A more positive post

I can be pretty negative here at times. On the forums as well...yuck. Some of you probably wouldn't want to keep reading me here if you'd seen how I am there at times.

So I want to try and inject a little light, right now; even if it does end up only being for the next post or two before I go back to being more vicious.

During an Alterac Valley game the other day, I saw a member of the Alliance, a female human Paladin, who was trapped against the side of a hill, who was trying to ride away, but couldn't because the curve was too steep. I impulsively started firing, but then stopped, and looked at her situation. Someone else started shooting her, but I didn't resume. She was not trying to fight us, but merely escape, and I felt sorry for her.

I know Rilgon has written about how people who play PvP don't think about how the target's character being killed affects the target; usually it doesn't affect me all that much when someone kills me, but it has before, and I know Alliance players can get very upset and angry when it happens to them as well.

To answer Rilgon's earlier statement that he couldn't see me as a PvP player; as I said to him in the comments, I had to learn. I would have rolled on an RP server ideally by my own choice, but all of my offline friends at the time had rolled on an Oceanic PvP server, Jubei'Thos. Initially, I wanted to be very peaceful. Although I had played Ultima Online, I never went into the PvP area, Felucca, in that game at all, and I actually disliked the idea of killing other players' characters, or them doing it to me.

The Alliance on Jubei'Thos however, were a particularly savage group of bullies. My first character there, a Mage, was killed so many times while questing in contested areas that in the end I wasn't able to quest outside of an instance at all. It made me angry, and in so doing, encouraged me to create this Hunter and shed some of my more pacifist inclinations in the process; it became something I needed to do on that server in order to survive. There was one particular time when I was attacked on the Shimmering Flats while levelling this Hunter that I will never forget; an Alliance player killed me 3-4 times; I think I managed to get her once, but then she was angry and /sighed at a guy who actually came to help me.

That I think is the other reason why I've tended to play with Survival, even though I've learned to enjoy PvP. As I've written, I feel Surv is a lot more about me being able to walk away from something than it is killing the other person, which is also why, for battlegrounds, I've actually had to respec to something more actively offensive.

I'm able to do dailies again on Thaurissan now though, which is good. Although the Alliance were causing a lot of trouble there when they first transferred in, they've apparently been largely beaten into submission, now. They generally don't attack us while doing dailies at all, and of those who do, they're generally in pure PvE gear; so even though I've only got a little over 100 Resilience myself, I don't normally find it too difficult to beat them off. They generally only need to be killed once or twice to get the message, as well. We had a Rogue on the Greengill Coast the other night though with the Warglaives of Azzinoth who was causing a major disturbance. Very poorly skilled player in PvP terms, but with a Priest and gear like that, it hardly mattered. ;-)

So, yeah; I ended up becoming PvP oriented for the same reason that, in the various Trek series, despite being primarily for exploration, the Enterprise still had phasers and photon torpedoes. I try to mainly be peaceful in game myself, but if someone else starts something, I need to be able to finish it. ;-)