Anti/Hero

For the Horde!

Baned, of Twisting Nether's top horde-side raiding guild, Borrowed Time, echoes Flaareon's sentiments. "I like Horde because, growing up playing Warhammer computer games, I always loved the Orcs," he says. Unlike "min-maxer" Flaareon, his fellow Orc fetishist's faction choice seemed purely cosmetic. Could it be that my assumptions about the innate villainy of Horde players were just as superficial?

Despite my initial problems with getting anyone to speak to me out of the dozens of raiders I'd queried, everyone I did speak to was rather polite, with little in the way of negativity levied at the opposing faction or their place on the servers. It wasn't what I had bargained for - my examination of how and why people chose to play Horde had turned into some amount of endearment for the ugly miscreants.

I had only one course of action left: I would interview my worst enemy, Toxxi (or "Merciless Gladiator Toxxi, the best druid in the world!" as he referred to himself on the realm forums). Not necessarily my arch-nemesis, but rather the realm's arch-nemesis, Toxxi was the faction's most notorious griefer, and the receptacle into which I poured my most raw feelings about the Horde. If there was a holiday going on in Goldshire, Toxxi invariably did his best to ruin it.

I searched online for Toxxi's Armory profile ... only to find it absent. Had he changed his name? I wondered. Impossible - anyone who tried so hard to cultivate an outlaw persona wouldn't dare discard it. An inquiry in Trade chat was met with several cryptic responses which were of little or no help, including, "YOU ARE NOT TOXXI!" in all capital letters. No, I'm not Toxxi, but I needed him to hang this piece on, to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Horde players were the angry, socially maladjusted halfwits I'd pegged them as.

Eventually, someone sent me a tell. "Dude, Toxxi quit playing like four months ago." My villain was an apparition. Someone else offered me five gold to sign his guild charter. I sighed and accepted.

Jonathan Glover is a writer living on the East Coast.