Children's Week!!! (Don't Be A Dick)

I am getting seriously annoyed with the attitude of most WoW players these days, and here is a prime example, in story form:

I clear my way through a tower in Alterac Valley with my Children's Week orphan in tow - capping a tower in AV is one of the 4 goals for the "School of Hard Knocks" PvP achievement for this world holiday. Another player follows me up, also with an orphan out - I know he/she is also making a bolt for the flag and this is a slight annoyance, since I was there first, put in the effort of killing the guards that were aggroed, etc. However, a rogue without an orphan zoomed in, beat us both to the flag (as I was still getting pelted by arrows) and proceeded to cap it even though both of us with orphans out tried to petition him to stop. I would've been a bit annoyed if the other achievement seeker had snuck by me and stolen my opportunity, but to have someone blatantly block our efforts was just plain rude. This experience was followed by several other failures on my account - getting stuck in combat so that I couldn't summon my orphan (while another rogue capped the flag without an orphan despite the protests of yet another person trying to actually do the achievement), trying to get credit for recapping a tower on defense (that should really count), getting my face smashed in by a ret paladin intent on interupting my flag cap. Fail, fail, fail. People seriously need to learn how to SHARE in this game.

Thanks to Alliance players making an extra effort to kill players attempting to cap towers with their orphans out, and thanks to other Horde players being dicks, it took a number of AV games before I was finally lucky enough to sneak into a tower with my orphan and cap without anyone noticing.

Achievements like this would be a total blast if people were not so dead set on cock blocking other players for fun. I know a lot of other people had nice cooperative experiences with this set of achievements, such as teams allowing opposing players into their Warsong Gulch base to pick up a flag, drop it (without being killed or attacked) and repeat until the team completed the achievement. It reminded me a little bit of my favorite pasttime when WoW first released - cobbling together simple phrases from numbers, symbols and punctuation in order to bypass the linguistic filter meant to keep Horde and Alliance players from communicating. It was hilarious and entertaining to see gamers put forth the effort to think their way around the game's intended social system. I wish I knew where I put the screenshots I took long, long ago of my Night Elf hunter chatting with some random Horde player as we assisted each other with a difficult group quest...