TEACH ME, LAX! MY BODY IS READY!

With that said, I was the one who did the "research" for the starting zone, and, in case anyone is wondering, I'd like to share how I came to the conclusion as well as what to expect.

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1) Pandaren/Troll/Goblin: Right off the bat, these starting zones are out of the question unless everyone wants to be roll characters of that race because you cannot do anything in those zones if you're not that race (NPCs either won't talk to you or you can't reach that area unless you're that particular race). I think it's safe to assume that most people won't want to all roll the same race for the event (which is completely understandable), so these choices were nixed from the beginning.

2) Tauren: This was my first choice for the event because Mulgore is absolutely beautiful—both the atmosphere and the environment are calm and serene, which I think make this zone great. Unfortunately, there were two issues.

First, the obvious issue is that, for those who don't have the heirloom mount, traveling around this zone is quite tedious—there is a lot of back and forth from hub to quest area, and some might be turned off by this.

Second, as a non-Tauren race, I found myself stuck without quests after the first hub with zero breadcrumbs on where to head next. After venturing north on my own to another hub, I was given three new quests, but again, everything stopped after that. So, with those two negatives, I decided that Mulgore probably wasn't the best zone to do the event in.

3) Undead: Deathknell was fine as an early starting zone, but the moment you leave Deathknell there are quests which I feared could lead to heavy bottlenecks with multiboxers in the area.

Immediately upon leaving Deathknell you're given a quest to gather 10 pumpkins, and with a five man team that's a total of 50. Now, while the pumpkins have an adequate respawn time, but there aren't even 50 pumpkins to start off, so if us multiboxers were out there sharing the area along with other solo players, this quest area was going to be a huge bottleneck.

Shortly after the pumpkin quest you're given another ground collection quest, but this time it's for three different items in three different areas. Two of the three items require you to be underwater to gather them, both of which have barely enough available for a five man team, and the third item lacks enough for a full party, so, again, we'd probably be stuck standing around waiting for respawn on these items since these quests are given to you before you even reach Brill.

With the potential for such huge bottlenecks causing people to be standing around for an extended period of time, I decided that this probably wasn't where we wanted to do this.

4) Blood Elf: While I didn't do a test run of this area along with the others, I'm very familiar with this starting zone, regardless. The biggest drawback to the BE starting area is that it's so popular, and there's no shortage of solo players who we'd be sharing the zone with. This, by itself, is likely going to slow things down since there are several kill-collection and ground-collection quests throughout all of these areas. Also, upon reaching Ghostlands, traveling without the heirloom mount becomes fairly tedious and because the BE starting zones are still mostly intact from the days of The Burning Crusade, the flow of questing is very unfriendly unless you're familiar with the area.

5) Orc: At first, I didn't think that this area would be worth our time, but seeing as both Mulgore and Tirisfal had fallen short, I decided to give it a try. To my surprise, it's very simple and straightforward, with only a small potential for bottlenecks early on.

I found that there's a cactus apple ground collection quest early on, and while it's not all that bad because it covers such a large area, it can be skipped all together. In fact, several of the quests near the end of the Orc starting area can be entirely skipped, and the NPCs in the next hub (not Razor Hill) will still talk to you.

Now, once you reach Razor Hill, there is one quest where you need to collect artifacts from chests, and this will be an area where there could be some bottlenecks since: 1) there aren't enough chests for a five man team, and 2) the respawn time is a little long. However, it's far enough ahead (two whole hubs) that I felt we'd likely be spread out enough by then, and the bottleneck would be minimized.

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So, there's my breakdown of the starting areas and how I came to the conclusion that the Orc starting area was probably going to be the friendliest in terms of player volume and potential bottlenecks. My original idea was that I'd do the test runs, see which ones were the best, and if there was more than one zone which felt good, then I'd leave it to the community and call for a vote on where we wanted to go. Unfortunately, the Orc starting zone was the only one which, by far, stood out the most, so there wasn't much need for a vote.

Also, regardless on whether or not you use ISBoxer, like to play Horde, or even plan to keep your characters after the event, you're more than welcome to join. While I'll be rolling a team for the event, I'm mostly an Alliance guy (blue faction, best faction), so I'll mostly be playing my teams on Sargeras where I've got way more teams already created.