Archive for May, 2009

Children’s Week: How to tick off everyone in one easy lesson

The Children’s Week minicast is going to be coming out later today, after Starman gets home from work and can get the music tacked on and posted. But here is my general impression from having played a little of the PvP part of things, and having gotten my most dreaded part, the Warsong Gulch flag return:

Put simply, from what I could tell, pretty much everyone is miserable in battlegrounds right now.

There are an awful lot of inexperienced BGers who are not geared for PvP, don’t care if they win and don’t want to be there, which ticks off the real BG players. So, some of the hardcore players then take it out on the inexperienced players by ruining any attempts at cooperation so people can get their achievements and get the hell out of there. You’d think they’d either stay out of BGs until things clear off, or they would welcome people getting their achievements and getting the heck out of there, but no, they view these poor folks as sitting ducks and free HKs. You’d think, then, that they (the hardcore BGers) would be happy with the free HKs, but with games going on forever, no flags getting capped, and no real game going on, it just pisses them off further, which makes them more inclined to do things like camp rez points, etc.

I got my achievement because a very nice Alliance DK decided to go into our flag room, and pick up and deliberately drop the flag over and over and let people return it. Of course, this got ruined in short order by another couple Alliance DKs who decided that they’d use this opportunity to shoot fish in a barrel.

I’m not sure what Blizzard was thinking when they put this achievement in. Did they hope that they would introduce battlegrounds to players who had never tried them, by making them go into them for this achievement? Because if this was my first exposure to battlegrounds, let me tell you, I’d tell you that rather have my toenails ripped out than go back into one of those again. I know they can be better than what I have experienced right now.  The battlegrounds created by this debacle are places where tempers are even shorter than usual, and people aren’t really playing the game or put in any situation where they are encouraged to play the game (really, get the achievement and leave is almost the only bearable solution).

I feel sorry both for people getting achievements and for people who just like and want to play battlegrounds — though not sorry for the griefers who are taking advantage of the situation to make life as miserable as possible for anyone not “leet” enough for their league. I’ve heard stories of sustained cooperation and it would be nice to think that those are the rule rather than the exception. But so far, they’re not. This is going to be an ugly, ugly situation for the next several days. I just want to close my eyes and get through it.

I keep reminding myself: this is a game.

I do this for fun and relaxation.

Yeah, right.