Going to the Dark Side

A few months ago the WoW Guild which I'd belonged to for over three years collapsed and I ended up rolling a Horde toon on the server where my sister and her family play. With me being in Los Angeles and them being in Australia, unless they log on before dinner I don't normally see them in-game except on weekends. But this isn't much different from my former Alliance Guild where most of my Guildmates reside in North Carolina or other east coast states. I'd log on at 9pm, being midnight their time, and I'd be just in time to say good night to most of them. My Horde Guild is pretty much the same as my former Alliance Guild, although perhaps reversed. Just as I'm getting ready to call it a night, my Horde Guildmates are getting home from work and logging in. Sometimes the more things change, the more they stay the same.

One thing which never seems to change is the infamous Barrens Chat. The Barrens is a central area in Kalimdor where almost every teen-level Horde players finds themselves, and when they encounter Barrens Chat which is comprised mostly of Chuck Norris and Your Mom jokes ("Who would win if Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee fought? YOUR MOM!") most players level up and get out as fast as they can. But I've noticed another constant about the Barrens, particularly the hub town known as The Crossroads; Alliance players seem to be constantly attacking it. Constantly, as in you cannot even fly through the Barrens without getting an Alert Message that "The Crossroads is under attack!"

The Alliance-equivalent of Barrens would be Westfall, and while the Horde did attack Westfall and Sentinel Hill many times that I experienced, it was not the almost constant badgering that occurs in the Barrens. Alliance seem to be there every single day.

I think part of the explanation for the reduced Horde activity in Westfall is that the only Instance there is the Deadmines and only Alliance get Deadmines quests, whereas the Barrens has three Instances (two of which cater to level 25+ players) and a Neutral Goblin-run town, so there is an abundance of quests available for both Horde and Alliance players, but this doesn't explain why lvl 60+ Alliance players feel compelled to attack The Crossroads on a daily basis. I have a couple of Alliance toons on this same server who have been through Westfall, and it's definitely a one-sided affair with Alliance being the aggressor and attacking Crossroads far more often than Horde hitting Westfall.

This weekend I rolled a Blood Elf Mage but I decided I didn't want my Mage to have an Ostrich mount at 40. I decided the Undead's Skeletal Horse would be a far more appropriate mount, but to get the Horse I need to do A LOT of Undead quests. While I had done the Undead's starting area of Brill before, I'd never worked through the entire Undead side of the map and done all their quests, so this was also a way for me to satisfy my ""Explorer" side and get a bit more out of WoW.

While doing the Undead quests this weekend I noticed that, just like in the Barrens, there is frequent Alliance activity in Tirisfal Glades. Again it seems like this area is under attack at least once a day. I can understand the Alliance presence in Tirisfal Glades because the Scarlet Monastery (a very popular lvl 30-40 Instance) is located here, but that doesn't explain why Brill and other lowbie areas get attacked. Bored Alliance players, perhaps?

When WoW first came out Blizzard were very careful to stay away from painting Alliance and Horde as good and evil, even thought it is a game of Humans & their allies versus Orcs & their allies. What I find interesting is that the people playing the traditionally "good" side seem far more inclined to attack the traditionally "evil" towns, than vice versa. I'm not saying Horde don't attack Alliance towns and high level Horde players don't grief lowbie Alliance players, because they do, but in my personal experience it is the Alliance, or the "good guys", who are the aggressors in this War.

This is only in my personal experience, and is based on observations from just a couple of servers. It's entirely possible that if you play Alliance on a Horde-dominated server that Westfall, Darkshire and Goldshire are constantly under attack, just as The Crossroads is on my server. I've seen Horde attack and kill the NPCs at Sentinel Hill, and I've seen them tear through Darkshire and kick back in the Inn, knowing nobody currently present could defeat them, but these occurrences were few and far between, but again, maybe that was just on my servers.

Many Horde players say they prefer Horde because there's far too many kids playing Alliance. While the infamous Barrens Chat may be a good counter to that, the rebuttal is the almost daily sight of Alliance players descending on Crossroads and the almost constant alert "The Crossroads is under attack!" It could be argued that many MMO griefers are not kids but are actually bored 30+ y/old guys with far too much time on their hands and not enough to do, but if we change "kids" to "immature people" then it might still be true to say that most of the immature people are playing Alliance, Barrens Chat being the exception, of course ;)

*Disclaimer - I'm not saying if you play Alliance that you're immature. I played Alliance for three years and will attest that there are fantastic people on both sides of the game, and Barrens Chat is certainly a classic example of the immaturity level of some of the Horde players. This is my Blog and these are a just few of my observations, and remember, there are exceptions to every rule.