"The recipe calls for a full cup of PvP - is 3/4 cup OK?"

Well, no. For doing School of Hard Knocks, Blizzard insists that you really need a full cup of PvP. Whether you like it or not.

Now, I'll be honest - I do like PvP, or at least, like it as much as a primarily PvE player can. Just last night, I got my 1000 Honorable Kills achievement on my main, Ms. Arcane Mage. I've actually got a set of PvP gear; not the best, but it's gemmed and enchanted appropriately. I love nothing more than to spend some time in Wintergrasp, mining and farming. Wintergrasp is, in my mind, just the right thing for world PvP... a place where the rewards are a bit greater, the risks are a bit higher, and you get to dive into a bloody big brawl every couple of hours. Loads of fun.

In contrast, I absolutely despise battlegrounds.

Well, most battlegrounds. I haven't tried Strand of the Ancients yet, nor... um. Whatever the island battleground is in Wrath. That's how uninterested I am. While there's a decent chance that I'll drop what I'm doing and pop into Wintergrasp when a battle rolls around, it's an almost mathematical certainty that I will never bother to hit any battleground I don't actually have to be in for some reason.

The primary reason is the players.

I was in the Navy at one point. My first assignment, I was a junior officer in a very visible division. This was on board a ship commanded by a senior captain bucking for admiral. Nothing was ever done to his satisfaction, and he was sometimes... colorful... in letting you know that you were, in fact, made of fail. Repeatedly. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure we had a least one psychiatric discharge as a result of his repeated verbal castigations.

Dealing with him was pleasant compared to your average chapeau-wearing posterior in a WoW battleground. Seriously. You guys complaining about bad PuGs? Hit a random battleground and follow something less than an optimal strategy. Even better - if there are two possible things you can be doing (capturing a flag, capturing a tower), pick one. You'll be told in detail, with explicit references to your sexual orientation and practices, why you're an idiot for doing A instead of B, and how you're doing A wrong in any case. Oh, and how, thanks to the fact that you didn't do B, your side is definitely going to loose the battle, and it's all your fault.

Unfortunately, I had to spend 3 hours in battlegrounds last night to get the first three parts of the achievement. Fortunately, that translated into only about 8 or 9 battlegrounds... and while the first experience in any particular battleground was less than stellar, I managed to get lucky and and find cooperating Horde/Alliance groups in subsequent runs.

Even then, though, there were the inevitable "lol don care 4 your achieve ima kill horde n00b" mouth breathers who tried to screw things up because... sheesh, I don't know. Because they're immature childish idiots who get off on griefing others? In any case, their idiocy gave me another achievement. It's not one you can see in game on the armory; so you'll have to trust me when I tell you that last night a few fellow achievement hounds and I all got the "Applaud An Undead Shadow Priest For Melting The Face Off Of A Complete And Utter Dirtwad Of A Teammate" achievement...

Hopefully I'll luck out and find some cooperative groups in the Eye of the Storm tonight, so I can say goodbye to battlegrounds for a good long while.

On the plus side: since I couldn't handle nine consecutive battlegrounds without actually killing someone with my bare hands IRL, I ended up taking breaks after each achievement to cool down and let Aeven run around Searing Gorge. By the end of the evening, I had not only picked up 3 out of 4 parts of the School of Hard Knocks, I had also managed to get Aevern a full level! Yep, she's 54 now, and pushing into the end of the vanilla WoW content.

Of course, since I wasn't paying attention, I'm going to have to assemble a group by hand to finish up Marudon. That should be interesting. Aside from that, though, I'm happy that Aeven is sailing right along at nice clip, headed for the Outland.