Good old days

Didn't get to play at all yesterday, had some RL aggro come up that needed my attention, but now that I'm questing in Hillsbrad again I got to thinking of the old days, before TBC, even before BG's, when Hillsbrad was one of the most contested zones in the game. Being on the Alliance side of things up until now I was only ever able to see it from that perspective. I remember flying into this zone, before continuous flight paths were implemented, landing with the intent of continuing on to the next flight path, only to find that the flight master was dead and there were dead bodies scattered all over the area.

The main goal of the Horde always seemed to be taking over the inn and camping out in there, and there was one time that I remember that they accomplished this, and we had a hell of a time getting them out. The tough thing about this situation is the only way you can really get them out is to kill them all at once and then stay inside so that they can't just rez inside again. The problem with this is the setup of the inn, with only one entrance they can just blast you if you come through one by one, so you have to zerg the place and hope you can overwhelm them. If they are able to hold you off, the ones you killed will rez back inside and you will have to start over from scratch. The only other defense was to wait until they got bored and left on their own.

Hillsbrad wasn't like STV, with the extent of PVP being random ganking across the map. Raids on Southshore and Tarren Mill were organized and fun to be a part of, even if you weren't really high enough level to do much good. This was really the first battleground, and is actually more realistic than how the BG's are now. No tower capping or silly objectives, this was flat out war, trying to take out a town full of enemies, showing no mercy. This is how I imagined a Warcraft MMO when I first started, basically instead of commanding all the units in your army, this time you are one of those units, but you have a lot more control over how that particular unit contributes to the outcome of the battle. I guess that sort of game wouldn't have gotten as big of a following though, and I'm not sure how they would implement the other aspects of the Warcraft RTS games, such as gathering resources and constructing buildings.

Now I find that I miss the raiding PVP aspect of Hillsbrad. Oh sure, every so often there will be a raid on Tarren Mill for old times sake, but it's not the regular thing it once was, and with so many PVP options right now that net you rewards, I don't think it will ever be the same.

It's been a while since I quested in Hillsbrad, and I noticed this to be the case as soon as went to turn in my quests at Tarren Mill. I kept seeing the defense channel announcing that we were under attack but when I got there I expected to see the town wiped out with a bunch of Alliance running around killing the lowbies and basically wreaking havoc. Instead, I found two Alliance sneaking around the town, avoiding the guards and killing someone every so often, not really causing too much trouble, and then a few Horde 70's rode in and put an end to them. Very anti-climactic from what I remember it being, but when you can earn honor and badges from other forms of PVP which will get you some good items, the drive isn't there anymore to raid towns in normal zones. I suppose it's nice to not worry so much about being ganked in the middle of your own town, but it always made for some fun surprises any time you ended up there. Seeing a raid of enemies try to charge into your town and watching another raid of your own faction holding them off was what I looked forward to every time I found myself in Hillsbrad. Now it's just a regular zone where the Alliance and Horde towns just happen to be pretty close to each other.

I'm excited to see the new PVP zone in the expansion and how that will play out. So far the world PVP stuff hasn't been that popular, but with new seige weapons and buildings you can destroy I think it might be a change of pace that everyone needs.