Siege of Nazjatar Postmortem

Siege of Nazjatar was a community event that took place from October 13th-19th 2019. This was my first campaign as a member of the Warcraft Conquest staff. Warcraft Conquest is a Discord community focused on hosting large community storytelling events in World of Warcraft. While it focused on telling stories, our events require a high level of planning and coordination to execute. They are akin to playing Dungeons and Dragons on a massive scale, creating a plot that hundreds of players can contribute to.

Why We Launched the Project

We launched this project in August 2019, about a month after the conclusion of the prior event. The first Warcraft Conquest event, Depths of Vash'jir, was a success and launched widespread interest in more down the line. As a result of this, the team was scaled up to fit with demand and I was asked to join it. Since prior polling had indicated an interest in an event set in World of Warcraft's newest zone of Nazjatar, we began planning for an event set in that location.

Documentation

While I can't easily share the entire contents of a Discord channel, things were hectic from early September to the start of October, to say the least. There was confusion about whether our story would fit into the existing narrative of the game world, confusion about how we might start off the plot in general, and how it would be palatable to the general population of our server. Additionally, one of the coordinators spent August and September promising a complete campaign outline, but one never quite emerged.

This confusion came to a head as the campaign's dates were publicly announced by the project leader before we had so much as a half-baked plan, much less something concrete. With a campaign starting date bearing down on us, the pressure was on to figure something out.

On the 4th of October (9 days out from the campaign) we held a very productive voice meeting, settling on a few major points:

• We want to shorten the campaign down from 9 days to 7

• There will be no Alliance vs Horde pvp events

• We are arriving as reinforcements, but not explicitly for rescuing prisoners of the naga

• We want to offer some chances at cross-faction groups if it can be accomplished easily

• There will be a three plot structure where three stories occur simultaneously across the course of a week, with the occasional battle event thrown in as well

After that, we put together a Campaign Schedule as a collaborative Google Doc so that ideas could be more easily shared.

Additional documentation includes Betrayal Arc Plans and Unsundered plans.

We used the Discord chat to stay in constant communication with one another, discussing any issues that arose, side-events that players wished to run, and how we wanted to finish out the week.

The Results

Many guilds and groups were pushed away by a number of factors in the early planning stages of SoN. Warcraft Conquest relies on a large base of about 8-10 guilds, and the vast majority of those guilds declared that they had no interest in joining a campaign set in Nazjatar for various reasons ahead of time when they were asked in mid-September. Some cited issues with the timeline, others said they had different engagements, and still more said that the release of the newest patch on September 25th had killed any desire to play out that storyline. Others saw the chaos in the planning circles and decided that it would not be in their best interest to come, preferring to stay away.

Despite these setbacks, we had about 45 attendees to this event each night. It's a very healthy number to have and those who did attend were very engaged in the plotlines offered.

While we did not do an official post-campaign survey, those who did offer feedback cited some of the personal touches and engagement we gave some of the events as positives. They cited the narrative weakness of the Water Elemental storyline and the tech issues we had with the CrossRP addon as negatives, as well as the way all three storylines were very disjointed in terms of events and seemed to not acknowledge one another.

Analysis

Siege of Nazjatar was exceedingly difficult to plan and we had many hurdles that were difficult to overcome as a team. These were very much exacerbated by the somewhat casual nature of moderation and event planning within the Warcraft Conquest team. There is little to no accountability during the event planning phase and no centralized power or project manager-type position during campaigns. Without a central, guiding authority, it leads to a very disjointed and confusing planning process and this absolutely was reflected in the campaign we put out. While I am proud of the event we did put together, I absolutely do not wish to see this sort of haphazardly-planned project repeated. It would be wise to have a central authority figure who can determine the shape of our campaigns going forwards, even if they're not explicitly given that role.

We crafted three storylines for this event. On their own, each was very engaging, but they had almost no relation to one another and offered little chance for crossover or accessibility. Going forwards, it would be a smart idea to try and weave a grander narrative storyline more reminiscent of a war campaign.