For me, this all comes down to OOC etiquette and player courtesy. I’ll toss a couple coins into the well from the POV of an event organizer.
When it comes to similar event concepts; whether it’s about being interested in organizing something with one’s own take on the idea, or trying to ride on someone else’s success and effort?
I’ll use the Lunar Festival as an example, just because it’s something I’ve organized many times in the past on Argent Dawn. My Lunar Festival doesn’t have to be the Lunar Festival - there’s room for more events inspired by the holiday! Be it a Lunar Festival Story Night like the one hosted by Cristana, or a Lunar Procession through zones.
What isn’t cool though, is someone just cloning another player event format, with the exact same organizing plans, without asking.
For instance, many years ago my Lunar Festival in Darnassus event was copied - from word to word and image to image - on the US roleplay servers with no credit for the descriptions or banners. A complete 1:1 copy of it. Only after this was brought to my attention, and they were asked to credit me, they did so. I didn’t ask them to take it down, and the Festival became an annual tradition over there too, with the Moonball sport and all. I’m happy and flattered that my work inspired others to create events of their own, but when drawing inspiration, it’s good to do so tastefully.
When it comes to theme overlap, I personally like to check that my events aren’t overlapping someone else’s event if they’re fairly similar. For instance, last year the Nightblades organized Byltan, a spring festival primarily aimed at the night elf population. Knowing when they wanted to host theirs, I made sure to schedule my own two-day Alor’el Spring Festival with a 2-3 week gap between the events to avoid event exhaustion for the target audience. It’s just about being thoughtful and respecting other people’s efforts despite being passionate about your own, and I wanted both events to be a success. I believe we’re better off trying to support each other than making a competition out of it.
When it comes to gatekeeping event locations, again it comes down to just being reasonable and mindful.
On this, I have another experience I’d like to share:
When hosting the Lakeshire Dance Night the other year, I put the event up on the forums and Argent Archives several weeks in advance. I recall Stormwind was sharded at the time, and Lakeshire was pretty active as people flocked to the surrounding zones for roleplay.
Behold, on the day of the event or the night before, I’m whispered in-game about how a group of guilds are having their tension-filled storyline in the area, and how Redridge is supposed to be dangerous to visit at the time; the jovial dance night isn’t in tune with their storyline. There had been no public notice of this campaign anywhere on the forums, Argent Archives, etc that I could see. Yet I felt I was being scolded for not roleplaying in the area long enough to figure out the pecking order of the local guilds and their private storylines.
If you ask me, if their campaign suffers from other people using the town for running initiatives of their own, they absolutely should’ve brought their plans to the public light instead of expecting others to magically know of them. And even then nobody can claim ownership of a zone - they can only ask other people to respect their initiative and take it into account for a certain period of time.
When I pointed out that my event had been published for weeks in advance, and that nobody had reached out to me until the event was about to happen, the person told me someone from another guild had posted about the matter on my event’s forum thread and never received a reply. Well - I asked the person to point out the post to me, because there was none. After this the person’s tone turned slightly more polite as they realized they had probably been lied to. It was weird and further made me feel like there were people trying to paint me as a troublemaker.
Anyway, if I saw someone hosting a perilous campaign somewhere, I wouldn’t initiate my own event there clashing with the narrative. That’s just common decency. But expecting other people to spend their evenings at one of the few towns near Stormwind to figure out the private storylines going on in order to use the area for one evening for something unrelated, falls to the gatekeeping side of things in my humble opinion.
As far as “gatekeeping” the target audience for an public event, I think that’s perfectly fine as long as the host is thoughtful about the location. Organizing a night elf only ceremony in the middle of Stormwind would chafe at other people’s freedom and the likelihood of being there, while hosting a dwarf only event in one of the rarely used taverns in Ironforge would hardly step on anyone’s toes.