Here’s a bit of a weird situation that came up last night during some world PvP that I wanted to get some other opinions on. It’s no secret that I like the PvP, and I generally consider myself pretty fair and on the level as far as that goes. I won’t camp corpses, I don’t attack people many lvls below me out of no where, and I think tricking people into flagging who don’t want to be flagged is a big no no. However having gotten into a lot of real fights with people as a kid I think a lot of real world things apply – once the fight is on, it’s on and not getting your ass kicked is goal number one. With world PvP I’m about as stubburn as I am in real life as well, if you kill me I’ll come back and if you kill me again I’ll be back again and I’ll keep coming back until I kill you or until you run away. I might get pwnd, but you’ll remeber the fight.

So with this past weekend being bonus honor in WSG and Paineater being lvl 45 I was playing him a solid group of WSG runs back to back (We can do that horde side, neener!). I kept getting WordDefenseNotices that Splintertree Post was under attack – for at least an hour I was getting them pretty regularly in fact. When I finally wasn’t able to get back into WSG I decided to head over there and see what the action was. I pinged a few guildies and some said they’d be there as well. I got there first and found 3 lvl 55 and up alliance killing a whole pack of lvl 40 and under horde who had shown up for the fight. One of them was a lvl 60 Pally who I’ve run into numerous times in world PvP before he was lvl 60. In fact he must have been doing some serious grinding because last time I fought him he was only 2-3 lvls above me. And I smoked him! So anyway…

I get there before the rest of my guildies and flagg right away. Somehow I get the better of the lvl 60 Pally and with the help of the other people there already fighting and a Mindblast crit I take him out. However I didn’t see his two friends behind me and they killed me right away. Even a bad ass shadow priest like Paineater is no match for two lvl 60’s. I run back from the grave yard, res, fight a bit and get killed again. And again. And then my guildies show up along with some others. These guildies were lvl 60, and suddenly the attacking allinace wasn’t so hot on attacking. In fact seeing someone flagged their own lvl pretty much put an end to the whole thing and 2 of the 3 took off right away. The third was where things go tricky – he didn’t run away flagged on his epic mount like the others, he waited until he was unflagged, res’d in the middle of camp and started taunting those of us who were still there.

He was laughing and dancing, some of us were making chicken nosies and generally talking about how this guy must be a giant wimp to only fight people 15 lvls below him. Before anyone realized what was happening a lvl 43 rogue challenged him to a dual and he accepted – which I absolutely couldn’t believe. The rogue, obviously, pulled the oldest trick in the book. Started the fight, and then ran up next to a guard. When the alliance guy attacked, so did the guard, and he accidentally targeted the guard, causing him to flag at which point everyone jumped in. One of my guildies noted that it was a kind of cheap tactic and didn’t like it. This got me thinking.

In theory I agree whole heartedly – tricking someone into flagging who doesn’t want to be flagged and then killing them is bad. No question about it. But that seems to be in reference to a new fight – but what about a fight already in progress? I tend to think that once a fight is happening, it’s happening. Maybe I’m wrong? This guy had just spent the last hour killing players at least 15 lvls below him, some 20 and 30 lvls below. He’d killed me twice even. Sure we’d all opted into the fight ourselves, but he was standing dead in the middle of a horde camp and had come there flagged on his own so it seemed that he opted in as well. Waiting until he was unflagged to res and then taunting everyone seemed a lot like punching a guy in the face and then calling for a truce before he can punch back. I keep thinking about the situation, and I’m not sure what I think. How much does the situation at hand play into what is right and wrong?