Or so wrote Robert Heinlein in Beyond the Horizon. The general idea was that, in a country where there were serious (and officially sanctioned) consequences to misbehavior from quarters other than the police, you'd wind up with a place where people really thought hard about whether it was worth pissing someone off just for the fun of it.

Whenever I'm reading about PvP, that quote always springs to mind. People who have played MMORPG's with more "hardcore" PvP systems have mentioned that the amount of random ganking you see in WoW just doesn't seem to occur on the same scale elsewhere. WoW's PvP is pretty consequence-free. Corpse runs are annoying, sure, and being camped is nobody's idea of fun. But you don't take durability or experience loss after a PvP death, and you don't lose money or items to the attacker. Nor does the attacker gain anything from killing you (unless it's honor if you weren't a gray target).

I'm sure we've all done it from time to time -- trying to get somewhere new, you've encountered heavy resistance from the locals and died a terrible death. Refusing to give up, you've run back to your corpse and continued on, until you're caught and killed again. Perhaps you thought you'd be smart and run to the spirit healer in your destination zone, far off from where you died, only to tragically see that you've been sent back to the location of the spirit healer closest to your corpse.

This does make traveling through areas high above your level quite the challenge -- as I'm sure they were intended to be. Die, run back, rez a bit further down the road -- then simply wash, rinse, and repeat until you've reached your final destination. However, over at Mania's Arcana, Mania provides us with two tricks that will allow you to do the majority of your traveling as a ghost. The trick? If you die on one continent and then spirit rez in the other (yes, you can ride boats and zepplins as a ghost!), you'll be allowed to rez right where you want to. And, perhaps more conveniently, if you run as a ghost to wherever you wish, disconnect, reconnect, and then try to spirit rez, you'll be allowed to.

Now, both of these little tricks smack of overlooked bugs, as the intended behavior of the game client is clear. But at present it is a working strategy in-game that can be used to more quickly move you from point A to point B.

WoW has a pretty lenient death penalty compared to other games. Ten percent durability lost and a ghost run to your body is peanuts compared to, say, forcing your naked self to run back to your corpse while that jerk who killed you loots all your items. Still, there are some pretty annoying corpse runs in WoW, whether due to inconvenient graveyards, bugged-out death spawns, or simple geography. According to this thread, the top 5 worst corpse runs are (in ascending order of annoyance, since the blog software won't let me do a Letterman-style countdown):

1. Blackwing Lair, Molten Core, UBRS, LBRS, or BRD. Not a long run, but probably the run everyone's done the most -- and we've all fallen into the giant pit in the middle and made 39 other people wait for us at some time.
2. Razorfen Downs or Razorfen Kraul. Set yourself on autorun and get a cup of coffee.
3. Coilfang Reservoir, particularly for Alliance. Am I the only person who can never see where they're going in the tunnel in ghost form?
4. Getting back to C'thun before they added a teleport near the beginning of AQ40. A 100 percent speed mount usable inside, and it still took five minutes of running through what looks like intestines.
5. The cave in Ravenswood in the northwestern part of Blade's Edge. Whoever designed that area should be forced to run through a maze with sharp pointy spikes on top of the walls until they collapse. I waited until I had a flying mount to do the zone since I had heard about the death runs, but dying in that cave is still a soulkiller.

What's your least favorite corpse run? Or what's the easiest? (Dying in Legion Hold in Shadowmoon Valley takes about 15 seconds for Horde, which is nice.)

While you may think that no death is a good death, some are definitely worse than others.  I can pinpoint my least favorite immediately - it was a full party of mid-40s players running through Jintha'Alor to finish making Zul'Ferrak mallets.  The final pulls as we approached our goal were level 51 elites, and quite challenging for our under-leveled group.  We finished and started heading out, to be met with respawns.  I, a cloth wearer, was taken out pretty quickly, while the rest of the group managed to run, and keep running, to safety.  I must say that extracting myself from this temple, swarming with angry trolls, was quite interesting.  But there are still other scenes that come to mind - instance runs gone wrong and particularly underhanded PvP tactics.  What about you?  Do you have a least favorite encounter with your friend the spirit healer?