Blood Plagues and Endless Raids by Palumbi Anthony

Author:Palumbi, Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2017-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

Offense: A Tragedy in Three Acts

The server Detheroc opened along with the original flight of PvP servers at WoW’s launch. Named after a demon from Warcraft III, it never attracted many players. However capriciously players picked their servers at the launch, an accelerating dynamic soon emerged: those servers with established and successful guilds attracted more players, fueling those guilds and further waves of fresh rerolls until Blizzard had to lock them. Detheroc suffered from the opposite effect: nobody ever put together a really successful organization, so ambitious players rerolled elsewhere. It was an invisible little backwater.

That very fact made it an appealing destination for a particular clutch of friends. They’d started playing WoW to do battle with their fellow players and found a home in the Alliance guild Retribution on the Arthas server. In time Retribution became famous for their hardcore raiding exploits, and this group of friends felt disenchanted. They weren’t having fun anymore, spending all their time on PvE rather than PvP. Rather than quit the game entirely, they rerolled to Detheroc for the opening of battlegrounds with a plan: assemble the greatest PvP guild on the server, an unbreakable squadron of elite badasses capable of dominating the realm. Shunning PvE pursuits, they promised each other never to go back to raiding. A warrior by the name of Intrepid led them.

It worked. Naming their new guild Offense, the friends quickly leveled to 60 and began accumulating PvP gear. They found their Horde opponents spirited but woefully disorganized—an ideal combination, as they were easily defeated but continued to gamely queue up for the massacres, feeding CP to Offense. As for their fellow Alliance, they deferred to the acknowledged finest players on the server. Offense won so much, they needed no cartel. Though his character hadn’t even existed on Detheroc at the Honor System’s inception, Intrepid became the server’s first Grand Marshal. The next seven Grand Marshals and ten of the Alliance’s first twelve were Offense players. It was a viciously efficient engine for minting rank 14 players. Offense hummed along, harmonious, universally victorious, and might have remained so for a very long time had it not been for the unforeseeable intrusion of outside forces. Detheroc’s low population status inspired Blizzard to name the server as a destination for free character transfers from the high-population Sargeras server. Many players, sick of the crowding and latency and login queues that came with life on a popular realm, took them up on the offer. Hundreds immigrated, including entire guilds who’d debated the possibility for months beforehand. One of those guilds was T K T.

We landed on the shores of Detheroc as conquerors. That was half the appeal: after the cutthroat competition and overcrowded cities of Sargeras, Detheroc promised a whole new world to ravage. The first night, we stood en masse atop the broad-roofed bank in Orgrimmar’s central plaza bedecked in our finery, dancing or hopping in circles around homemade campfires.6 The “natives” could barely believe their eyes. Nobody on Detheroc wore raiding epics, certainly no one in the Horde.

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