The Cycle of Hatred

Someone in the TN official forum was jokingly complaining about the "Cycle of Hatred", which basically consists of the misapplied revenge taken on an unsuspecting member of the opposite faction.

Let me 'splain.

Beezlebot is farming clefthoof hide in Nagrand, minding his own beezwax. He's an alliance rogue, let's say. Over the course of a few hours, half a dozen horde have passed by. Most have ignored Beelzebot, some wave, some even stop and help for a few minutes.

Then, right as Beezlebot makes a kill, some horde hunter rolls up and dismounts. Well, considering what's already happened, Beezlebot thinks nothing of it, loots the beast, and then starts to skin it. Lo and behold! Horde hunter, Bucshot, sits back and aimed shots poor Beezlebot. Beezlebot tries to recover, but is immediately hit with a concussion shot, slowed by some pet, dazed and confused, and couldn't get to the hunter if he tried, which he did, and very quickly dies. Not much you can do with farming gear on vs. a hunter with a full pvp set who gets the first shot at you.

What, personal recount? Pshaw, naw, I'm just makin all this up, right?

Anyway, by the time Beezlebot gets back to his corpse (which takes a while in Nagrand), Bucshot has long since left to go find other victims. Beezlebot is like, damnit, and I always leave farming horde alone, damnit, that isn't fair. Damnit, I want some revenge.

So, Beezlebot creeps around, or flies around, and finds some other lowly horde, and GANK.

Thus it begins.

That lowly horde only saw exactly what Beezlebot saw. Some random alliance ganking him.

So, that lowly horde does the same thing in return, but not to Beezlebot. To some other alliance.

And soon, it's a vicious cycle that keeps repeating. Why? Because there's always at least one true, heartless, relentless ganker, and that's all it takes.

I'm not complaining about ganking. Just saying.

Well, in my case, I'm kinda like Beezlebot. But I make slightly different "revenge" choices.

Nagrand has some pretty intense PvP, if you haven't noticed. It can be fun and strategic.

Well, Bucshot, my friendly hunter that did, indeed, gank me, was nowhere to be found. But... there were plenty of horde to be had at Halaa. It was horde-owned, and they only had 1 guard left, which meant that they'd be trying to protect it.

So, I snuck on over to a wyvern post, and capped it.

Now... Nagrand pvp. For a rogue.

I'm not going to give away my strategy, sorry.

It's just too good.

Let me just leave it at this:

I did go flying once, to try to drop a few bombs and maybe hit Bucshot, but I couldn't find him.

When I returned, as I expected, there were a few horde waiting for me.

What I didn't expect was that there were six horde waiting for me!

Well, I didn't last long.

But, I returned. Ultimately, the score ended up something like this:

They killed me: 2 times
The number of total kills (and tokens) I got from stealthfully killing them: 13

I win.

The moral of the story?

I redirected my thirst for revenge at horde who were anticipating combat, and who offered a real challenge. It was much more satisfying for me to take out same-level horde who were engaged in pvp (especially when I was killing one of them when two other of them were trying to kill me) than it would have been if I had merely found some horde farming, and ganked that horde.

So, I ended at least my potential cycle of hatred by strategic redirection.