Looking back on Children's Week PvP

Earlier this week there were quite a few post about relating to Children's Week and in particular the achievement School of Hard Knocks. I made the decision to give it a few days before writing my post relating to this subject as, if I'm being honest, I felt that I needed to calm down an collect my thoughts first. Having said that, even now, I struggling to coherently present my thoughts in a written format but here goes.

My goal for this years Children's Week was to finish of the meta achiev For the Children which would require me to complete Hail To The King, Baby and School of Hard Knocks. Completing Hail To The King, Baby was easy but the latter PvP related achievement was a completely different story!

I started the week with a real positive mental attitude towards the PvP achievement. I have dabbled in PvP but nothing serious. I had no PvP gear but have a couple of spider pets on my hunter which I believe are better suited for PvP due to their webs (or so I am led to believe). My experiences of PvP hadn't always been good ones. Generally, I have found it to be infuriating and not something that I enjoy. But still I was determined to do it...

My moment of madness

Initially I only had orphan whistles on my mage so thought I'd give PvP a go with her. A couple of battlegrounds in and I had a moment of genius that quickly turned to panic and slight distress. I was in Warsong Gulch and headed straight for the Horde base. I was the first person there so I thought "I'll pick up the flag". As soon as I got back outside of the Horde base they were after me, chasing me up the hill. I hadn't really thought about the whole point of this BG and that, naturally, the Horde would want to reclaim their flag!

I was able to make it back to the Alliance base but unable to place the flag anywhere. Not knowing what to do I asked someone who was guarding the base who was really nice and told me I needed out flag to be returned first and that given my lack of (PvP) gear I probably shouldn't have picked up the flag - which I totally agreed with! Soon after a Tauren one-shotted me.

I now look back on this particular event and think it was quite funny. A moment of madness possessed me to boldly grab that flag and I did make it back to the Alliance base. It was just unfortunate that our flag has also been taken.

The incident

The rest of the weeks PvP was not so good and I had a minor incident in Arathi Basin in which I was called a "retard", which really angered me. I was stood at the gates watching the clock count down. Once it hit zero I headed straight for the nearest base (the stables I think). I got to the flag at pretty much the same time as someone else - we're talking as in there was milliseconds in it. We both started capturing the base and this person said to me something along the lines of "can't you see I'm already here retard" and then when the captured it before me (again by milliseconds) said "I told you retard". Now I held my tongue and didn't say anything back but I felt it was completely unfair of this person. It was just plain rude in my opinion which leads me to question:

Is the achievement fair?

I think this question gets asked quite a lot by PvP novices, such as myself, that simply want to get the achievement. I think it is a viable question because it really does put a heavy emphasis on the need to not only partake in PvP battlegrounds but to complete set tasks. Yes, it is a challenge which I certainly prefer to something being stupidly easy but for me the emphasis is just to heavy. It would be fine if the achievement wasn't part of the meta For the Children which is in turn part of What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been.

I'd also like to also look at this from the point of the PvP player (i.e. someone that regularly PvPs). For them I am sure that Children's Week presents a nightmare! A week where battleground's are full of noobs who have no idea what they're doing and are only in it to meet their own needs and not that of the team. Personally, I know if I were in their shoes I would be extremely frustrated at people potentially ruining the game experince for me.

How did I do at hitting my goal?

I manged to complete 2 out of the 4 sub-parts of the achievement: "Capture the flag in Eye of the Storm" and "Assault a flag in Arathi Basin". I'm fairly happy with having completed half of this horrendous achievement. And to be honest by Sunday evening I was lacking the motivation to try any further at completing it. I think that next year I will probably try to tick off the other two parts but I will definately be more conscious of how I am impacting on PvP-ers in-game time!