Fourteen and a half years ago, World of Warcraft players got to experience a massive in-game event – “The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj” – the likes of which hadn’t been done before, and haven’t been done since. Tomorrow morning, in the re-released World of Warcraft Classic, players will finally get to experience opening the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj once again, so I thought it was time to share my experience with this memorable moment in gaming history. Over the years, I’ve had countless people keen to hear my story, and I’ve told parts of it many times, but now I’ve finally written the whole thing down. For any non-gamers, or gamers who aren’t familiar with World of Warcraft, I’ve tried to write the story in a way that you can follow, and I hope that you can find this story interesting and entertaining too.

This was supposed to be my professional website, created while I was job-hunting last year. But hey, here we are a year later, and my first post is about gaming.

Without further ado, this is the story of Luke Skywalker’s fight against not-really-very-many odds to be the first person to bang a gong…

On January 3rd 2006, World of Warcraft released “The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj” update. Before venturing into Ahn’Qiraj, players had to open the gates, the players on a server (or realm) had to do 2 things:

1. Complete a server-wide “War Effort”, involving players handing in a total of 3.85 million items
2. Complete a long and challenging series of quests to reassemble the Scepter of the Shifting Sands

It must have been at this point that I realised I had to experience this quest chain myself, because before our next raid in Blackwing Lair just 4 days later, I had completed the first few quests – the next step was obtain “Head of the Broodlord Lashlayer” from the 3rd boss. Only one dropped each week. I don’t think the guild had thought much about how the item would be distributed. Frankly, I don’t think anyone else cared much about it.

As a regular raider in my guild, I’d amassed quite a bit of DKP – Dragon Kill Points, a currency earned by attending raids, and spent on items, which guilds used to help decide who should get loot. Though that was usually for equipment that your character could wear, not quest items. With my eyes set on obtaining the item, I asked our officers if we would use DKP for “Head of the Broodlord Lashlayer” – we would. Awesome!

I was planning to spend my entire DKP to guarantee that I got the first one, but after realising no one else cared, I realised it would probably just be a waste. I was right – I offered 30 DKP, less than how much we charged for normal items, and got it.

I may have missed out on the unique rewards of the Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest chain on my server, but it could still be completed, and who knows – maybe someday an opportunity would present itself for me to open the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj. It wasn’t very likely – impossible, if you asked anyone else. But I wasn’t so sure…

I worked on the quests whenever I could, but since they required the help of many other people and the Gates had already been opened, it was hard to make much progress.

When Naxxramas, the next raid after Ahn’Qiraj, was released, I was chosen by my guild to obtain the Splinters of Atiesh. This was part of a different quest chain to obtain the very rare item Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian, and it meant that I was expected to attend every raid. But with the looming release of the game’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, in January 2007, most of our raiders weren’t interested in continuing raiding. Naxxramas was a step-up in difficulty from previous raids, and the gear from Naxxramas would be replaced very quickly once The Burning Crusade was released. I became very stressed making sure I attended every raid, while relying on 39 other people to progress through a raid they were becoming increasingly uninterested in.

With the release of The Burning Crusade on Tuesday 16th January 2007, I was very keen to level quickly. I was wondering if I could be the first to get to level 70 (from level 60) on my server. By level 64 I was somehow around 2 levels ahead of the next person. I was confused, but having a lot of fun. But it was taking longer than I expected, and I had a Church camp to go to on the weekend. After realising that I wouldn’t be finished leveling before I had to go, and with the stress of collecting Splinters of Atiesh, I came to the tough realisation that I was starting to let the game affect my real life too much.

While practically guaranteed to be the first level 70 (by far) on my server, I quit the game.

It’s hard to escape the pull of World of Warcraft, and I eventually returned almost 6 months later. Though I returned to find my guild struggling to recruit new players. We were an Oceanic guild on a US-based server, and the pool of Oceanic players had dried up – it was time to move.

Transferring server involves paying a fee using real money. I generally avoid paying anything extra on top of the price of a game, but I had no problem doing it to stay with my guild. It also presented an opportunity. If I ever wanted to transfer to a different server to, oh I don’t know, complete a unique quest chain, I would also need to pay for another transfer once I was done to go back to my original server and re-join my guild. But if I was already going to pay for a transfer anyway, what if I just took a little detour first… I would essentially save myself a massive $25!

But is it even possible that there are still servers with the Gates closed? After all, the War Effort apparently has some sort of auto-completion to help small servers.

Well, the official World of Warcraft website had a page dedicated to showing the status of the War Effort. Here’s a snapshot of that page on September 11th 2007 thanks to the Internet Archive

What!? Incredibly, there were still a few servers that hadn’t completed the War Effort. I could hardly believe it, but on the other hand, this was exactly the type of thing I thought might just happen one day…

If I was going to attempt this, there were a few small hurdles:

1. I didn’t want to let my guild down – you can only transfer once every 3 months, and I didn’t have any other characters I could play in the meantime
2. I didn’t want to “steal” the rewards from someone else’s server
3. Oh yeah, and I hadn’t even finished the quest chain yet

But I may as well try.

For number 2, I scoured the Maiev realm forums, and also made my own post asking if anyone was working on the quest, as I didn’t want to come and “steal” it from someone who actually played on that server. But I didn’t find anything, and didn’t really get any responses to my own thread.

I could tackle 1 and 3 by offering to level a 2nd character, and asking the guild for their blessing and help to finish the quests. Please excuse my photo and my forum signature, though I did say this was a story about Luke Skywalker…

It’s pretty clear that I thought this whole idea was a long-shot. But surprisingly, my guild was okay with it, and kind enough to help me out. The quests didn’t seem much easier now, even though we were all level 70 now instead of level 60. People cared even less, and couldn’t remember much about the steps or bosses involved. But with the help of my awesome guild, I managed to complete every single quest. I was one step closer.

I started leveling my 2nd character on our new server, and transferred my main character to Maiev. The next step was to complete the War Effort. As mentioned earlier, the War Effort involved the players handing in a total of 3.85 million items. Various items needed to be handed in, and each opposing faction (Alliance and Horde) had different items and quantities.

Maiev had completed hand-ins for every item except 1 – Linen Bandages on Alliance side. Unfortunately this was the item which required the most hand-ins – 800,000 in total – and when I transferred there were still around 200,000 remaining. Furthermore, Maiev was a very small server, and most of its population was Horde, not Alliance. So I quickly realised I would need to do most of the 200,000 hand-ins myself. I was hoping to be done as soon as my 3 months was up, but how on earth was I going to get 200,000 Linen Bandages on my own on such a small server?

At first I started farming Linen Cloth myself, turning them in to Linen Bandages, and then handing them in whenever I returned to town. But it wasn’t long before I got bored of this. 200,000…

Instead of farming Linen Cloth myself, I decided I may as well just buy it. After all, I’d made a fortune selling Potions and Flasks in the past. When The Burning Crusade was released I had 13,500 gold – probably not much to people playing World of Warcraft Classic now, but back then I only knew of 1 person for sure who had more than me on my server (though I’m sure there were a handful of others). This worked a lot better – I could stock up on Linen Cloth very quickly. The cost didn’t matter to me, though luckily it didn’t cost me too much.

I kept my ears open for anyone else who might be working on the Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest chain, so I could help in any way I can, though I only ever heard about people with mild interest. People from other servers would ask on the forums about how the War Effort was going, and I’d answer any of their questions. But no one wanted to put any effort in to transfer to the server and help out.

I joined a guild, and found an Arena team to do some PvP (Player-vs-Player) – I even managed to get to the “Duelist” rank, which is 1 below the highest rank of “Gladiator”. I also stumbled across a really interesting player – Noor the Pacifist, who was leveling a character to max level without killing anything. I loved the idea of that challenge, though it’s not something I could do myself. I found him because his blog mentioned the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj. I even got a mention later in his blog.

Things were going well. I was raiding with my old guild on my 2nd character, I’d made a bunch of friends on Maiev, and my progress on the War Effort was going well.

At some point I noticed something weird with the hand-ins – when I handed in 20 Linen Bandages, it counted as 140. Details were scarce on the “auto”-completion of the War Effort, but everyone seemed to think that the number would just automatically go up by itself. Multiplying player hand-ins by 7 was not something I’d heard about. Strange.

Ok, so divided by 7. By this point it was closer to 23,000. That’s still a lot… I stopped handing in the Linen Bandages, and decided to stockpile until I had enough to complete the War Effort in one go. This would give me more control over when it would happen, so there were no surprises.

I kept buying and buying, and even without my hand-ins, the number remaining was slowly decreasing, until eventually on December 10th 2007, I had 20,000 Linen Bandages, and there were only 140,000 (divided by 7, so 20,000) remaining for the War Effort. I finally have enough!

If I was going to complete the War Effort myself, I figured I may as well complete it at a time that would work well for me. But since Horde greatly outnumbered Alliance on the server, I also decided I should choose a time that would reduce the possibility of problems, i.e. when the server (which is based in the US) had the least number of players online. Due to the lack of interest I’d seen from anyone on the server wanting to complete the quest chain, and since I was the only one who seemed to be putting any effort in, I didn’t feel too bad about that decision.

So of course I decided to make a spreadsheet to track how many players were online at diffrrent times of day. From Thursday 29th November to Monday 3rd December, whenever I was awake and online, I recorded how many level 70 characters were online, how many were in Ironforge (the main Alliance city), and how many were in Shattrath (the joint Alliance/Horde city). Querying the number of level 70 characters wasn’t very useful, as there were usually more than 49 online, and if there are more than 49 players the game only returns 49 results. So I relied more on the Ironforge and Shattrath queries.

They showed that the server had the least number of people online around 5-6 AM server time (which was 12-1 AM Sydney time).

So at 11 PM Sydney time (4 AM server time) on December 9th 2007, I started handing in my 20,000 Linen Bandages…

I didn’t really think much about how long it would take to hand in 20,000 Linen Bandages – it turns out it takes 1 hour and 56 minutes of non-stop clicking. At 12:53 AM Sydney time (5:53 AM server time) I was finally on the last hand-in!

The War Effort is done! Thank you for waiting, Sentinel Silversky, Linen Bandage Collector. In 5 days, at exactly 12:54:44 AM Sydney time on the 15th of December, the supplies will arrive in Silithus, and the Scarab Gong can be rung, and I’m the only person on the entire server who knows the time!

I’d asked my guild for permission, I posted on the realm forum before transferring, I asked around on the server after transferring there, I answered peoples’ questions about the quest chain and War Effort in-game and on the forum, completed the last 140,000 Linen Bandage hand-ins without help from a single person, and it’s been almost 2 years since the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj was released. What could go wrong?

A lot.

Suddenly, everyone comes out of the woodwork. Apparently lots of people were working on the quest chain, and now it’s my fault that they’re not going to finish it, and how dare I transfer to their server and “steal” it. Exactly what I tried to avoid before I even transferred there.

But there was 1 person on the server who had finished the quest chain. He should be happy the War Effort is finally over, right?

My biggest regret in this whole story is that I cannot for the life of me find the screenshots of what happened next – I was so sure I took some. I’ve looked everywhere to no avail.

A thread appeared on the Maiev realm forum – “Ahn Qiraj Gates open on Maiev” by Chamuki. The link to the thread can be seen here on the Internet Archive, but much to my disappointment, the thread itself doesn’t seem to have been archived.

Chamuki had already completed the Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest chain, so he was in no danger of missing out on the unique rewards. So what was thread about?

Chamuki didn’t just want to ring the gong like the rest of us – oh no. For Chamuki, there was something very particular that he wanted. You see, there’s one slight difference between the person who rings the gong first, and anyone else who rings the gong within 10 hours. They all get the same unique mount, but when the first person rings the gong, there is a server-wide message that every player sees. This message announces the name of the player who rang the Scarab Gong and opened the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj.

I’m paraphrasing, but this is as close to Chamuki’s actual words as I can remember:

I’ve put so much work into getting here, and have been dreaming of this moment for as long as I can remember. I dream of my name being announced all across Azeroth, being the hero that opened the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj to defeat the evil C’thun.

I mean, it hasn’t even been 2 years, and there’s a bit too much roleplay for my liking, but I can try and ignore that. Go on…

It is my dream to feel like Luke Skywalker at the end of A New Hope when he’s getting a medal from Princess Leia for saving the galaxy.

Cringe… Oh, by the way, I’m not Luke Skywalker in this story.

Look, I like Star Wars as much as the next person. Scratch that, I love Star Wars a lot more than the next person. I love the prequels, I love the sequels. I don’t care – I just love Star Wars. But Oh. My. God. The whole post was one of the cringiest and funniest things I have ever read. Was this meant to convince people to let you ring the gong first? Seems like a bit of a miscalculation.

The post continued, lambasting me for being so selfish as to come to his server and steal the rewards. How dare I. His fellow tough-guy keyboard-warriors joined in on the Mephisston hate-train, repeatedly attacking, insulting and threatening me. Some of it got pretty nasty.

Look guys, I’m just here to complete the quests, okay? Geez.

Hang on, I posted on the forums before I even transferred to Maiev, and I asked around to try and find anyone that was working on it so I could make sure they get to finish it. Where were you guys before? Their response: “Well we didn’t want to reply because we thought that would have made you finish it faster”. That’s the opposite of what I was going to do, but okay…

So you knew I was planning on finishing the War Effort, and your plan was to not say anything to me, and not complete the quest chain with any urgency? And you’re shocked that you didn’t complete it?

It would be nice if I get to ring the gong first after all the effort I went through, but it wasn’t a big deal to me. But now I’m being threatened? Oh hell no! If only I wasn’t a lone person on a server where Horde greatly outnumber Alliance.

There was something else I didn’t account for when completing the War Effort. December 10th 2007 was a Monday. It’s not so much that it was a Monday – I would have had the same problem on Sunday, Saturday, Friday and even maybe the last few hours of Thursday. It’s the fact that I completed the War Effort within 5 days before a Tuesday evening. What’s so special about Tuesday evening? Anyone who’s played World of Warcraft is probably aware that the servers go down for maintenance every Tuesday. Why does that matter? Because generally any in-game timers are paused while the server is down. So the 5 day countdown of the supplies being transported to Silithus, which I planned to finish at a particular time, was going to finish anytime up to 8 hours later than I expected.

So now I’m just as clueless as the rest of the server…

But that didn’t stop me. After a bit of panic, I realised there was a way to figure out exactly when the countdown will finish with no prior knowledge, though it involves a bit of time and effort. Once the War Effort is complete, the War Effort NPCs give an estimate of when the countdown will finish, though they only say things like “less than five days” or “less than four days”. I realised I could use the NPC dialogue to gradually narrow down the exact time, e.g. if it says “less than five days” at 1am, then a few hours later it says “less than four days” at 7am, I would know that the end time would be between 1am and 7am.

So I spent the next few days repeatedly checking the NPC dialogue. As I narrowed it down each day, I would check more and more often, until finally in the early morning of December 14th, after continuously clicking on the NPC, reading the dialogue, and pressing ESC, I once again knew the exact time – 3:03:15 AM on December 15th!

Though since it came as such a surprise to everyone else when I completed the War Effort, I’m sure people figured out they could do the exact same thing as me. So I had no advantage, but we were at least on a level playing field.

At the same time as that all that, I was also being threatened in-game every day, mostly by someone called Tintin. He demanded 5000 gold or else he and his friends would kill me for 10 hours, and ensure I wouldn’t get the mount.

At first it didn’t bother me, but the messages just wouldn’t stop. I tried to defend my actions, but of course it didn’t help.

I eventually got to talk to some Horde players on Ventrilo (voice chat software). It was more of the same – threatening to kill me for 10 hours, and making fun of me for all the effort I’d put in that would now go to waste. It probably doesn’t sound like much – threatening to kill someone’s character in a video game – but it did start to bother me.

If you look back at the Internet Archive link for the Maiev realm forum, you’ll see a thread titled “@Orangebug”

Once word got out that the War Effort had just been completed on Maiev, the server started to get a few new arrivals. Richiewolk was one of those arrivals, though he decided to change his name to Orangebug when he transferred. The name Orangebug is a joke. “Orange” refers to “Legendary” items – some of the rarest items in the game – whose names are in orange. “Bug” refers to the unique insectoid mount that’s rewarded for ringing the gong.

This joke was not received well by Chamuki and friends (hence the forum thread), who were already pretty angry at me. I’m not sure if Richiewolk intended to provoke anyone with the name, or if he just thought it was funny to be blunt about his sole reason for transferring to Maiev. But provoke it did, and it probably didn’t help that Richiewolk was a little cocky.

Other people who transferred were Paraselena (Alliance) and Oomm (Horde). Richiewolk and Oomm were actually both “Goons” – users of the Something Awful forums. Oomm and I had a brief email exchange, and he didn’t have kind words for Chamuki.

And I did have other friends – my guild, my arena team, and even people I didn’t know, some of whom were even friends with some of those threatening me. Shout-out to Ckyourself for giving me all the inside info from the Horde players, reassuring me that I’d done nothing wrong, and cheering for me. I know you asked me not to tell anyone that you gave me all this info, but I’m hoping that it’s alright after nearly 13 years

There were others too. Reasonable people who didn’t think I deserved any of the hate I was getting. So maybe I’m not so alone after all.

Richiewolk, Paraselena and I all arrived in Silithus hours early. They were both Rogues, enabling them to go into stealth and be unseen. I was a Priest, not a Rogue, but luckily I was a Night Elf Priest – Night Elves can also go into stealth, but they can’t do it while moving like Rogues can. But that was good enough. Paraselena and I had used a glitch called “wall jumping” to hide on top of the 2 pillars next to the Scarab Gong, and stayed in stealth. From there we could see everything that was happening, and could also quickly jump down to the gong at a moment’s notice.

On another character, I spent the entire morning of December 15th advertising in chat channels attempting to recruit as many Alliance players as I could to help us fight the Horde in Silithus.

Ok, I can’t help myself – let’s see if I can tell a story like Chamuki does. It’s 2:54:37 AM now – only 8 minutes and 55 seconds to go. Let’s set the scene.

The endless sands of Silithus are perfectly still, but the sands of time continue to fall. The hourglass is almost empty. Outnumbered threefold, the Alliance grow nervous. Hiding in the shadows, perched atop a pillar next to the Scarab Gong, Mephisston starts rallying the troops. They must move as one if they have any chance of victory.

Chamuki can sense victory.

With only seconds left, Mephisston orders the Alliance to charge. They have one goal – take down Chamuki.

But in a few short moments, the valiant Alliance soldiers were struck down, and Chamuki had barely a scratch.

Chamuki Skywalker and his Rebel Horde stood strong. A joyful smile spreads across Chamuki’s face – his enemies have been crushed, their cowardly leaders nowhere to be seen. He bows his head, as the victors shout in unison, “For the Horde!”. Leia leans forward…

…as a lone voice cries out in defiance…

A loud “GONG” reverberates across Silithus – Azeroth’s champion has been named.

Orangebug has opened the gates of Ahn’Qiraj!

Yeah so we all basically died in about 15 seconds, and Chamuki didn’t even fall below 50% health. But it was enough of a distraction for our real plan.

I don’t exactly approve of what Orangebug did, but due to the behaviour of Chamuki and his friends, not just towards me but everyone who stood in their way, I definitely didn’t want Chamuki to ring the gong first. So I was pretty elated, to say the least!

While Paraselena and I used wall jumping – a trick anyone could do with a bit of practice – Orangebug knew how to do something entirely different. He had hacked himself underneath the gong, and then killed himself so his health bar couldn’t be seen. He was waiting as a ghost, beneath the ground, ready to resurrect and ring the gong at the exact moment it became ringable – you can see his red health bar on the right of this screenshot, taken by his friend.

It wasn’t a sure thing, but hilariously it worked out.

With the pettiness out of the way, it’s time to attempt to finish what I started almost 2 years earlier. But I’m too scared. As soon as they see me, I’m dead. And who knows how long they’ll stick around to keep killing me. Could they do it for 10 hours? When’s the right time for me to jump down?

As the Horde are cleaning up the scraps, Paraselena jumps down first. The Horde are distracted. Paraselena rings the gong.

I hesitate for a few seconds, then jump down myself. I ring the gong.

What!? Oh. Ok. After all the abuse I received, I was surprised just how useless the Horde was.

As I was coming to terms with the fact that it was done – I actually finally did it! – I remembered the horrible treatment I’d endured. Did I say the pettiness was out of the way? Nope. I’d been pushed too far.

I mentioned how I’d made a fortune selling Flasks and Potions, so I always had a lot of on-hand. After all the threats, I found any Flask or Potion that might give me an advantage. Now was the time to taunt the Horde – they hadn’t even killed me once. So on my new mount, I circle back around, and head straight for the largest group of Horde I can see. Facing certain death, I use my first Flask – Flask of Petrification, which makes you invulnerable for 1 minute.

I make my character dance, as more and more Horde start to gather around me, waiting to cut me down. But as the Flask expires, I use another Flask of Petrification. Another minute of dancing, as more Horde gather. And then I do it again.

My second biggest regret in this story is that I convinced myself that I probably wouldn’t even use any Flasks or Potions. Also, Flasks of Petrification don’t sell as well as other Flasks, so most of the leftovers would go to waste. My original plan was to have around 45 Flasks of Petrification – 45 minutes of invulnerability – but unfortunately I decided to only made 3. So I was now out of Flasks.

But I wasn’t done. My final trick involved an Invisibility Potion.

This wasn’t guaranteed to work, because if you take any damage, you become visible again. But they don’t know how many Flasks I have – is it 3 or 45 or 100? – and I can only hope that, much like 3 minutes earlier, the Horde would be too distracted when I did run out. All I need to do then is run behind a wall or rock, mount up and run away, avoiding death again – the final insult to everyone who threatened to kill me repeatedly for 10 hours.

As the final seconds of my 3rd Flask of Petrification counted down, I spammed my Invisibility Potion so it would take effect immediately.

And for a second it looked like it might work, but it was not to be, and the Horde finally killed me. I wasn’t surprised though, and it hardly even mattered anyway. It would have just been more icing on the cake on top of what Orangebug had already done.

After almost 2 years, I actually did it! I could barely believe it – ll my hard work actually paid off

I was so happy, I apparently even used the phrase “please have my babies”…

The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj was such a memorable event for so many gamers – the effort involved, the teamwork, the rivalries, the drama, and the servers buckling under the load of countless players gathering in one place. I’m sure we’ll see more of that in the coming days, as it happens all over again in World of Warcraft Classic.

For me, becoming a Scarab Lord was one of my proudest moments in gaming. To this day, I am still incredibly happy with what I achieved (even if it was a little late), and so grateful for everyone that helped me along the way. At the risk of sounding cliché, I learned a lot too – about myself, and about other people.

I still regularly get people messaging me about being a Scarab Lord, and I’m always happy to have a chat and share my story. Now I can share the whole thing with everyone.

I unfortunately never found anything about Scarab Lord Paraselena.

Noor the Pacifist was interviewed by WowInsider (now on Engadget) where I got another mention. On November 15th 2008, a few days after the next expansion Wrath of the Lich King was released, he finally reached level 70, though the new max level was now level 80. But a few months later January 31st 2009, he reached level 80!

Scarab Lord Oomm was thrown a lovely parade by the Something Awful “Goon Squad”.

And Richiewolk told his story years later on the Something Awful forums, and in true Richiewolk fashion believes that he’s the craziest person he’s seen in an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game). I’m not sure I agree, but we certainly had no chance of beating Chamuki without you, and for that I thank you, Richiewolk!