Flush with not humiliating myself (or having it done for me) in Warsong Gulch, the next stop was The Crossroads in The Barrens. The Crossroads is a small walled village in the middle of the main Horde L10-20 development levelling zone, The Barrens. Most Horde players will spend a good week or so here in their early days, and The Crossroads is their main goods and services hub for the essentials, and loot selling. It also occupies a key point at the centre of the Wyvern air travel routes to the further away and higher level zones. This means that it’s often very busy, and mostly with L10-20 Horde players. This makes it an obvious Alliance PvP raiding target.

The timeline of the average raid is quite predictable, and interesting to watch unfold. A party of 5 or more Alliance players got off the boat from Booty Bay at Ratchet, the nearby sea port from Alliance lands. They jogged across to the Crossroads, and began hostilities, by attacking a Crossroads NPC guard or two. This does two things; first it changes them from a Bluename to a Yellowname – effectively completing their half of consenting to PvP. It also causes a zone-wide broadcast message to be sent out on the Horde’s ‘Local Defense’ channel, and a world-wide one on the ‘World Defense’ one, alerting any Horde who are listening, that something bad is going down at the Crossroads. Then they waited.

Initially, a few local Horde had a go. Those were people who are there anyway – L15ish or so…hopelessly outclassed. To engage, they simply have to target an enemy player with a yellowname, and attack. This then flags the Horde player as PvP enabled, completing the other half of the consent process. The yellownames then all turn red, other Horde see your name as green and its game on. The flagging lasts for about five minutes after you stop fighting other players, and then you go back to blue again, carrying on as usual. However, unless you make that first attack against a yellowname, you’re totally safe and can just stand right by them watching, and doing the /chicken emote a lot if that’s your thing. Many levelling youngsters tend to give it a go though, and die a lot initially, alone against the fury of five vastly more powerful and co-ordinated players.

Time passed, perhaps five to ten minutes, and the number of Horde who had gone green from individual suicide missions increased, and as well as local have-a-gos, passing L60s of our own started to show up – many having set their hearthstone teleporter to the Crossroads specifically for a fast response in just such a situation. I flagged up at this point, now things were a little more balanced, and a line of growling Orc and Tauren bodies was forming up at the gateway. By this point, the Alliance has passed the word also, and over the next ten minutes or so their five got reinforced, and very quickly the main layout had formed.

I’ve seem very similar at Taren Mill, an Undead village on the other continent (L20-30 or so), another popular Alliance raid target. I’ve yet to find out where we go to harass their newbies, but I gather it doesn’t happen a lot, and anyway, our own L60s don’t seem to take long to respond anyway. But once any sizable number of players are involved, ten or more a side, the same basic pattern seems to emerge, and it is a dance.

The most obvious feature is the two front lines, facing off against each other in a very Braveheart style, just outside of ranged attack range form each other. In the ‘rest’ state these are stationary, as members of each look for potential targets in the other; the injured, the lower levels, the healers, the unguilded, and both wait for one of the enemy to make the first move.

Then a clash occurs. One member of either side will get impatient, and push forward alone, into bow or spell range. This is extremely risky, as all the enemy lets rip on that one target, but this is often a feint. Things get chaotic after that, as the lone target then races back to his own line in the hope that some of the enemy follows into his own troops range. This often works, and all manner of close quarters carnage occurs as a result. It reminded me of the way lightning forms and discharges, and after a short scuffle, both sides withdraw back to the lines and the waiting starts again.

These cycles continue until one side loses enough troops to not recover from the next scuffle, at which point it turns into a running battle as the weaker side tries to flee to their nearest village to regroup. These basic dance steps are complimented by all sorts of flanking by hunters with bows, stealth attacks from behind by rogues, and the occasional kamikaze mage with massive area-effect spells, so it doesn’t seem to get stale, but the basic pattern can still be identified every time.

In many ways it did seem a lot like the unconscious tactics of a Planetside assault and defence, where there are rarely any actual orders or leaders, but where every grunt has done it before so many times that none are really needed. But it seemed different too – infantry battles in the open field almost never happen in Planetside. I considered this and realised why they were happening here – no air cavalry in WoW. You stand in a line in a field in Planetside and you’re asking to be rocket-spammed from on high. Fleshing out this reasoning a bit more myself, I realised that despite having no horse, let alone a hovering rocket-laden gunship, I would actually be the most useful as light cavalry myself.

The Warrior has a particular skill called Charge. It allows you to pick a target and literally sprint a short distance toward them, connecting with a blow that hits hard enough to stun briefly. So I adopted the tactic of running around in loops just behind our own front line of L60s (so that invisible people can’t backstab me – Planetside does has some transferable skills), and then every time one of the enemy troops over-extended, my Charge hotkey would light up to show they were in range, and I’d dive on them like some kind of human firework, quickly spam out a few more of my movement hampering special attacks, and then peel off and return to my circling, back behind our line, while the Charge skill cools down, ready for the next dash.

It worked well. At my level (30), vs theirs, I can’t realistically expect to go toe-toe with their big guns; often my special attacks would be resisted, and my normal attack greatly absorbed, but when I tried hit-and-fade, enough of them did connect, even with L60s, to cause them sufficient difficulties that they couldn’t then retreat to their own troops as fast as they needed to, and it left them stranded out in no-mans land long enough that our front row could easily catch them, lock them down and finish them off. At the same time, this meant I was exposed to the enemy artillery for the minimum time possible, often safely out of range behind our own lines before they could even tab-select me and finish casting the Big Bolt-O-Death.

All in all, quite exhilarating, and I soon noticed a couple of lowbie warriors like myself circling and peeling off for dive-runs on any Alliance that stuck their noses out, and three of us bodyslamming the same poor guy in quick succession generally left him unable to move, let alone escape. I doubt it’s a particularly revolutionary tactic, but I do get some satisfaction from arriving at it without having to look it up elsewhere. Of course it is counterable – simply set yourself up as ‘Counter-Cavalry’, and charge me as I charge them. It’s also quite tricky, and several times I found that I’d extended a little too far, or stayed spamming specials a little too long, and during the confused close quarter brawl phase of the cycle, my real danger was being caught in some nightmare L60 AOE Firestorm, or Ice Burst, which may be trivial to other L60s, but really hurt and often killed me outright. As a grey difficulty player though, I’m not worth any 'points' for most of them, so tend to be ignored a lot. Also, as a Warrior, I’m tactically not as an important target as a Healer, who do tend to be agro-magnets in PvP, so I died a lot less that I was expecting.

On the whole, outdoor PvP in WoW is mostly about the ‘Zerg’ – the large-scale rush built around superior numbers, much like Planetside, but I find I’m often a lot happier and less anxious about that style than one-on-one duelling. Skill has a place, certainly, but numbers more so. Ironic really, since Blizzard actually invented the term.

So all in all, an enjoyable weekend, and very much a case of not dismissing something until you’ve tried it. My final HK tally: 72. I have no idea if that’s good or not, but almost all of those were ‘Assists’.

I’d say my uncharacteristic enjoyment of WoW PvP comes down to three main factors:

  • No Smacktalk. Players on the enemy side are effectively unable to communicate with you. I like that – much of my PvP anxiety comes from the post-gank bitching, often either ‘HAHA PWNED U FAG!1!’ or ‘WTF??? HAX!1!’, neither of which is pleasant, necessary or desirable.
  • No Loss.Dying in PvP in WoW doesn’t set your main game back at all, and definitely doesn’t impact on your ability to PvP further. This takes a lot of the stress out of it for me, and turns it from a hardcore career specialisation, to an average midweek night gameplay alternative.
  • Lowbies Still Matter. Even a L1 has a chance of landing hits and specials on a L60. It’s easier if you’re L60 certainly, but at L30 I’m finding none of the usual abject hopelessness in the face of ultra maxed-out enemies. I’m there, and I am making a difference. This turns it from something you wouldn’t dare try until you’ve ‘finished’ the main game, to an average midweek night gameplay alternative.

Those are only my reasons of course; you may not agree. I feel like I’ve come full circle in my attitudes to PvP nowadays – from my giddy anticipation of an honourable sport of gentlemen that simply didn’t exist, through subsequent shattering, anger, disillusionment, paranoia, bitterness, fatigue, rejection, indifference, bemusement, curiosity and finally back to a sort of good-natured understanding that when it comes to PvP, it really is different strokes for different folks. There isn’t a right or wrong way to do it, merely varying degrees of commitment, different stakes, and an understanding of your own ‘comfort zone’.

To use the sporting analogy, I’d much prefer to just have a kick about in the park with jumpers for goalposts, than be striker during a World Cup Final, but most importantly, I no longer believe that everyone else should too...