Last week we took a look at some of the Battlegrounds Achievements that can be unlocked in Wrath of the Lich King and examined how they could change the game for the better. Goal-oriented Battlegrounds PvP is certainly something to look forward to in this age of mindless fighting in the mid-field or roads. Having Achievements certainly make it prone to the glory hounds, but it also helps to keep everyone's eyes on the prize.

Eye of the Storm
Because it's a new Battleground not associated with any faction (which makes me feel like I'm not fighting for anything worthy), there's no reputation to be gained and no associated gear to be obtained. This means that there are virtually no retroactive Achievements for the Eye of the Storm. There is the basic Achievement of Eye of the Storm Victory, which all but the most hapless and luckless of combatants will get. There is the Eye of the Storm Veteran iteration, which requires 100 wins in the Battleground. Not quite as easy to get, but most of us will get there eventually.

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.

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.

Everyone knows you can see your total lifetime Honorable Kills on your Armory profile. Most people know this number only shows up if you have at least 1,337 HKs (ha). But does anyone know who has the highest ever number of HKs? This simple question was the topic of Drifter's (US-Runetotem-H) thread on the forums; so far, the biggest anyone's found is 341,462, on a druid named Kuroma from US-Daggerspine-A. Can anyone beat that? Armory links or it didn't happen.

Update: We have a new champion already! Theplague, of EU-Frostmane H, with 411,701. Anyone want to step up to that?

Update 2: Fartzwrgoben (does that name mean anything?) of EU-Perenolda-A, a subtlety Rogue, handily tops that with an astonishing 560,878!