Hahaha. I'm reading this and did we really farm all that shit? It's worse than I thought.
Yea, I honestly forgot a lot of what the war effort required; I just stumbled upon that by following someone's link earlier.
The thing that I remember was that it took 200 carapace fragments to get 500 rep (more if human), and all the bugs dropped 1-3ish from what I remember. At that point all the bugs in Silithus were elite; I don't recall them being particularly nasty for a pet class to solo, so you'd probably have to ask someone like Sterling how annoying they were for a clothie. I remember we did it in groups to greatly increase kill time.
I also remember that every time you turned in a batch you got another badge thing to make someone an agent. Good golly.
The dragon scepter parts were good times though; I loved every piece of that quest part once you got over the hump of the rep farming.
Unsure how long it took us to open the gates; I just remember the begging and pleading we did to get others to turn in materials and not use them their selves. I want to say we were resource blocked; we did a lot of the major quest lines before the materials were turned in.
As for alts, yea GC is obviously high. As others said we ran alts through MC, although that was the two top guilds with their alts in there so it wasn't a bunch of idiots. In BC I made a few more - I recall doing things like Kara/Gruul/Mag's on numerous characters during that time. The way the rep was/raids were made it easy to just do instances for gear/rep to actually propel character progression. My number stayed the same in Wrath, but it was probably Cata where my alts caught up on things like professions/recipes/reps. But that was inception, not DS. Also, carrying over a lot of the WoTLK practices made having alts not only fun but profitable.
And hell, a lot of us had alts in EQ like Baba said. I had a max level rogue/druid who were planar flagged to check spawns and dual boxed an enc/clr. A lot of people dual boxed clerics. Alts aren't anything new, but they quite specifically put things in place to encourage people to log in and actually experience other quests, classes etc.
MOP abolished a good deal of that. I have my enc/tailor maxed with a bunch of reps, not raid gear. I have one alt with LFR gear from ToT, mainly because I use her to farm eggs on the isle and I just wanted to be more efficient at it. My other alts are sitting probably around 87-88, because once I got through the other zones I went, jesus. It's about that time for rep again!
I'd probably go through with more leveling if things like tillers rep and growing motes weren't blocked off by both level AND rep.
