/yell, or "Help Me and I'll Give You Stuff"

Non-Gamers' Guide to This Post

/yell is a chat command that sends your text over a broader area and turns it red, so it shows up brightly among the softer-colored chat text.
Realms are just different servers you can play on, so that one server doesn't get overloaded with people. Everything (land, quests, etc) is the same on each server, but the players and sometimes what you can attack (just enemies or other players) are different. Anvilmar and Fenris are realms.
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I used to run Birdfall on Fenris. I'd gotten her up to level 15, but my family and friends decided our Alliance characters should be on Anvilmar, and I was too cheap to pay $25 to move one Night Elf. So I said to myself, "Self, how can I benefit others when I delete this character?" So I went to the cave with the spiders, in Aldrassil, the very first Night Elf area, and yelled "Help me! Help me! Please, someone help!"

Elves ran by me, sometimes twice. One of them came up and took the chest I was standing by. But no one spoke to me except for a girl who was on my friends list, and she was in another area. I waited and chatted and occasionally yelled, but no one came and no one whispered. I told my friend what I was doing, and she laughed when she heard how people kept running by.

She laughed because I'd told her that I was going to give them all my stuff if someone helped. I had sold most everything. I had in my backpack: two 8-slot bags and a little over 1 gold in cash. But no one came. No one at all. The boy who took the chest beside me, eager in his greed, passed up the larger prize by ignoring me when I asked, "Are you here to help me?"

So I went to the next town, and I found the mailbox. And I said to myself, "This is never going to work." So I sent the one person who'd talked to me, the one who hadn't even been in the same area, my two 8-slot bags and over 1 gold in cash.

"This was an interesting social experiment," I'd yelled as I left the cave, informing everyone of my little ploy and what they might have won. "Thank you for failing."