Citizen Azeroth: Full of sound and fury

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

Last night, the Ron Paul raid invaded Whisperwind. They progressed from Ironforge through the tram to Stormwind, to Westfall, to Booty Bay, to Ratchet, the Crossroads, and then where I believed they hoped to take group pictures in front of the gates of Orgrimmar. At Ironforge I counted 223 members of the "RP Revolution" guild, and they apparently picked up several others along the way, probably nearing 250. There were also a number of flagged 70 alliance "guards" with them.

Until I lost them in Westfall, I followed the "raid" along with my unguilded gnome warlock, just monitoring what was going on in chat channels. From the RP Revolution side, mostly what I heard was spams in shout, general, and /say that amounted to empty sloganeering. My favorite reply to the oft-repeated "a vote for Ron Paul is a vote for freedom" was (and I am paraphrasing here, because I don't have the exact quote), "a vote for anyone is a vote for freedom, dumbass". It was probably the most politically astute thing I heard all night, and I certainly heard a lot of people spouting politics. Or at least I heard a lot of vapid sound bites, which I suppose is what poses for politics these days.

Although there were 250 people on the server for the march itself, and there were probably far more who logged on to heckle (there was some organized heckling going on through most of the Ironforge to Westfall route that I could find, including a "RuPaul for President" group and several toons with variations on the name Hillary Clinton), I would guess that the vast majority were recent imports, because another effect they had was that there was a server queue over 400 people long. We haven't had a server queue since the servers were upgraded over a year ago. Whisperwind was undoubtedly chosen because it's one of the highest population server, with THE highest ratio of Alliance to Horde of any of the high-pop servers (85%/15%). I know several people who were late for raids because they simply couldn't get on.

Frankly, the whole thing seemed more like a cult meeting than a political rally. There were no issues discussed. Just a lot of spammy jingles about how great Ron Paul was. Honestly, to me, it came off more creepy than enthusiastic.

The lag was almost paralyzing in places, and I have a good machine with a top video card and 2GB of RAM. I feel sorry for anyone who was just trying to play their game in areas where this march went.

I lost the raid in Westfall and decided to camp to my Horde toon, since many of my guildmates were gathering in Ratchet to "meet" the raid.

"The truly epic moment of the night occured [sic] after getting off the boat in Ratchet: the mass of people walked up the road heading out of town to meet MANY high level horde characters, flagged! Fun times were had by all. I wish I would have gotten a SS but I forgot to do so. If anyone else did get one please post." - Acrile, a 70 human priest of The Twelfth Man, Whisperwind.

Most of the high level Horde on that road were members of my guild, The Collective, though there were a handful of other level 70 horde who showed up, plus more when we hit the Crossroads, and even more when we hit the gates of Orgrimmar. Yes, we flagged up, and we had a great time PVPing with the "guards" of the RP Revolution march. Incidentally, one of my guildmates on his Alliance toon talked to a couple of the high level Alliance who were escorting the raid. They said they had no interest in Ron Paul or his message; they were just hoping that the Horde would show up and they'd have some fun world PvP. Well, we gave it to them. As Acrile said, fun times were had by all. (The RP Revolution people spent a lot of time admonishing people not to flag, but of course many did, and the Horde was there).

The original march was supposed to have the RP members surrounding the Crossroads and dancing, but a large number of them belatedly realized that the guards have a pretty big aggro radius when you're talking about a lot of characters who are under level 5. The piles of bones outside the Crossroads were soon legion. (Not to mention I had my one and only death when I got jumped by about five level 70s, but even that was good times).

So they ended up running around Crossroads, giving it a wide berth, and running on toward Orgrimmar. We mounted up to meet them there.

"The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley"
(The best-laid schemes of mice and men often go awry)
- To a Mouse, Robert Burns

I did learn one extremely important lesson in front of the gates of Orgrimmar. It wasn't about peace or freedom or that I had somehow lost my mind and wanted to vote for Ron Paul. It was that by dueling a hunter and setting off his snake trap, you can kill a lot of unflagged Alliance. A LOT of them.

Here's a picture of some Collectivites, standing amidst the masses of bones that once were Alliance players.