OOC here, just to address a few things. ((I'd make an IC write up, as well, but Xen and Aro have that covered better than I could do, heh. Rusty on my writing.))
If you're roleplaying as a bitter member of your faction that has so little respect for the avatars on the opposing side, then be original and manually type an original emote that your side can read. You can freely disrespect the characters, but /spit comes across more often as disrespect for the real human players on the other side of the monitor.))
Problem with that is the other side can't really /see/ any of those emotes. Its all "strange gestures" to them, and chances are folks won't even be around to see that. Pretty small window before folks even release to get a point across, at that, and the varying in game emotes are a quick tool for that. Nothing about it being lazy or unoriginal, really - heck, we were having non-stop IC banter throughout the entire thing.
Just explaining the problem with that, of course. You're right in that the vast majority of players take it as an ooc insult, whatever the intent - heck, I know someone that uses it as a PVP taunt, just to get folks to focus him instead of healers, and it works without fail. As such, personally, I tend to avoid it myself (I find it distasteful enough too, but I'm not going to tell anyone not to, unless they're spamming), opting to play up the whole forsaken bit and use emotes like hungry, lick (when targeted on one's self, you lick your lips,) and cannibalizing folks. Conveys a nice IC disrespect, much harder to come across as an OOC flip off. Only time I really will ever spit on someone is when they're being a griefing prat, really, and I want them to know well sure how much I think about them, which isn't generally related to pvp events and the like.
Gotta disagree with you on the bit about planting banners and flags, though, and personally think that's being a bit overly sensitive, but to each their own, and all.
On to some other stuff, the Goddfrey thing - he actually only had like 4k health, and was balanced around level 18s, so someone having him out for the quests didn't change much. I think they died a few times to AoE, even. We just played it off ICly as my mirror images, since Godffrey is dead lore wise, and all. Still, was kind of amusing, heh.
Addressing an angry whisper I got the other night that I didn't much have time to respond to before they logged off, on the subject of blueflagging, I can quite assure you we made an effort to avoid any of that - I hate it, and made sure that anyone whose flag dropped would put it back up, so I'd appreciate to not be called a blueflagger. For the bit about it being tough on lowbies, yeah, but that's just the nature of the game these days, really. There's such an exponential difference every set of "expansion levels" jump that there's not right a lot one can do anymore without being a certain level in pvp events. Tried not to pick on the little guys too bad (key word too bad there), and tried to keep folks off them when they weren't doing anything (not counting things like summoning or rezzing, that makes you a target) but it is pretty fun to try and blow them up in more creative ways every now and then, so long as one isn't being aggressively proactive about it. (Which I personally tried to avoid, but I know at least one person was at it.) Long story short on that, don't want to discourage lowbies from participating, but they better be sure to expect to die, quite a lot. Silly to think otherwise, and if they're going to get upset about it, they should probably wait til they're closer to the level cap.
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