Messing with my Head

Just to remind me that an MMO isn't all sweetness and light, I encountered an Imperial L50 on Tatooine the other day.  Or rather, he sought me out.

You know the type:  the player that likes to mess with the lowbies.  In a PvP environment, they'd be the person decimating Tarren Mill or invading the Crossroads.  In PvE, however, if you don't attack them they can't do that to you at all, so they park themselves atop your toon, wiggling around, trying to freak you out in the hope that they cause you to mess up so they can gank you.*

I remember quite well one day, years ago now, when Quintalan was just reaching L20, and he was finishing up the pre-Cata Silverpine Forest.  This was back when I was on a West Coast PvP server, and I was quite aware of the free-for-all that awaited me when I crossed into Hillsbrad.**  Perhaps I wasn't thinking straight; it was 6 AM that day and I probably was waiting on my coffee.   I was at the gates to Shadowfang Keep, poking around and admiring the moon over the keep, when all hell broke loose.

I saw a flash of yellow bars and then the skull of a much-much higher level toon as he descended upon my young Paladin, jumping and swinging and yelling some nonsense in Common.

"Oh god," I thought, "I'm going to die.  I'm about to get creamed."

I quickly bubbled and then used my Hearthstone to get out, all the while praying that I wasn't going to get ganked in the middle of nowhere.

Once I'd Hearthed back to Silvermoon, I realized that I'd been had.  He wasn't going to attack me at all; I wasn't flagged for PvP, and I was in a Horde controlled area.  I felt incredibly foolish that I'd fallen for such a juvenile tactic, yet at the same time I itched to get back at him.

Fast forwarding to the present, I knew just how to respond to such idiocy when the Empire player tried messing with me.

I was in the middle of a quest that bordered on a Heroic area, so I was keeping an eye on my positioning.  The last thing I needed was having several elites decide to pay me and my Wookie a visit.  I was examining the next mob when my screen was filled with an Imperial on a speeder, bouncing and wiggling atop my Gunslinger.

"Oh great, just what I need," I grumbled.

My toon yawned and made a rude gesture.

"Hmmph."  I don't know what the guy expected, but he certainly didn't expect that.  The Imperial player stopped all movement for several heartbeats, then flew away on his speeder.

I sent a message out in Gen Chat about the guy, telling any fellow lowbies in the area to ignore him and he'll go away.  Because you never know if you've got a true newbie around, after all.




*Or, failing that, they attempt to kill the quest givers.

**Q was actually my second toon; a Blood Elf Priest named Gdaan was my first.  I manged to actually get him to around the mid-L20s before I finally decided on Q as my main.  (The reason for the strangeness of the name was simple:  I thought I could put in a ' in the name, and discovered that wasn't the case.  Since I didn't have a backup name to use, G'Daan became Gdaan, and that was that.)