Perceptions, or "Is The Enemy Always The Enemy?"

I have a slight problem.

I view the alliance as people.

It's a problem because many of my horde guildmates don't.

It's not that they don't realize that the alliance is played by humans, it's just that the only alliance they experience on a regular basis are the vilest part of alliance society. So my friends see alliance and think "monster" rather than "person."

It has been bandied about, usually joking but always with a serious undertone, that all alliance are evil and should be killed whenever a red nameplate appears.

The thing is, I've played both sides and both sides have gankers who make everyone miserable. But 80% of my PVP server doesn't actually gank. Most of your populace is in cities getting ready for raids or doing transactions or queuing for things or leveling something, not out in the world trying to find someone to grief.

So I don't agree with anti-alliance or anti-horde sentiment. Anti-really-mean-people, sure. But I just can't get behind blanket generalizations for (and retaliation toward) a whole populace just because their biggest jerks bother you.

On a PVP server, you want to kill the people you don't like. But there's no way to interact with those people, so you don't always know if you'd like them or not. (Some, yeah, you know. But most of the people who get attacked are minding their own business.)

Next, we come to the issue of being outgeared. Even if you find the worst people on your server and have the chance to attack them, what is the possibility of outgearing them without massive time and effort expended into acquiring resilience?

On a PVP server, if you want a chance at survival when someone decides to bother you, PVP gear is a must.

It's also a massive time sink. If you don't have time to gear out properly, trying to kill people for revenge or just to be able to defend yourself is an exercise in futility because I guarantee the worst gankers will have some of the best gear.

Then, finding the gankers you hate the most takes time and effort that isn't always worth it. Many gankers, when faced with an equal or superior match, are cowards and won't give you the satisfaction of a fair fight, and when you're ready to fight them they aren't always in a convenient location waiting for you.

So why does anyone in my guild still think that PVP servers are where we should be when, at the end of the day, nobody wins?

Everyone loses. Particularly the people who have better things to do than run around trying to grief others, and who can't defend themselves because they don't have PVP gear.

So this is yet another reason I want my guild to move to a PVE server when the game allows entire guilds to pick up and transfer. Because I hate the animosity bred by the worst of each faction and taken out on the people who did nothing wrong.

If I had to leave one final thought for my guild and the people in it who like PVP and view alliance as some sort of twisted game of whack-a-mole, it would be this:

The ability to fight over a resource node isn't worth the crap the rest of us have to put up with. Your delight in the "surprise" of world PVP should not be able to trump my right to play in the world unmolested.

If you want to stay on a PVP server, feel free to argue your case when the guild discusses it, but do not assume for a moment that I will not do everything in my power to escape.