My two copper on...forums and old friends.

On a completely aside note and not exactly what I had intended to start with, sometimes when one is trying to make a blog post and one's significant other wants a backrub, things can get a bit...sigh. I love this man to death but backrubs can wait.

Moving on from that, recently I made a forum thread @ That Priest expressing my undying love for her and posting a link to a screenshot showing my priest sitting on a bench outside Silvermoon City. 

D'aww, look, she's all alone. 

As is the case with things posted on the realm forums, other people got involved, including one of my old Alliance friends who recently started playing nearly exclusively on her Horde rouge professing her undying love for my priest, and my priest shunning her because Arcane Torrent is terrible and it makes her have a sad. 

Then there was The Tank, who made PvP related comments. Since he is primarily Horde and I am primarily Alliance, naturally we cross paths in Wintergrasp and, during the actual battle, I treat all my Horde friends the same way I treat everyone Hordeside. 

Please don't hurt me.

We had some good-natured banter back and forth, as is usually the case between the two of us and, in the course of the conversation it had come up that he had taken a piece of my immolated flesh to That Priest, and said piece was a boob. Which I really didn't take offense to or feel threatened by, I merely commented that there was no problem with that since everyone knows boobs are for motorboating. 

A day or two later, after some more commentary back and forth, I refreshed the thread only to find that it was deleted. I was distraught and contacted That Priest via AIM so we could share our sorrow about our lovethread going kerploffle. 

I was logged on my paladin so I could talk with a one of my fine feathered friends and The Tank asks me if I'm the one who reported the post, to which I responded no, and then informed me of the 72 hour banhammer he got for "threatening [me] with serious bodily harm". 

Err...what? 

I didn't feel even remotely threatened by what he said, and if I had, my fiancé would have interjected and would have kindly told him (or anyone else who threatened me, for that matter) to gtfo and possibly eat a mountain of male reproductive organs. 

The forum moderators need to either harvest some common sense or a sense of humor. I'm good with either. 

In other forum-related news, as just about everyone knows, BlizzCon tickets have come and gone for the second time, selling out just as fast as the first. The rage threads are endless on the BlizzCon forum regarding queuing issues and eBay scalpers and just how Blizzard is a terrible company for offering limited tickets to their own event and ruined people's honeymoon because they couldn't get a ticket and blah. There was one person who actually threatened suicide if they didn't get to go (thread has since been deleted) and someone who, in their bitterness regarding not being able to get a ticket, wished that everyone who gets to go has a terrible time. 

I'm not entirely sure why people think that complaining like that is even remotely deserved. Blizzard did nothing wrong as a company, it's a very popular event in a place with a limited capacity. I notice people saying "This is the second year in a row I've missed BlizzCon tickets! Clearly the problem is Blizzard's ticket system!" 

No sweetheart, I regret to inform you that...

I have no idea why I'm making this post so image heavy. I'll blame it on the fact that I started this at roughly 4 in the morning and I am le tired. And in being such, I like pictures. They're pretty! 

For the second part of my post, I was surfin' good ol' Facebook last night when I came across a post that an old guildmate of mine from Back In The Day was playing her holy paladin again and lamenting the difference in gear from when she quit (mid-Ulduar) to now. About 5 seconds worth of digging and I found out that she had indeed server transfered to Tortheldrin, where her brother plays and runs a fairly successful guild from what she tells me. 

Since I have a lack of disposable income and a surplus of spare time, instead of moving my Horde paladin off of Argent Dawn or realm/faction transferring one of my Alliance characters, I elected to start anew yet again, although my heirloom gear will probably remain on Moon Guard until cross-server mailing becomes available. Heirlooms are nice because it's armor / weapon slots I don't have to worry about upgrading as I go along (not to mention the +20% exp buff) but they're not critical to leveling - I've done it enough times that I'm fairly sure I have a decent grasp of the fastest leveling spots for both factions. And for me, bleeding edge content isn't my goal - the leveling experience is a good portion of my enjoyment in this game. (I know, I'm crazy). 

The interesting part about Tortheldrin is it is a realm with two no-longer-familiar features - 1) a PvP server and 2) and not an RP server. I'm not used to having to watch my back for hostile players all the time, but it might be a refreshing change of pace. I'm starting there with a death knight, since they start at 55 and it's a solid class for building a backbone for alts - it's very easy to farm things on a death knight, especially while still in Outland. 

We'll see how it goes. 

My two copper on...PvP behavior.

I come from a server where the population balance leans heavily to the Alliance, and thus the Horde have problems taking / keeping Wintergrasp for any significant amount of time. It's been that way for as long as I've been on Argent Dawn - I started there as Alliance on low-level characters, but then I transfered my Tauren Shaman and my Blood Elf Priest over as well as a couple higher-level Alliance toons I had chilling around on other servers, therefore condensing all my characters on one server. Faction transfers for raid spots happened and eventually it got to the point where it is now - all of my characters, with the exception of my paladin and a low-level warrior alt, are Alliance.

But during the time that I was Horde, I became acquainted with many players that, despite my time being primarily spent on the other faction now, I still consider friends.

Lately the guy who seems to be single-handedly able to rally the Horde into an organized group for PvP returned after a hiatus for real life reasons, and lately the Horde has been holding Wintergrasp more consistently. Which is great, fantastic for them. Despite the fact that my pally is horde, I hardly play her - I'm not too fond of melee classes in general and my healing gear needs a lot of work. My lack of anything really to hold me to that faction doesn't help - I don't know many people in the guild my paladin is in outside of the core officer team and I do not currently raid with them in any capacity. I'm just...kinda there, when I log in, have a few conversations with people via tells, and then get bored and log off.


So taking all this into consideration, lately when the Horde loses Wintergrasp they have elected to start camping the entrance to VoA, in a seeming attitude of "If we can't have it, you can't either." I have a good number of friends in this group and this is where the trouble lies. Doing it once or twice, okay. Doing it after a match where they lost by mere seconds? Yeah, I can see that.

Doing it over and over, after just about every lost match?

I regret to say that, even though people very near and dear to me are doing it, I can not justify the behavior. And this is where my heart aches. I don't like thinking negative things about people I care about and I'm non-confrontational (which might be an odd trait for a PvPer) and being so annoyed with people that matter to me makes me want to cry in real life.

I could justify it if it was occasional. But this? No. In my opinion it's like a spoiled, bratty child who breaks another kid's toy just because they weren't allowed to play with it when they wanted to. Admittedly the Alliance population of Argent Dawn isn't very good at sharing this particular toy, but the point remains.

But, you might say, you play Alliance. So of course it would seem that way to you. 


I thought about that. Honestly, I'm not typing this in a fit of nerdrage - I've managed to do my weekly quests and VoAs around their camping and it hasn't really affected me personally, outside of my feelings regarding friends participating in it. Even if I was still primarily Horde and even if I did still PvP with that particular group, I wouldn't participate in this. In my opinion, when the Wintergrasp match is over, it's over - if you won, congratulations, have fun doing your VoA for the week. If you lose, tough luck, and try harder the next match. I've never been one for camping and griefing and inconveniencing other players, even when I played on a PvP server. Sure, I'd occasionally gank them once or maybe twice, or take part in EPIC BATTLES IN STRANGLETHORN, but I would leave after maybe 20-30 minutes.

Maybe I'm just too nice to be playing this game. But I don't find enjoyment in making people frustrated or annoyed or angry. I make a pretty bad forum troll, as you can imagine. I don't find it fun to have 22 people pounce on a one or two unsuspecting players that can't even react.

I did a Wintergrasp on my Horde paladin, and I think I've discovered part of the problem, besides just the raw population imbalance. The Horde keeps using the same tactics that they used to use when I was Horde. It was a moment of epic /facepalm for me, and here's why.

Imagine the Alliance population of AD as a giant. A very large, frothy giant that has a lot of bulk but not a lot of brain behind it. Then condition said giant by using the same tactics over and over and over. Then complain when that giant expects your tactics and beats the smaller you to a grisly pulp.

Moral of the story? Horde, you need to switch things up if you want to win Wintergrasp at a sane hour.