The Last Alterac Valley

"What's this, George? Are there no movies left on the internets besides WoW-related ones?"

There are, but this one is different. This one is from the server I'm playing, and you can even see my character in it. For a second or so. But that's besides the point.

Last Wednesday, a new patch introduced several changes to the World of Warcraft, including massive changes to the battleground everyone loves to hate, Alterac Valley.

For the uninitiated, Alterac Valley (AV for short) was designed as the most "epic" of all WoW battlegrounds, with 40 players on each side fighting over a large map, with several NPC's (non-playable characters) to fight along the way. It didn't always work, as it has been changed half a million times already, and it's always a pain to fight when you don't know anyone in your group. Even more so when everyone else is speaking Italian.

But it was a great place to fight when you had a lot of friends on your side, and especially when there was a leader than could organize attacks. Stealth teams, gathering reinforcements for the Wolf Riders (think cavalry) or the War Riders (think bombing runs), and let's not forget the huge boss that you could summon after significant effort, which got stronger with each player it killed.

Yes, AV was fun. After the last batch of changes was announced however, some of us were disheartened to hear that most of these NPC's would be removed. For that reason, we decided to have one last fight in the "old" AV, one in which we planned to completely dominate.

More than 30 of us joined, the fight lasted a little over two hours (it might sound like a lot, but the old old AV fights sometimes lasted more than twenty) and it was an almost flaweless victory, though we did lose one Lieutenant near the end. He was properly mourned.

All in all, it was tremendous fun, the kind of conflict I had in mind when I first heard about PvP battles in WoW, and not the low-impact skirmishes we get nowadays, but eh, what can you do? I'm just happy I took part in this one.

The forum thread (including some screenshots) dealing with this can be found here, and the movie page here. You can see my character a couple of times in the movie (look ma'!) though it's always at the graveyard, after I had died yet another time :P. My character is Gilraukoris, a Blood Elfette, in case you're curious.