ sharding solution proposed above.
Questing and Leveling NPCs need some form of protection or at least reliability. If they can be Ghouled, a spirit representation of them should remain so they can still be interacted with by people in order to turn in or receive new quests or functions. This is to help prevent ‘dead towns’ that are made unable to function for the duration of the event, so new characters can still actually make progress and play the game.
There is a difference between a scripted PvE event that can be engaged with on the players’ terms and a PvP event where coordination between vastly unbalanced ‘teams’ result in PvE content being a total no-go because other players won’t stop swarming people minding their own business. Opt-in fixes a huge amount of the issues with the event, and War Mode shows that it would work just fine for this purpose.
Not every character will have a Garrison. Some people might actually, gasp, be new. An unavoidable lagfest and deathtrain is not the way to get someone interested in playing.
Opt-in is fair and allows people that want to engage in the content to engage in that content. If anything, they should add bonuses to opt-in to encourage people like me to peek in and give it a look, but if it’s a never-ending grief-fest, then there’s nothing there worth looking at.
With all due respect to the OP and like minded folk… I don’t have a issue with this, I want to be a part of the world my character is in when it comes to this event.
No. This should be a world event where we have some chaos for 2 weeks. I promise you and the other sensitive folk can survive for 2 weeks while the games gets a bit of fun in it.
The Opt-in already exists, you either do it or you don’t. Simple as that. This whole “incentive” garbage people continue to demand is ridiculous… the incentive is that it’s new content. Period. It has it’s rewards and it will be limited time. Stop trying to live in your safe bubble.
The game’s fundamental core is engagement and conflict. WARcraft. If you can’t handle that once in a while, this is NOT the game for you.
