Just a little preface:
I'm sure some of you have thought about this. World of Warcraft has one core problem that makes character progress less fulfilling than real life progress: The world around you doesn't change. No matter how many times you kill animals, you can never extinguish their species, conversely there is no point in somehow growing any of them as cattle. No matter how much you mine out minerals fro the ground they'll be back sooner than later, same with the vegetation. No matter how many times you kill the one big baddy in a raid instance, nothing in the world changed whatsoever. Even going out of your way to kill people relentlessly or kill everything in an enemy town will become a completely moot experience in less than an hour. It gets old and frustrating, definition of sterile and barren really.
So I conducted a little experiment to remedy the problem:
Given that I play a variety of classes across both factions (in Anathema), between Sunday and Tuesday I decided to try something that would leave a more lasting effect and force people to deal with my own doing. So I targeted a number of Alliance flight points across Southern Kalimdor and disabled them for extended periods of time. I believe my personal record was taking the Gadgetzan female dwarf who was out for well over 24 hours, with the one in Thalanaar reaching half that time, Theramore a couple hours and Cenarion Hold about the same. Varying degrees of success since I basically concocted my disabling strategy on the fly and out of pure improvisation and some flightmasters seemingly did manage to sort themselves out after an extended amount of time.
The results were nothing short of sublime:
Seeing dozens upon dozens of people successively loiter by an FP spawn point in a hopeless attempt to wait out the return of the NPC was hilarious. I had essentially stopped playing in this server seriously, for several weeks now and focused on other real life activities, but these last 2 days allowed me to have a high degree of amusement as I logged back and forth from characters, and I saw the reactions and complaining of people in Alliance regional and world channels. Having several of them log out in pure frustration (some even offered me for free the conjured water he had just paid for in Ironforge to play during the evening, but decided it wasn't worth riding several areas), really gave me the one thing this game had yet to deliver: Lasting repercussions for my actions that affect other people.
I spent about 1/5 of my gaming time these last 2 days actually disabling the flightmasters and the other 4/5 in the Alliance towns and cities just relishing on people's frustration, complaining and logging out several times in a row out of frustration and giving up on the evening.
Best part about it?
All of this can be done entirely on your own, with a moderate time investment. Knowledge and thinking through how to disable the paths is the real work, and it's thus an exercise in pure creativity, as well as subtlety in execution. The Theramore FP for instance recovered from my first disable after 2 hours, so I had to rethink a new method for it, with the second one lasting all the way till server reset.
There is no need to deal with the worst part of this game, other people's mistakes, insufficient skill level or personal dislikeability. I'm sure plenty of you reading this are now part of a 40man raiding guild where there are several people whose guts you cannot stand, and secretly hope they'd just quit the game and left the spot for someone who, for lack of better words, is less of an insufferable loot whore. There is also no need to deal with the mediocrity of pvp teams where you are either constrained by the timetables of your premades or you are left to deal with half-afking, barely thinking pick-up teams unable to read, interpret and execute messages.
Complications exist but are manageable:
By far, zone phases are the biggest hurdle to overcome, but once more it all just provides more obstacles for your disabling method to overcome.
Other people on occasion might catch wind of you fighting their flightmaster, and will attack you, screwing up the whole thing, but it's also fine, just pushes for more subtlety doing so as well as timing correctly when to sneak in and get the FP. Theramore was an illustrative case with the seemingly fortified town being actually empty and defenseless most of the time, with the occasional large surge of people coming from Menethil once the boat docks in. More timed variables to tackle.
So what next?
I am unsure to what extent I'll continue doing this in Anathema, but I am open to the possibility of trying more generalized lockdowns of parts Kailimdor as well as Eastern Kingdoms. For one, disabling Kargath + Stonard + Grom'gol + Booty Bay seems largely feasible, thus putting all of Horde's FPs in the southern half of Eastern Kingdoms out of order.
If anyone has also tried this, and I don't mean the lazy and short-lasting chain killing fps every 10 minutes, I invite you to try as well. It would be an interesting sort of competition to see who can cut the highest amount of flight points for the longest amount of time. Some I tried weren't particularly lasting. Everlook Alliance FP I could take down for about 30 minutes only before it was back on its spot for instance given how rough the area is.
Thanks for reading, and remember:
All the Grief is fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPNrTBZTJ5U&t=1m37s
