He suggested that I start a toon on his server. I then suggested he start a toon on my server. I got a page-long rant about how bad Alliance is, how terrible PvE servers are, and so on and so forth. Having spent a year as Alliance on a PvE server, it was easy to realize how incredibly biased and misinformed he was. But he wouldn’t budge.

So I started a toon on his server. I leveled up until the low 20′s and ventured off into contested zones. The experience was horrible from then on. I remember one night in particular, I was ganked in Hillsbrad then camped until I had to spirit rez and book it to another zone. Headed to Thousand Needles – ganked, camped, spirit rez’d. Headed to Stonetalon Mountains – ganked, camped, spirit rez’d. Then I headed to Ashenvale – ganked, camped, spirit rez’d. Within two hours, I had killed less than ten mobs and completed zero quests.

I ended up abandoning the character when he “quit” the game. A few months ago he un-quit and said I should pick the character back up. Since he was on a new server and the character was level 30, I decided to re-roll from level 1, which gave me the chance to switch races as well. I leveled all the way to 60 being ganked less than ten times. All in all, I probably lost half an hour of leveling all the way to 60.

Basically, I have three years of experience on a PvE server, and only a few months on a PvP server. I can say, however, that I’m still not a fan of griefing, at all. I haven’t killed anybody let’s say five levels lower than me or more and I haven’t ganked NPC’s in lowbie towns. Maybe it’s my PvE server perspective, but I’m just not interested.

However, I recently transferred my Warrior there and am having a blast. I’m finding it to be a lot easier to find people to group queue for BG’s and people willing to add you to their arena team for a week to get points. Maybe it’s because the server is ranked in the top 10 overall in the US, but I’m also finding it easy to find groups for just about everything.

Long story short (too late!) I definitely agree on the griefing side of the equation. If there was a rule that a high level player could not be the first to initiate combat with someone significantly lower than them (maybe 5-10 levels or more lower), I think that would work well. However, I am loving the general atmosphere. I’m more of a PvP-focused player and the general atmosphere caters to that.

The only *real* PvP I ever did was when I was playing Lineage 2. That stuff was hardcore. There were no factions and basically anyone could jump you. Atleast with Horde you kinda have a warning, Horde may gank you, Alliance cannot. With Lineage 2 *anyone* could be a killer. And they had a lot more means of griefing too. They’d camp respawn points and town entrances. Its horrific. Thats why I chose to play on a PvE server when I started WoW.

But all my friends, and my awesome guild, is on DB, so I can’t make myself leave. However much I would love playing horde on Moonglade…

Started a rant there – remember this ain’t my blog, tis yours, thought I’d best delete it =D

I’ll leave it at I agree
.-= Vok’s last blog … Times Are A Changin’ =-.

When I first started playing, I joined a pvp realm, I didn’t know much about it myself but one of my good mates who was also going to play told me about how if you play pve you are a carebear and you’re not getting the full game experience.

I’ve had some particularly horrid experiences with PvP when I was a noob, or even just when I was playing my priest and didn’t know how to play the class as well.

However I still agree with my mate who got me to roll on a PvP server. It’s part of the ingame experience, without which you wouldn’t really have the full experience of the game.

Being on a PvP server you realise that you need to treat the other faction with a certain amount of respect.

You’re going to cause an “incident” if you steal herb or mining nodes while someone is fighting mobs, or tagging someones quest mob when they have been obviously waiting for it to spawn for ages. If it were a PvE server, you’d just do these things and who cares, not like they can do anything back to you, hell they can’t even /w you and abuse you for doing it!!

The only time that a problem really occurs on a PvP server, is when the balance is uneven, when they are significanlty higher level or much better geared/skilled than you. Or if they have the advantage of numbers.

But then, these are the great equalisers, I remember many an epic battle, where I’ve been outnumbered or a group of friends and I have taken down much higher level members of the opposite faction. These were probably some of my most fun experiences in wow. I still remember my first raid, it was world pvp when I was on Kil’Jaden, around 30 of us were camped inside an alliance town defending against maybe 5-10 horde who were ?? lvl. They were destroying us, but every one which we took down was a great victory to us, no matter the cost.

Rolling on a PvP server doesn’t automatically mean you are hardcore. All it means is that you are in for some ghastly leveling experiences.
.-= Shawndra’s last blog … Unicorns =-.