So, as promised, I spent a lot of the weekend throwing myself into the fray of World of Warcraft PvP, (and indeed, threw myself into the fray of Fray Island at one point, but that’s another story,) and you know what? It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. I guess a lot of my problem is with Rallos Zek induced psychological scarring. The kind of post-traumatic stress disorder you could pick up there doesn’t go away, instead colouring your perceptions of all online games, and the people who play them, hence my unrelentingly bitter style. On the whole, I’m glad Rallos Zek has been server-merged out of existence.

But that was then and this is now, and keyed up to the point of a hyperactive nervous breakdown, I joined the Warsong Gulch Battleground queue (L20-29). I was Lv28 at the time, so fairly near the top of the pack, which provided some reassurance, but as detailed previously, the whole thing seemed a bit daunting, not least the 45 minute wait beforehand. I’m not sure if that’s an average time to wait or what, but my Fishing skill improved a lot at least. And then we were in!

The Warsong Gulch Battleground is very basic; two small castles facing each other across a fairly small and relatively obstruction free valley. Each has a flag in it, and the aim is for your ten people to get their flag back to your castle three times, while preventing their ten people from doing the same with your flag. I confess to going a bit mad on the first match, massively overcompensating for my already preconceived ineptitude, and was barely aware that there were flags at all, instead going on what can best be described as a ‘Spree’, which ended up with me in second place for kills in the post-match leader board. Probably more luck than judgement, but it was encouraging nonetheless. Fortunately, there were a quite few people on our team who knew what they were doing, and we (The Horde) won the match as well. I didn't die once, which suprised me as much as my enemies.

I stuck around for a second match, and now a little calmer, began to take note of the surroundings and dynamics of it all. I’m not a young man anymore, and at my age, reactions just aren’t up to the classic Quake-style rocket-jump rail-gun head-shotting style of twitch play. But age does compensate in some small way, and I increasingly find that I’m much better able to study, anticipate and work with the bigger picture in mind nowadays. It’s this reason alone that stops me unsubscribing Planetside in tears; I’ll lose a one-on-one with shotguns in a tight corridor every time, but know enough about the game’s ebb and flow, to have usually placed a high explosive booby trap in that corridor several minutes before the chap with the shotgun shows up, or be waiting a long way down the corridor with a sniper rifle instead, and so I maintain satisfaction, if not glory, in that way.

Not that the two skills are mutually exclusive, of course, and the really uber leet godly players are those who can combine 16-year old reflexes and 60-year old foresight.

WoW turned out to be no different, and after watching briefly, I realised that the whole thing resembled a somewhat anarchic game of Rugby or American Football, rather than a war, and as a slow moving, short ranged, heavily armoured tank-type of class, my skills would work quite well in the ‘goalkeeper’ type of position. So I spent the majority of that match unashamedly camping our own flag, while our speedy Rogue types went off to grab theirs, and the rest of the teams brawled indiscriminately somewhere in the middle of the valley. I came about 15th that match, out of 20, but more importantly, beat down several invisible Alliance ninjas trying to sneak a grab at our flag, so felt usefully important anyway. And we won again, disproving my earlier fears. It seems that I’m quite capable of pulling my own weight afterall.

The two sides fell apart after than, so there was no third match, and emboldened by my success, and a small but significant number of new 'Honorable Kills', I headed down to the Crossroads to try a serious go at some PvP in the ‘Real World’. More on that later, but the Carebear Verdict on Battlegrounds? A lot more fun than I was expecting...