Today was maintenance day in the World of Warcraft, a special time that comes but once a Tuesday during which the servers are brought offline so that Blizzard can stealthily implement server-side bug fixes and balance changes without telling anybody else. However, when the servers game back up around noon, there were four new servers among them, one of which was a PvP server. Seeing as how we already had the largest Horde guild on Tichondrius and the largest Alliance guild on Kil’Jaedin, we decided to extend our sphere of power and create another massive Horde guild on the newly formed Spirestone. Vector_black and I quickly created new characters and set about speeding through our early quests and amassing the ten silver required to purchase a guild charter. But when we first signed on we were met with an awesome sight and proof positive that Blizzard’s queues were (and are) a good thing.

There were players everywhere. We accepted our first quest and tried to kill some boars in the neighboring valley, but it was quite the task, seeing as how they would each get tapped by one of the hundred or so players running around the starting area trying to complete the exact same quest. Thankfully, the game has a dynamic spawning system which respawns creatures at a rate relative to the number of people in a particular area. Because the area was so overcrowded, monsters were literally respawning within fifteen to thirty seconds. It was absolute chaos.

Still, we persevered, completed a few quests, and finally set out to kill the dangerous scorpion Sarkath, only to find a large group of players standing directly over his corpse, waiting patiently for him to respawn and hoping against hope that they would be the ones to tap it.

Thankfully we were able to tap old Sarkath on our second attempt with the help of three other players. We then completed one or two other quests in the Valley of Trials before leaving dramatically underpowered and with many quests unfinished. However, because there were two of us, we were able to murder enough marines and sailors at the nearby Tiraguard keep to earn enough money to buy our charter.

So, with the server a little more than two hours old, we got our signatures and raised our newly found Sea Men (whose name should be changed in about week) from 0 members to 65, making us the largest Horde guild on the server as I signed off.

And though the highest level characters on the server were only level 11, there were already naked night elves running through Orgrimmar.