So much for Alterac Valley. With the Battleground Holiday this weekend, it was expected that a lot of players would be queuing up to farm their Honor points. I had looked forward to a lot of combat and hopefully rack up those Honorable Kills in the hopes of inching closer to the magic 100,000 number for a future Achievement. I know I said Alterac Valley was the place to farm HKs. Well, I was wrong.

Alterac Valley is the Battleground to join if you want to avoid PvP. I've been part of countless Alterac Valley races before, but these past few days have been ridiculous. Not only do players ride past each other -- that's expected in races -- but in the times I have engaged, players even run away. If they had Achievements already in the game, I would have unlocked The Sickly Gazelle over and over.

If you've been paying close attention to the Wrath of the Lich King Beta -- and let's be honest, how could you not? We've been covering it like crazy over here are WoW Insider -- then you might have noticed that Blizzard will be implementing a nifty little feature called Achievements. Of course, the first thing that jumped out at me (and probably you, too, since you're reading this column) were the PvP Achievements.

I didn't plan to pursue Achievements actively. Not before I heard about the PvP Achievements, anyway. Now, it's one of the things I can't stop thinking about... more accurately, I can't stop thinking of how to complete them. There are quite a bunch of PvP Achievements to pursue, and most of them will only be tracked once the expansion goes live. But there are also some achievements that you can start working on right now because they'll be tracked retroactively (as far as I can tell). Let's take a look at those Achievements so you can get them out of the way before Wrath.

One word of caution: all these Achievements are in beta and can change at any time before (and possibly after) the Wrath launch. So proceed at your own risk.

In an era where clicking on the wrong link while browsing the web could mean your account will get hacked, and one of your guild members clicking on the wrong link means your guild bank could get emptied as well, it's always good to protect yourself and keep abreast of web security issues.

In that vein, it's worth checking out a new report released by McAfee called Mapping the Mal Web Report Revisited. It tested 9.9 Million websites in 265 domains to find out which ones had a higher risk of exposing visitors to malware, spam, and malicious attacks via a red, yellow, and green system.

I'm really excited that we'll be posting about Hello Kitty Online. I took some time to check out their fantastic Dream Studio. Dream Studio is a great resource for displaying your graphical talent to the Hello Kitty Online readers. There are many really fun videos in the Dream Studio, and everyone is welcome to share their creations. It's free to join the Hello Kitty Online community at Sanriotown.

I found this video for XO-Man. This movie is a part of a series of Hello Kitty and Friends Adventures videos. I think XO-Man is the best super hero ever! He has all of the characteristics I look for in a super hero. He's brave, cute, and strong. Most importantly he wears a cape and he's got a plan. I love the part where he knocks back all of the big, mean alligators in the video. I love that he's totally looking out for the little guy. XO-man, you're my hero!

Animal-Lover showed multiple talents in the following video. Not only can she make a super pretty video, but she can bake beautiful Kawaii Kupcakes too. She describes her video as "Cute and lovley cupcakes that I have baked all by myself."

Check out all the amazing talent over at Dream Studio!

And by honor I don't mean the honor-as-currency system that's currently in the game -- I mean a sense of personal honor as in, there are things you make a conscious decision to avoid doing just as a moral gesture.

I thought of this recently after a truly miserable losing streak in Arathi Basin. I wound up in three consecutive matches with a full complement of 15 Alliance players to 7 or 8 Horde (with both sides being PuG's, mind you). Being out-numbered and out-gunned sucks no matter what, but it's made immeasurably worse in places like Arathi Basin and EOTS due to the dwindling number of sites you'll have to rez when your side is being utterly destroyed. There was one particularly awful game where the Alliance decided to see how much honor they could get from us before the inevitable 4 or 5-cap ensuring their victory, and simply zerged us in the graveyard as we rezzed (or tried to). The feeling was made worse by knowing, having also played Alliance in BG's, that Horde would almost certainly have done the same thing had the situation been reversed. PvP is the subject of a lot of emotional dicussion in the WoW community as a result of situations like these, and I think we can all agree that it's not the losses that drive you nuts so much as knowing that the game is full of places and times where no amount of strategy or skill will keep you alive.

There are a lot of things in PvP that I just don't like being a part of.
I don't attack fellow Druids unless I'm attacked first (yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but a surprising number of Druids subscribe to this). I don't join in when an enemy player is obviously being dog-piled. I don't /spit on opposing players or do other rude emotes, and I don't participate in griefing. There's not much about WoW's PvP system that's really all that fair to begin with, especially when compared to games more explicity designed around PvP combat, but in the back of my mind there's still that notion that your opponent should at least have a sporting chance. I risk being called a hopeless carebear for this statement, but I think "honorable kills" are a lot more enjoyable when there's a measure of actual honor involved.