In the World of Warcraft for the past several days, this was not uncommon sight: a landfill-sized stack of corpses buried deep under the Alterac Mountains. (As shot by Solymr of the Zul’jin realm, click for original size) Poor, poor dead priest with Spirit of Redemption, aka the Angel of Shame. Couldn’t you have found another talent to spend that point on?

Some post-patch observations: Who do I have to blow around here to get my Alterac mini PVP-map to remain open? Damn thing closes every few seconds so that by the time I race down to the Frostwolf graveyard, I’m alone, and, as I will discover after running headlong into a pack of Horde warlocks and shaman, the Alliance hasn’t captured a single graveyard. W. T. F. If the map would stay put, I’d know I was on a team of no-graveyard-capping knuckleheads and plan accordingly (i.e. never leave stealth).

Now that Warcraft has cross-server battlegrounds, I was (not) shocked to discover that other servers have dicks, too. I’m talking Alliance here; my x-server battlegrounds have been refreshingly free of the Horde /kiss’ers and /spit’ters. Not so of the ALL-CAPS-CALLING-US-F’ING-TARDS Alliance leader-wannabes. How can they have experienced so little of life that they think screaming in ALL CAPS repeatedly is a valid technique to encourage troop obedience … with a voluntary army, no less. My solution, since I haven’t found a way to /ignore players from other servers … offer the screaming dude gold to get out of the battleground. Also, mocking them in public chat has been effective.

I pulled a few oddball Alterac Valley (the 40-man PVP battleground) teams. The one, we got all the way down to the Horde’s encampment, captured the Relief Hut (the graveyard), our Hunter begins the pulls of the warmasters (the Boss’ guards) and OOPS: We have no warrior. BIIIIG problem. I suppose we all could have teleported back to our own encampment and turtled for hours (playing pure defense mostly to annoy the opponent), but who has the energy anymore? We took our loss and moved on.

While I’m enjoying the action of x-server PVP immensely, I will miss the board flaming and trash talking that used to go on. Seems to me that a community NEEDS that kind of, ahem, distraction, lest the public conversation descend into bitching about ancient server history when Suchandsuch Guild wiped for weeks on Ragnaros and absolutely everyone else passed them by on raid progression. It was more entertaining to read how Jimmydawarrior was played by three real-life friends 24/7 to get the top PVP rank and Stabbydarogue was speed hacking for flag captures.

Fucking Stabby. I KNEW he was hacking, but it’s always nice to have the suspicion confirmed by 5 players I don’t know and will never hear from again.