Nevermind that I know about 234,509 warriors who would disagree that other classes have been nerfed to favor their PVP performance, what’s relevant to this discussion is today’s hate.

Some additional class changes for Patch 2.4 were announced today, principally nerfing to elemental shaman. And priests. (And rogues? Whew, the rogue beating doesn’t appear fatal. Again! HA HA HA!)

Now here’s the big accusation: Must Read If You Care About Anything .. Ever. And I fully expect that thread to die a mysterious death, but I’m prepared this time! (Thread died while I was typing. What a shock. Links to the screenshots are at the end.)

Anyways, posting alt Jayne of the Akama realm wrote:

This isn’t a troll, and is entirely true.

1) There is a non-blue player named “Leiah” who regularly posts on the warlock forms about upcoming patch changes, sometimes as much as months in advance.

2) Leiah was formerly an arena partner with Kalgan’s (the developer) warrior, as well as a member of the same guild. He has acknowledged this in the past, and it is generally well-known.

3) Leiah has claimed to have influenced design decisions as a result of his banter and feedback with the developer — most notably he suggested in mid-January that elemental shamans had too much burst damage, and that, as Leiah put it, “Kalgan sees it my way”, and that a mechanic change was upcomming.

4) Leiah is now bragging on the warlock forums about how the changes he demanded have been implemented on the PTR — and he is entirely correct. The suggestions he made were implemented almost exactly the way he said that he wanted them done over a month ago. This was long before leaked patch notes or any sort of official Blizzard communication.

This is not a blizzard developer making decisions based on hard knowledge or numbers. This is just a friend of a developer who has an inside ear, and is producing results based solely on his limited player experiences.

What is upsetting is that he is allowed to then disseminate this information on the forums as childish bragging and gloating. The shaman community learned about their major 2.4 nerfs from some random guy telling them to “QQ” on the warlock forums… only to have it proven totally true a month later.

So the next time you are wondering if Blizzard really hates your class, or just who in the hell is calling the shots, look no further than some chums of the developers who got bested by your class/spec a few times and complained about it.

Then fanbois and haters alike climb aboard for the flame train and we’re off!

Normally, I’d also dismiss this as fantasy, but I’m gonna guess what’s really going on here is some nobody (Leiah in our example) thinks he’s/she’s somebody when he/she posts about the casual conversations he/she has had with the Kalganator while doing arenas. Obviously, this is a big no-no to players and SHOULD BE to the gaming companies, and probably is to most, but there is a history around here of employees getting (too?) cozy with their guilds and their gaming mates.

However. It could be as simple as how my arenas and battlegrounds go.

Me: I really hate blood elf paladins.
Partner: Ya, me too. Blood elf anything.
Me: You’re not hearing me. I REALLY fucking hate blood elf paladins. I want them DEAD! I want their families DEAD! I want their houses burned to the ground!

And if I was a dev-head, and my partner was an IDIOT and posted that BELF paladins were about to take it in the rear, then tada! BELF paladins take it in the rear, that would look pretty bad. Y’see that’s the thing with non-disclosure type jobs: you have to keep your hands clean, and your hands have to look clean too.

That’s why I wonder … why has this boasting and nerf-threatening been going on for months? Allegedly.

And I wonder this too: why in God’s name would a higher-level dev name his game character the same as his forum persona? Please tell me they don’t because that’s stupid.

I don’t know Kalgan and his posts well enough to hate him like some of the WoW players, but I tell you this … if he’s in charge of bag space, he’s on my list. The same list as BELF paladins.

Selected screenshots of deleted forum threads: Must Read If You Care About Anything, page 1
Must Read If You Care About Anything, page 7
The Shaman forums are melting
Kalgan responds to the totem droppers:

Shamans in general will be getting buffs to go along with their nerfs. Bear in mind that there’s still quite a bit that hasn’t been implemented yet.

I’d share some of these with you, but some of them might not be technically do-able for this patch, which in turn changes some of our decisions about exactly what changes we make, so we’re hesitant to give specifics until the work has been done.

Philosophically though, we’re planning to make a number of improvements related to the totem dropping mechanic, improving specific under-used totems, and a few other non-totem related improvements.

To provide a little bacground, our general outlook on the class is that they’re actually in good shape for all 3 specs for raid PvE, on the weak side for heroic PvE, pretty solid in battlegrounds and 5v5, on the weak side in 3v3, and pretty well gimped in 2v2. We’re hoping to get at least 1 spec viable in 2v2 for this patch (we’re thinking Enhance), but hopefully all three specs will be viable for 3v3.

See Also: Leiah’s blog about Tom, warlocks, hunters, Tom, losing his forum access, his Wii, Tom, and shaman.

Before I quote his findings, recall that the Ruin Horde aren’t doing very well in AV; only a .749 Horde/Alliance win ratio. Not terrible, but certainly not the 3:1 ratio of other battlegroups.

Anyways, his data:

Total number of games recorded – 202

Wins – Alliance: 141, Horde: 61

Premades – Alliance: 15, Horde: 14

Joined In Progress: 31

Average resources remaining for winning team: Alliance: 328.30, Horde: 283.54

Bonus Honor: Alliance: 432.61, Horde: 286.29

Galv/Bal down: Galv went down first 102 times, Bal went first 70 times, and there were 12 instances where they were so close that I couldn’t tell. The remaining games were ones where I joined in progress past one or (usually) both going down.

Number of buffs in cave: 1.63

Manna Bread provided: 72/171 (remember, 31 JIP) Soul Stone: 110/171

He also makes some interesting conclusions and theorizes on why his battlegroup differs from Horde results elsewhere. It’s so refreshing when a PVP poster doesn’t resort to the typical inane conclusions like “this faction is more skilled at PVP” or “that faction’s average player is more mature”.

And who woulda thought a cow could be so articulate?

1. Holidays. Duh.
2. Traveling for the holidays.
3. Finished a major project at work. Ka-ching!
4. Traveling for work. Bleh.
5. Updated the blog software and ruined the site … on New Year’s Day while VERY hung over. That was fun.
6. Told 1/3 of our World of Warcraft guild membership to GTFO of our guild. We realized it was more efficient to have them type /gquit then go down the list and /gkick. Really saved a lot of time.
7. Explained on Vent that we really did mean it.
8. No. Seriously. GTFO.

Here’s the thing. Every goddamn year around Christmas time, raiding guilds go through this period where people are traveling or spending time with their families or both, cuz THAT’S WHAT NORMAL PEOPLE DO. So, of course, the raiding (read: the loot train) slows down or grinds to a halt, only to pick up again after the holidays have passed. And every goddamn year, there’s a group of players who begin to panic when the loot train isn’t chugging down the tracks. “Are we disbanding?” “Will we raid again?” “This guild is dead!!”

Fercrissakes, it’s two weeks out of the year and these losers can’t wait for people to get back to their computers.

So our officers told the losers not to panic, and, after the holidays, they’d see, everything would be back to normal.

Apparently, losers don’t have access to calendars, and in their world, the holidays are over December 26th. Therefore, they had been more than patient by waiting until January 1st to start issuing ultimatums like … replacing our long-serving officers and giving King Loser the guildleader rank. (Riiight.)

See #5 above. I was trying to put out a fire on Ye Olde Blog while alt-tabbed at the PVP lounge and those sonuvabitches are complaining because we’re not in Serpentshrine Cavern and goddammit, turn over that guildleader tag and give them admin rights to all the web resources and the Ventrilo server so they can get to it.

The officers said, “So go raid SSC, nothing stopping you.” And indeed, they were welcome to raid SSC, there was nothing stopping them.

Not good enough. They wanted the raid leader to stop playing his alt and lead the raid; they wanted me to stop screwing around at the PVP battlemasters and heal the raid on my priest alt; and pretty much everyone to stop what they’re doing for a good old-fashioned New Year’s Day raid in Serpentshrine Cavern.

It was one of those super-rare moments when everyone’s temper blows at once. In short, every single officer online issued a “GTFO” (or some variation thereof), and me, late to the party, added my GTFO on Ventrilo … y’know, for the illiterate in the audience.

Those that GTFO are now on their third post-Foton guild.

9. Remember that one chick in my guild who plays the same class as me, and, she and her imaginary guild boyfriend always hassled me — more accurately, passively aggressively hassled me — about rolling/bidding on any loot ever that she might want? They left. Server transferred to another server where her dude had a real life friend in a Black Temple guild. He’s the one guy in all of gaming who has a worse personality online than out in the world. We were all (secretly) glad to see them leave.

Guess that didn’t work out though because they’re unguilded now. BIG surprise.

10. I PVP’d ALOT. Mostly Eye of the Storm. As you might recall, Alterac Valley is dead on my battlegroup, but I tried AV out a few times to see if it was still dead. Take a look.

This one was outrageous too:

A screenshot demonstrating the sieve-like qualities of the Stormpike graveyard:

That was actually a fun Alterac Valley. No wait. It wasn’t. Made a good screenshot tho.

11. Leveled up a couple of alts, mostly for PVP fun, and took them to Alterac Valley to see if the other brackets are as stupid as the level 70 AV. Surprisingly, no. And I’ll say here, if your battlegroup’s Horde aren’t winning every single AV except late at night when they all fall asleep at the keyboard, your Horde aren’t doing it right.
12. Chuckled at the AV changes coming in Patch 2.4. Whatever. It’s much too late. Patch 2.3 was released 11/13/2007 so that’s 3 months (and counting) of Horde 3 medals plus 500-ish+ bonus honor per versus Alliance one medal + 0-ish bonus honor per. On my battlegroup at least … and almost all the others now. No way that gear gap will have a lasting effect. No way.
13. Shelved my level 70 priest alt, probably for good, but at least until Wrath of the Lich King’s gear reset. And I mean SHELVED. Emptied the mailbox, burned the transmute timers, shipped out the gold and primo mats to my rogue, and wrote a short retirement post for the guild boards. And I’ll tell you the reasons why.

As healers burnt out, we were relying more and more on my priest to pick up the healing slack, which was the purpose of my priest alt, yes, but I figure I’ve put in my time and we were never going to stop leaning on my priest until I called a halt to it. So I did.

But also, I confirmed in my own mind what I suspected when The Burning Crusade went live: priests are not the foundation on which to build a guild’s healing strategy anymore. I’ll go so far as to say that guilds should bring ONE priest on raids for the buffs, shadow-spec preferred, and round out the raid healing with paladins primarily + druids and shaman.

You might disagree, many in my guild do.

(And NO! I do NOT want Blizzard to nerf paladins … or druids or shaman. Toss the priests a bone and stop yammering about Lightwell, you twits.)

14. Attracted another anonymous game stalker who hates me and my guild and can’t stop posting about his hate on the official World of Warcraft boards from the safety of his level-nothing posting alt.

I promise you this: I am going to find out who that motherfucker is and then I’m going to call him on his bullshit.

Meanwhile, his drama posts are becoming ever more shrill since we (the royal guild we) all refuse to take his bait.

15. Did some thinking about server transferring. My realm is low/medium population, guild recruitment is a bitch lemmetellya, and as you know, my battlegroup is awful. It’s not just the AV thing, our Alliance has some truly terrible PVPers — disheartened PVPers, always-AFK PVPers, and stupid, very very stoopid PVPers, hunters who never trap, warlocks who never fear, paladins who think they have Hammers of Glory, rogues who can’t afford poisons, the list is endless. Sad.

On the other hand, it’s a great realm for leveling alts or farming mat(erial)s.

Still thinking on that, but if you have a realm recommendation, by all means, speak up.

16. STILL haven’t received a Warhammer Online beta invite. Those bastards.
17. Holy crap, that was a lot of spam email, phishing and keyloggers!
18. Realized that procrastinating blogly administrative chores for a month isn’t such a great idea. I mean, why can’t the internet tend to itself for a few weeks? I don’t know. It just won’t.
19. Our guild paladin man-whore MADE us guild invite his latest game love interest. She promptly dumped him and took up with another paladin in the guild. How long until this blows up in our face? (Y’know, more so than it already has.) I’m going to guess two weeks, tops.

So we all have THAT to look forward to.

and 20. I discovered a place on the public World of Warcraft forums where no man, woman or child should dare tread: the battlegroup forums.

If you’ve never been, it’s worse than you can imagine, and if you have been, it’s worse than you remember.

I’ve been trying to recover ever since my gruesome discovery. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

While they were doing that, I wanted to talk about the post-2.3 patch Alterac Valley. What a shithole that has become.

I’ve read some of the threads calling for boycotts and such of AV by the Alliance, here’s what I say: organized protests will not be necessary. Players will go where the honor is, and it ain’t in AV anymore.

I gave it a good try. I had an open mind. No one can doubt that Alterac Valley used to be my dirty lover. But, the one post-2.3 AV loss where I earned 20 bonus honor for my troubles versus the 600+ to the winning Horde was the last straw. F THAT.

And let’s be frank here (you can be susie), the AV honor system before the Great Nerf of 2007 was a little ridiculous. Tap a few things on the way to Drek, ka-ching, big honor! Even on non-AV holiday weekends, Alterac Valley was still king. Clearly, that needed tuning — I knew it, you knew it, they knew it.

So as I played through a couple weeks’ worth of post-2.3 AVs, I watched and studied the various stats of each round to figure out what in the hell was the problem with the Alliance.

Healing: no material difference between Horde and Alliance either in # of healers or in overall healing done. EXCEPT, paladins. Horde paladins are rocking the house and Alliance paladins, almost without exception, should delete their characters. Of course, in a smaller battleground (your Warsong Gulches, your Arathi Basins and Eye of the Storms) even a minor healing advantage can pull the win, but we’re discussing the 40-man AV here.

Killing the healers first: looked to be about even to me. I even benched my rogue and called up my priest for dozens of rounds so I could watch how regularly I was targeted first, and/or early, by Horde. Both sides equally sloppy with effective class targeting.

Fighting at capture points rather than pointless mini-battles in the middle of nowhere: Both sides guilty. And let me say, I LOVE when Horde does this. Some Alliance get angry when a group of Horde chase them to a corner of the map and gang … up … on him/her. Not me, I love it. That’s three or four or five less Horde messing with my flags and towers. Of course, if it’s five Horde on me at a crossroads, they won’t be distracted by my smoke and mirrors for very long, but still … it’s a distraction.

Organization and rapid deployment: My observation has been that Horde is clearly superior, however, in AV, if you’re pinned up at Stormpike, you’re pinned up at Stormpike and no amount of shouting about Frostwolf or the Relief Hut can help you mobilize … unless you can stealth, of course.

Gear and skeelz: Other than an obvious differential between PVP servers and PVE servers, both gear and skill are equivalent for a large sample of AV battlegrounds. (By the way, I prefer the term “PVP experience” to the myth of “PVP skill”, because c’mon, there really isn’t that much skill in PVP. We are just hitting buttons here, we’re not artists or licensed trades people. Some people pick up the nuisances of PVP faster than others, sure, but it’s still just buttons.)

Number of AFK players in AV: same.

Maturity level: another myth, it’s the same between factions.

Vann pull bullshit: gone.

Towers and defense of same: Each have their pros and cons. I prefer Alliance towers with the more spacious accommodations — when I’m stalking, I like to have some room. Others probably prefer the tighter quarters of the Horde towers — easier to flush out the stealthers lying in wait. Sounds like personal preference to me, rather than a clear advantage for one side or the other.

Which leaves us with the map. And I don’t know the answer of whether the map is a sizeable advantage for Horde (or Alliance). I know the Horde’s starting point is ahead of their base and Alliance is not. I know the Stormpike/Dun Baldur bridge is one helluva choke point and the ride into Frostwolf Keep … not so much. And probably dozens of other pro vs con comparisons we could discuss.

So here’s what I’d like to try: let’s swap bases each week. Sure, it’d be a pain to code, but it would settle the arguments and dispell the myths — from both sides. I’ll assault Dun Baldur with my merry band of crappy paladins, and you Horde can assault Frostwolf Keep with your stomping cows and after a few weeks, we can see who’s crying then … or still.

Mostly this would be to satisfy my own curiousity, because whether the map is or isn’t at fault in Alterac Valley, it will be the same result: players will not queue for a battleground that won’t put out. Losers need more for their time than, umm, ZERO, unless there’s absolutely no other alternate activity.

Fortunately, there is such an alternative. Salvation, thy name is Eye of the Storm.

Everyone is preparing for the start of the third arena season and we’re excited to get new items, rewards, and fresh competition going for everyone participating in the arenas.

As we approach the previously announced start date we’ve had growing concerns of what the new season requires of us to actually launch, and its proximity to the Thanksgiving holiday. Everyone wants the launch go as smoothly as possible, and in order to have resources available to tend to any issues as soon as they may spring up, we’ve decided to delay the Season 3 start date to November 27. One week after the previously announced date.

This allows us to have the quickest response time to any issues should they occur, and allows everyone to enjoy the holiday and the days leading up to it. While making everyone wait another week obviously isn’t the optimal outcome, in the end we decided it would be much worse to start Season 3 so close to the holiday and potentially make players wait longer until a problem can be resolved. Ultimately it allows us to provide the best possible service for everyone as we launch the new season.

Non-gamer types might wonder if there really are people whose holidays would be RUINED by broken game mechanics, but you and I (and the Blizzard Collective) know better, don’t we?

From Drysc’s fingers to your eyes:

While testing continues and a delay could possibly change these dates, we are currently planning to start Season 3 on November 20 once the realms come back up from their weekly maintenance. This means that Season 2 will come to a close when the realms come down for maintenance on November 20. During that maintenance the final standings are taken and the end of season rewards are distributed.

The start date for Season 3 is purposefully planned to be one week later than the release of patch 2.3, which is currently scheduled for November 13. We will be closely monitoring the testing of the 2.3 patch, and if it looks like it won’t make the November 13 date, we will announce a delay.

With the end of the current season all previous recipients of the end of season titles will have them removed, and the titles will be redistributed for participation in Season 2. A unique armored swift nether drake, visually distinguishable from the Season 1 reward, will be awarded to the top 0.5% of teams. We’ve recently added new requirements for a team to be counted when determining the top 0.5%, which can be found here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2649798359&sid=1

(emphasis mine.)

Sure glad my characters are honor capped already.

Anyways. They may pump up the honor of the 2.3 AVs, but I’m getting while the getting’s good.

So. I spent a bajillion hours in AV this weekend, making friends … no, actually, I didn’t make any friends, but I did get some laughs and I made it to at least one new /ignore list (that’s confirmed, people), and, oh ya, I met a horde warlock I hope to never cross paths with again.

One of the first interesting interactions came from this druid on my server. He wasn’t in AV, but he sent me a tell asking if my guild was recruiting boomkins. (That’s moonkin druids, for you non-WoW people. They boom boom, mostly.) Said me, I’ll ask. His name sounded familiar, I remember /who’ing him a few weeks back because some guildmates were in an awful heroic instance with him. Asked me in /gu, Isn’t *LilBoomkin* the druid who was gawdawful in heroic few weeks back?

No one knew, but before I could respond to LilBoomkin, he sent a mistell to me “I asked the guild”, and then, not realizing his mistake, “When we go?”. I was momentarily flummoxed. I /replied, “mt?” (that’s gamer-speak for mistell). He replied, “Hi. Yes? Who are you?” I “umm”-ed. He asked, “what they say recruiting?”

“Sorry, we’re full up on crazy in this guild.”

…

Later, I was in this scrappy AV where each side is fighting tooth and nail over every tower and graveyard. I’m on duty at Tower Point when the Iceblood Graveyard people ask for assistance. You might not know, but IBGY (that’s gamer-speak for Iceblood Graveyard — you’re catching on!) is just down the road from Tower Point, so I told my tower partners that I was gonna head over there and help them out, WHICH MEANS: Stay here and watch this. If I hadn’t said anything, I could see where a person could be confused if anyone was going and those graveyards sure are important.

I mounted up to ride over to IBGY, with all the other tower defenders behind me (/sigh), and when we arrived, we saw that the two IBGY defenders were fighting the Wing Commander. This was their IBGY emergency, the will-not-aggro-you-unless-you’re-really-trying bitch-to-kill horde NPC Wing Commander.

And of course, as you probably guessed already, we lost Tower Point in the meantime. GOD I LOVE ALLIANCE!

Before I returned to Tower Point to recapture, I did explain to the IBGY defenders that the Wing Commander IS NOT AN EMERGENCY. Don’t you be calling Foton over there to help you kill an optional mob. Or that beast of a warlock. No thank you!

…

It was kind of funny about the time I met that warlock beast, who I will call Beastie. Shortly before, I had just finished another AV where this one Alliance dude asked in /bg chat for some help with a warlock out in the middle of nowhere. I had told him, /bg I’m sorry, we can’t spare 15 people right now to go kill a warlock. Yuk yuk, warlocks are so OP, which I didn’t use to believe very much as I only had troubles here and there with them. But brother, now I’m a believer.

Back to Beastie. He was ten feet tall if he was an inch, shoulders as broad as a horde tower, forearms like tree trunks, and his AE fear could reach from Dun Baldur to Frostwolf Keep. A drain lock (think: EQ necro) with about a billion hit points.

How I ran into this beast: I was cheerfully guarding Iceblood Tower ( … IBT) with a feral druid guildmate, hoping for some horde customers, when up wandered Beastie, and we were ready.

I’ll spare you the play by play. I’ll just say he made short work of my guildmate and was able to focus on our PVP dance, the warlock and rogue — me determined to stay toe-to-toe, him determined to stay out of range, although I have my doubts that he even NEEDS to be out of range to survive. For my part, I did solo him down to 20 percent health, which was a far sight better than I saw anyone else do, but nevertheless, a poor showing.

Ventrilo – Guildmate: What. Was. That?
Me: I dunno, that guy’s nasty.
Guildmate: To the armory!

On my way to have another go, while my guildmate was fawning over Beastie’s armory, I spotted Beastie out in the Field of Strife dealing with five Alliance players. Five on one, not very fair, eh? OH HOW WRONG YOU ARE. He never dropped below 80 percent health and quickly sent all five on their way … to the graveyard.

Before I could stealth over (you might call it slink, I call it STEALTHING), he met up with a blood elf paladin buddy and this is my true strength in PVP: I know when I’m licked. No thank you, the Field of Strife is yours, I’ll go watch this tower over here (WAY over here) and collect my honor.

I’ve checked for him in every battleground since then, and, fortunately for my sometimes-large PVP ego, I haven’t had the pleasure again.

…

Do some players think that battleground flags and/or capture points explode on contact? I’ve noticed this behavior for many, many months, where players will tap a flag for their side and then immediately run away. So quick is their retreat that I wonder.

A related observation: If no player or one player is guarding a capture point, no one else will guard the point. If two or more players are guarding, everyone else will gather around to guard also … almost as if they think refreshments will be served. I understand there is safety in numbers but five Alliance in a horde tower is too much. Besides the misuse of limited player resources, there’s no way we’ll get any action if the Horde see five of us packed into such a small area.

…

Very often I’ll be randomly assigned as the battleground raid leader. I’m not sure how the game assigns this position: I know it varies in different battlegrounds, it seems to be related to PVP rank or honor kill totals, I don’t know, but frequently I am raid leader. I do understand that in Warsong Gulch, Arathi or Eye of the Storm, guildmates and friends want to be grouped together and I accommodate those requests. However, in Alterac Valley, with 40 team members, and several people asking to be moved around or put with this healer or that shaman … I don’t have time for that.

Honestly, some players act like AV is a field trip and they want to sit next to their buddies on the bus. Has no one heard of raid frames? There’s even some rudimentary default ones built into the UI nowadays, they can drag their buddies’ names to the WoW desktop and fondle the health bars all they like — I won’t judge.

…

I was guarding the Iceblood Graveyard flag in stealth. There were a few minutes left to go before the GY flipped to Alliance. A horde warlock arrived and began the 10-second flag capture. I slunk over and sapped him. (Non-WoWs: sap is a 10-second rogue ability that freezes a target. His head rolls around and his body wobbles — it’s quite entertaining.) I slunk away. After he recovered control, he ran in concentric circles trying to flush me out with an AE. (Boy, I didn’t see that coming.) He tried a flag capture again. I slunk in, sapped, slunk away. He let out a heavy /sigh.

A horde mage arrived and began to flag capture. Horde warlock did a /say “throm”. Hmmm, thought me, I wonder if that means “rogue” in Horde-ish. The mage interrupted his capture and AE’d. No throms that he could see. He restarted his flag capture. Horde warlock repeated, this time with more urgency, “THROM”, but alas and alack, his pal was sapped and he took a cheap shot to the spine.

Next time, that mage really ought to listen to his buddy about the stealthed throm.

…

The afk-reporting in Alterac Valley has really gotten out of control. I like the system, it needs some work for sure, I enjoy abusing it as much as the next guy — I’ll report the people who call everyone “tard fags”, or the blaming dudes, or character names that irritate me cuz they’re so damn stupid, but it seems to me that SOME OF US are spending too much time worried about possible AFK people and not enough time worried about fast offense, or minimal defense.

To wit: I arrived late in this AV and was just about finished carefully picking my way past the horde zerg near Icewing Tower (I like to be on O, donchaknow), when one of the Alliance told me to take back Icewing as long as I was nearby. Ok, sure, should have thought of that myself. So I went inside the very spacious Alliance tower known as Icewing, found it empty (FOOLS!), and restored the tower to Alliance status. Stealth, drop down, watch.

In came a blood elf paladin. He retagged the flag to Horde and ran around spamming AEs trying to flush out any potential stealthers. I like to let the flag timer drain down a ways before recapturing — gives them hope.

He grew tired of spam AEs and wandered off. I stealthed back in, retook the tower, stealthed/dropped/watched. (Possibly he thought “fucking throms”, I wouldn’t know that, but I like to think he did. I would have been.) He returned, retook for his side and spammed AEs.

Just about then, when I had plenty of time to get back in there and retake for our side, some Alliance douchebag told the battleground to report me as AFK near the Icewing Tower. Y’know wtf. I let him have it in /bg chat, cuz I’ll just sit on my ass and watch the BELF paladin take our tower and I’ll laugh and laugh — much easier than playing cat and mouse with fancy pants here.

…

Speaking of the battleground-AFK fascists, I had been assigned to the same AV as one of their more fervent believers a few times before there was any … “incident”.

This guy had a macro he would use many times in each AV. Something like, “Report the cave AFKs so they don’t get any honor! Make them work for the honor!” The macro really didn’t bother me, I had more of a problem with his blaming everyone else for everything, but there’d be plenty of opportunities to mock him openly when some graveyards and towers were secured.

In the fortuitous AV, we were having a tough time doing just that. Possibly due to the “zero or one defenders means everyone else run away!” phenomenon I cited earlier, graveyards weren’t secured, no towers taken, and only a few of the ranked horde NPCs had been killed. Naturally, Mr. AFK-Macro blamed the rest of us entirely (Cuz his play is perfect. Always.), and then he added his AFK macro for good measure. Another teammate complained about the macro and told him to knock it off already.

He protested, and further, we were tard fags who were too noob to guard graveyards and towers. I know, yayaya, it’s all us.

So, I suggested he should macro THAT. And he could name it the “blame macro”. Would save him some time typing out the blame every AV.

And that’s when I got this:

Because as luck would have it, he’s on my server.

Now. You might think I would /ignore him in retaliation. Take that, Mr. Ignore with the AFK Macro! Oh no no no no. I’m much smarter than that. Now I get to have some REAL fun with him. Y’see, I can still hear/read him, but he can’t hear/read me.

Like in the AV a few battlegrounds after that, when I told /bg to report Kal***** as AFK hiding behind the Iceblood Tower. And they did.

Boy. Was he mad.

BONUS from the World of Warcraft forums: Another WoW poster who should self-edit his posts. Maybe. “Horde ALWAYS wins EVERY BJ!”

You’d think horde characters would be more popular if that were the case.

That was an interesting story, lemmetellya.

And COMPLETELY not my fault.

That, and more, from my very WoW AV weekend … tomorrow.

EDIT: Did I say Tuesday? I meant Wednesday.

A screenshot from a recent (could be any) Alterac Valley, and like always, the Alliance General Vanndar Stormpike calls for a turtle. What a moron.

(For those who are WoW-free, a turtled PVP battleground is 100% defense — either forced or voluntary.)

Here’s some amusing guildnames I’ve collected over the past few months from our PVP battlegrounds. Thanks to these guilds for providing entertainment as we rode into the valley of death.

<Whip Cream Bikini>
<Hanging with my gnomies>
<Lambda Lambda Lambda>
<Queue Me Up Buttercup>
<Not Enough Minerals>
<Clan Redundancy Clan>
<Reagent Vendor>
<Gank You Very Much>
<OMG Who Talked to Domo>
<We Wipe on Trash>
<Nightmare Bunny Rabbits>
<Hanz Wheres My Guild Bank>
<Vicious Space Bees>
<Not Worth Inspecting>
<Diablo is better>
<My GF is letting me play>
<Do My Laundry>
<House of Pwncakes>

mmmm, pwncakes.

NOTE: If you want to add your own nominations in the comments, either use no enclosures on the guildname, or, use the hex codes for less than and greater than symbols. You probably think, “why don’t you just tell us those codes, Foton?” Believe me, I would, but I can’t figure out how to do it without resorting to & l t ; and & g t ; except no spaces, and by the time you’re done with all that nonsense, you’ll wish you hadn’t bothered.

Oh how I hope this is just the first of a series.

(Athene’s Blog)