Get me some Childrens Week

Whoever at Blizzard thought up the Childrens Week holiday is a goddam fucking genius whom I would love to sit down with and drink copious amounts of beverages whilst watching every Steve McQueen, Elliot Gould and Lee Marvin movie made between 1965 and 1976 as a bevy of nubile 24 year old female auto mechanics frolic in the background whilst playing naked twister with baby oil. Yes, I like whoever thought this up that much.

I like this holiday both for practical and philosophical reasons. Lets start with the philosophy first.

Think about it. You get your very own orphan to hang out with, whose parents were killed in a big war. Apparently we are all in a big war. And this kids parents were probably tortured and mutilated in horrible ways and, knowing the current expansion, then turned into yucky horrible undead things to shamble around whilst screaming, brrrrrraaaaaiiiinnnns. So your kid has issues. And what are you supposed to do with him? Why, drag him into battlegrounds so he can see you slaughtering people in horrible ways. Sure you can’t turn them into undead, but you can do just about anything else. The round table meeting at Bizzard must have been interesting on this one:

Dev1: Yeah, so anyway, what you’re saying is that they then have to take the orphan into battlegrounds and they have to kill a certain number of opponents and do stuff with the orphan watching the whole time. Are you fucking serious?

Dev2: Well, don’t forget we’ve just come off the love fool holiday, and that thing sucks balls …

[general murmers of agreement]

Dev2: … but they made us put it in to satisfy the pansies who think that videogames should be for everyone. So, if they want it for everyone then we need to cater for everyone, right? So we go from one holiday where you can easily convince your girlfriend and your grandmother to join in to the very next holiday where you can convince the really scary guy who punches pieces of glass into his nut sack to try out the game. But at the same time we’re disguising it so that the girls and pansies out there still think it’s a lovey-lovey holiday. So it’s effectively a win-win situation.

Dev3: Yeah, okay I get all that. But what happens when they find out?

Dev2: They won’t. People see what they want to see.

From a practical solution this holiday for me is the dogs bollocks, (which means it’s great). Now, don’t be under the mistaken assumptin that I’m actually going to do this holiday. I still think that all holiday events are vomit-inducing, even more so than my ex-girlfriend from grade 10. But this holiday gives the Alliance on Magtheridon a big boost. As some of you might know already from my posts, our battlegroup is awfully bad. It can’t get any worse. A lot of bloggers are moaning that this holiday event ruins battlegrounds, but ours can’t be ruined anymore than they already are. You can’t get any worse than a 3-0 loss in WSG, so an influx of PvE players with no idea what to do is just a normal day at the office for us. But the horde are having a rude shock. This could swing things, just for a week. We’ll only lose 1-0! And that’s so much better, right?

 

The Problem with a Plan.

Due to the fact that we have more level 80’s in the guild now, we’re starting to head into battlegrounds in small groups of three or four. Last night three of us jumped into the random and it was Arathi Basin. With 15 players on each side, there isn’t much that three of us can do to win it on our own. And we have learnt the lessons of laying out a plan in chat, which normally goes something like:

“Group 1 LM, Group 2 Stables, Group 3 GM. Sound good?”

“Lolz, noobs! BS is the best!”
“You don’t need 5 at stables”

Blah, blah, blah.

And those are the ones that bother to reply. Most of the players just run off and do their own thing which equates to fighting on the bridges. I don’t know why they like fighting on the bridges so much. Perhaps they hope to see their opponent topple over into the water, lying arms out-stretched facedown while a large pool of blood forms under their corpse. Actually, this would be cool. Anyway …

We decided to take and hold LM, just the three of us. I like LM because it gives you a good view of the whole battle and you can easilly see when horde are coming up to take it off you. I was first out of the gate and we sprinted up to LM getting there just before the horde. Our group was made up of 2 rogues and a paladin which is a very nice combination to get things done and stay alive. We took out the horde and then discovered that every other player in the game had followed us up there. So while we took LM the horde had quickly took the other 4 bases. This happened in another game where myself and the other rogue from the guild were given the task of going straight to the farm to try and keep the horde locked down there looking for us nasty sappers. The only problem was that every other player followed us there as well. So we worked out for the next game that one of us would head to the LM, and one would go for the mine, and then from there we would each sneak off to the farm. This actually worked as we had each been followed by a bunch of players who then held each flag while we kept the horde at the farm. Players don’t read text very much, but they sure as hell like to follow.

We deliberated on what to do and voted to stay at LM because, sure enough, the rest of the Alliance rode off in one group. This was quite amusing to watch from the lumber mill. They would run around in a big group of ten, completely overpowering the horde at each node point. They would take the flag and then sprint off again in a big group of ten to the next flag, leaving the bemused horde to cap it in their wake. All the horde had to do was to follow this procedure, but apparently the sight of the LM being in our hands the whole game annoyed them considerably, as they sent wave after wave of attackers to dislodge us. A couple of times they were actually about to take it from us, but unluckily for them it conincided with the large group of ten players sweeping around the map and stopping off at the lumber mill for a quick smoke.

We only lost the LM once to the best stealthed rogue I have ever not seen. He managed to take the flag from under our noses and then I never saw him. We kept trying to retake the flag and he kept sapping us. I have all the detect stealth abilities but I just couldn’t even catch a glimpse of this guy, not even a noise from him. Finally he must have got bored as he came out of stealth and attacked our paladin, (which I understand as just the sight of a paladin infuriates me), and we jumped on him in a rapid frenzy and hacked him limb from limb. So we kept the lumber mill but lost the match. That’s the problem with a plan in these situations – you’re not just making a plan to beat the horde, you’re making a plan to compensate for your own team.