A hurricane, a gong and a six-year-old dispute: the Scarab Lord story dividing Forever players

On 31 October, Reddit user RigTV told the story of being the last Scarab Lord to ring the gong on the Incendius server, then asked for one thing: "I genuinely hope Blizzard doesn't repeat this type of questline in WoW Forever." When we read it on 2 November, the post had 1,838 upvotes and 576 comments.

RigTV describes roughly 20,000 gold, four players in one house, paid raid spots in other guilds and help from players in dozens of guilds. Their own guild, Fusion, told them they had not been selected. Then, they write, Hurricane Isaias hit their house on the final day, and they drove about an hour and a half to find a hotel with electricity, with roughly an hour left before the deadline. They got the mount, burned out and quit WoW for a long time.

A Fusion member's side

About nine hours later an account identifying itself as Joardee replied, saying Joardee was first in line with Fusion and that many of the claims were "downright false or misleading". In that telling, Fusion spent months organizing the server's War Effort, picked three players partly on what they donated, and did not plan for a fourth. The same account later wrote that a fourth turned out to be possible, but that RigTV would not have been chosen. "Scarab Lord of the People", the first reply says, is "a moniker that you gave yourself".

RigTV answered that their own War Effort contributions weren't "nearly as significant", but that the effort and the questline were separate things and that they never asked Fusion to farm for them. A lot of players on the server used the name too, they say. They call the biggest part of the story a request from the guild master to hand over the carapaces they had collected; Joardee says "I dont know about that call".

The two also disagree over whether Fusion players mass-reported RigTV. RigTV posted a video and says Blizzard acted against multiple accounts, without being told which. Joardee says the video isn't evidence. We can't settle this and aren't trying to. "It's been almost six years," RigTV wrote, "and I'm sure we all remember certain details differently."

What it means for Forever

On the design question they are closer. "Keep the difficulty. Keep the community involvement. Keep the competition," RigTV wrote. "Just don't make the achievement permanently unobtainable." Joardee expects the developers will probably go that way, but likes limited events because they "create amazing stories that people remember for years".

The most upvoted replies lean toward RigTV on the deadline, though dozens of lower-voted replies disagree. "The quest was great, the time exclusivity isn't," wrote SkipX. Karilyn_Kare suggested events that return on a schedule, like holidays.

We found no Blizzard statement on which way it will go. On its 29 October podcast, a developer said Forever doesn't necessarily have "right at launch" a major event "like an AQ type thing". After some laughter, a voice joked that those gates have to open sometime. Earlier in that episode, the team talked about special events that "can kind of come and go periodically". Nothing there says whether a future reward would have a deadline.