it definately matters for my guild. It certainly wouldn't be fair for one server to not have the same chance at a world first as another.

and yes, we know who killed illidan and kael first.

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Here presents the problem. There was been as of late, a call for server-inclusive events such as the previous war effort. I personally think it's neat, to finally have the entire server participate in an event to make the game seem more fun.

But a balance must be struck. If the server-wide event ends up hindering a guild's ability to progress, then this is unacceptable. I do believe that if a guild is prevented from progressing simply because they rolled low-pop, then it is not fair at all.

Aside from the most obvious and controversial measures such as redistribution of players to low-pop servers, a possibility (but a technical feat!) would be to implement say, battlegroup wide progression. Rather than a realm being isolated in its progression, make progression a battlegroup wide event. This would even out the playing field and yet keep the feeling of everybody participating fun.

Granted, I, in my oblivious knowledge of Blizzard's technical infrastructure do not know the work involved in implementing this, but I'm simply suggesting what I believe is a suitable compromise.

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I actually recall server progression over world progression. While world firsts are certainly bigger news, each realm is its own little community. While I might never get the chance to be in Death and Taxes or Nilium or other well known world first guilds, there's always the chance that I can be part of a server-first guild.

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Whaa? Almost everyone knows world firsts? I strongly doubt that. I don't know about them, don't care about them, and see no reason to care either. My own and my friends' progression is enough for me.

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I think it's important. As someone who spent the first half of my WoW career as a casual, it's definitely something people talk about. Casuals take pride in knowing the progression of the top guilds and talking about it to others.

And now as a serious raider, you will find that you become friends with the other top raiding guilds. You end up PVP'ing together, PUG'ing together etc. It's almost like a class structure. The rich with the rich and the poor with the poor. It's not that people are snobby, you just tend to associate with people in your gear level because it maximizes performance. Anyway, tangent there. Being a raider, it's hard NOT to know who kills what and when.

So yeah, it's important.

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A lot of people see their server's progression as a way to compare it to others. While this works pretty well, players really need to decide what they want to be doing in the game and play on servers where they can do those things. If you're just playing with family, pretty much any server will do. If you're into serious raiding, you need a server with a history of good progression.

So for the average person, progression is not very important as long as they are happy with their guild.

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I could care less about server progression, but I have friends in BT farming guilds and I don't see any need to frustrate raiders with lack of progression just because they happen to be playing on a low pop server.

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A lot of guilds are using www.wwsscoreboard.com to compare them selves with eachother. Not every one can spend 10+ hours during raid opening days to finish content.

It's kind of like a huge damage meter, but for ranking guilds, and players across different raids.

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it was requiem on ravencrest i believe, and it was a little exciting but since im not doing it myself it was just a "thats cool" kinda thing

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On my server, kills per boss are listed as well as dates of first kills.

Some used the list as a yardstick for competition (We killed Hogger before you, nyah!), some as a guide on which guilds to poa.. recruit members from, and some as a record of server history. Many guilds have spearheaded the progression, only to crash and burn later.

Now that the "competition" is over for me, I rarely check the list anymore. However, it's nice to see other guilds progress towards the Black Temple. It's a great instance, and I do wish that more people could see it. Currently only around 160 players of 10000 can do so. I'd hate to see it end up like Naxxramas.

If you are about to transfer to a server in order to raid, checking out the progression thread is a good idea. In addition to showing the stage of progression, it also gives you a sense of the size of the raiding community. If there's only a handful of guilds listed and they're all in Black Temple, you might not want to transfer if you're wearing just 5-man/heroic blues and epics. Conversely, stagnated progression with only a few (or none) spikes in progression can be a sign of a server with a lot of infighting. If you don't like drama, transferring might not be a good option. Low-population servers are generally bad as well. If things don't work out with one guild, you might get "stranded" there, unable to do content that's interesting for you.

In my opinion, the most promising progression thread contains several guilds doing bleeding edge content, a sizable number doing mid-tier and a lot doing low-end raiding. That's usually a sign of a healthy community, and you're quite likely to find a nice guild that's on your level of progression.

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We have a server for our realm known by almost everyone and the kills and progress is recorded very nice in a table , this one :

http://www.shadowsongeurope.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=65&Itemid=41

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Lightninghoof-US also has a very popular server progression thread/website, which tracks the progression of all the guilds on our realm. I think that tracking server progression is extremely important, because while the people on the server will rarely-if ever see a top 10 global guild, the guilds on the server still have competition, and they like a place to see where they stand amongst their peers.

the Lightninghoof Progression site is at: http://www.webrender.net/rankings3 , or you can just go to our realm website at http://www.lightninghoof.net :)

-Moonmaster

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I have no idea about server firsts on my server. The only progression that matters to me is my own, and even that doesn't matter too much. We only just started kara lately (started with a bang, taking down Attumen, Moroes, and Maiden in first weekend, then having problems with those same bosses since). Making progress throughout content is only fun for me if it's with friends. And I don't pay any attention to world or server progression, if I see something about it on this site or in general chat, I may throw a "gratz" out there, but basically it goes in one ear out the other.

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World firsts do not matter as much as they used to. Before Blizzard started putting the raid instances on the test servers it was a true race where everyone started on equal ground right when the servers came up. No one knew anything about any of the bosses and each one had to be learned. Now most world firsts go to the guilds who spend the time to learn the bosses before they are on the live realms. It just doesn't feel the same anymore to me.

I'm from Mal'Ganis and my guild and I were looking forward to the server competition to open up Sunwell. I'm pretty sure most of Mal'Ganis was but that probably has to do with us being ranked #1 on WowJutsu. ;p

http://www.wowjutsu.com/us/realm_ranked.html

I think Blizzard should have left the server competition in and just put a maximum time before things started opening automatically to help the less progressed servers.

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Server progression seems to be used somewhat as a proxy for community status - a server with six Illidan guilds and 40+ guilds with a 25-man boss kill is probably supporting more raiding than a server with one BT guild that hasn't beaten Illidan yet and only 5-10 total 25-man guilds. Beyond that, I suppose it doesn't matter much to anyone other than the people actually on that list.

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I happen to play on a realm that wouldn't be doing well with a server-wide event to unlock top-end raid content; while officially it's med-pop and thus should have plenty of progression-focused guilds, we have two BT guilds (one that recently started BT, the other has just killed Illidan for the first time 10 days ago or so).

Hardcore raiding population is dropping, it's been the TBC taboo that Blizzard refuses to acknowledge officially, other than by boosting casual-centric features. The AQ gate-like events would take too long on too many realms at this point; it'd just frustrate the players for whom unlocking content matters even more.

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I think to some extent your server progression has a big effect on you even if you aren't at the high end of it.

For instance, I know exactly who first killed Illidan on my server because no one has; in fact we only have one guild that's at Hyjal and less than a dozen in SSC.

This has a large effect on the economy (epic gems are almost non-existent, for instance) and quality of players available outside of raiding, for both Heroics and Arena; just clearing Kara is a major deal for a guild on my server, whereas on others I've heard pugging Kara is not uncommon.

It's thus very likely that if that one guild (since obviously no one else will be able to for a long time) wanted to go through Sunwell 25 they simply would not be able to with the requirement Blizzard had in mind, since they'd have to do all of the unlocking themselves.

I think a lot of people are underestimating how different server progression can be if they think it's not relevant.

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None of it MATTERS.
This is why you Raider Freaks are named as Basement Dwellers and Unemployed Nolifes.

Argh.
Get a freakin life seriously.

Does it matter?
WTF?

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Yes. I know who downed about the entire later half of TBC on my server first. They are also the only guild on our tiny realm to have downed Illidan, let alone face him. (There is one other guild closing in, but I don't think they've even touched the council yet.)

My realm, Quel'dorei, is one of the reasons they took out that stupid system to unlock the Sunwell and turned it time-based. As far as progression goes, we suck. Our first Illidan kill was less than a month ago. My own guild is only just starting on Hyjal and BT, and when 2.4 hits, there will be only a few hundred Hands of A'dal on our server. Total. Alliance and Horde.

Why is this? A number of reasons. One, we're a new realm. Quel'dorei opened its doors about a week before TBC hit. So for a long time, we were a self-contained ecosystem of newbies or re-rolls with nobody who had even touched any of the old world raids on their new characters.

So we were slow off the start, and progressing through the end game on blank slate characters means that even the fastest people took quite a while from the word go. And come 2.4, there are maybe five or six guilds who could even hope to touch the Sunwell on its release, and only maybe two who have the potential to make it through the whole thing as of now.

It is blatantly unfair that the fact our server's progression has been so slow should block those few guilds able to handle Sunwell from finishing it. You'd be forcing a hand full of guilds to do on my realm what 20 or 30 or more would do on a more populated realm. I'm never going to be in the raid that first strikes down Kil'jaeden on my realm, but I for damn sure what the people who can do it to be able to some time prior to the expansion. The gates as they originally were set up was punishment to the underpopulated realms. Plain and simple. "You don't have 20 guilds farming Illidan, getting geared up for Sunwell already? Tough. Even if you have a guild ready to go in, they're going to have to do all the work themselves to open the gates to the last three bosses."

We're a small realm in Quel'dorei. Seeing people in T6 is still something that leaves many people in awe. Just because our copy of the Sunwell will have only a coupe visitors at the start doesn't mean those raiders should have to wait for the rest of us to catch up before they have a shot at the later bosses.

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