No King Rules Forever — Revisiting World of Warcraft

gamepur.com:

The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj is what I think of most when I reflect on my history with World of Warcraft. For those unaware, the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj (also known as The Gong Event) was a server-wide event that required players on both the Alliance and the Horde to contribute literally tens of thousands of items to a NPC-driven War Effort to defeat the Silithid forces hiding behind the Gate. This was a multi-week long endeavor due to the high amount of resources needed — I distinctly remember each faction needing about 100,000 Copper Bars and 400,000 Cloth Bandages, for example.

While non-raiding players contributed to these efforts, end-game raiders were focused on completing the Scepter questline. This questline was long, requiring you to not only clear some of the hardest content in the game at the time (Blackwing Lair at the time was a 40-man raid) as well as grind up reputation with a faction that hated you (Brood of Nozdormu), but also backpack across the entire game world collecting shards (each of which had their own associated quests.) The reward was worth it, however — players who completed the questline were able to secure a unique Epic Mount and title: Scarab Lord. Servers were organizing specific dates and times to “bang the gong”, because you could only turn in this questline within ten hours of the first gong-ringing.

So why tell you all of that? Well, nothing before or since has resonated with me in such a way, from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy XIV — and for good reason. Players who did not complete the questline, or joined a server after their gong had been rung, could never obtain these items. The world event shut down once the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj were opened — and later, in the Cataclysm expansion, removed