The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
WoW: ill never forget it. This was BC expansion and as a Druid I had just recently unlocked flight as part of a huge questline. I was hopping around mining nodes farming for my Jeweler profession when I encountered a Druid nightelf. They had the upgraded bird form (320% speed vs 60%). I must have pissed this guy off or he was bored but he was just stalking me. Eventually he starts fighting me and we had a substantial level difference. I think he was 70 and I was 60. He was going to kill me but eventually I escaped out of combat into bird form. Of course he’s several times faster than I am. I had a sliver of health and a single moonfire would’ve killed me. I am just holding down space bar… Climbing into the sky. He fires off his moon fire. It should have killed me, but as luck would have it my headpiece gem had a 1% chance to reflect a spell. I had to read the combat logs to figure out what happened, but the spell hit him. The damage caused him to lose bird form and as he was now in combat he plummeted to his death. I landed. Danced around his corpse and went on my way. I could not believe what had just happened.
Ah WoW open World PvP Shenanigans.
In Burning Crusade Halaa was an open world PvP area in Nagrand that the 2 factions could try to control by having more players occupying it, giving them access to vendors. My Faction was less populated on my server so it was harder to get access.
One day shortly after server reset I went over to see if I could take control before players started logging back in. I almost had it when another player showed up to contest and we started chasing each other around. I was winning but they managed to break combat and get on the their flying mount, I followed them into the air but there’s nothing you can do without dismounting and falling to your death. However, I was a Warlock, which means 2 things:
So, I load them up with my DoTs, dismounting and falling as I do so. My DoTs kill them, I hit the ground and die, then stand back up and finish claiming the town.
I used this technique more than once on opposing players who thought they were safe in the air.