'Honor' vs. honor

When Ideale first got to the Badlands a couple weeks ago, she was killing Dark Iron dwarves outside of Uldaman when a night elf rogue stealthed, came up behind her, stunlocked her while KILLING CINNAMON, and then dropped her. Considering that he was nine levels above her, I doubt it was very difficult for him.

He then proceeded to corpse camp until a group of Hordies wandered into the area headed for Uldaman, saw the situation, and took him out (thank you!).

Another time, while I was on my draenei paladin, I saw a blood elf pally and attacked. I realized my mistake when he simply stood there and shook his head while I bashed at him, and his health bar didn't move a millimeter. I stopped and thanked him, he gave me a hug, helped me kill some felguards, and wandered off.

It's bad enough that people will corpse camp for honor — seriously, you should not get any honor points for killing someone if you've killed them within the past five minutes, unless you're in a battleground — but people who feel the need to gank someone at the lowest possible level to still get honor are cowards.

I don't know how it is on other realms, but on both of mine, this seems to be a mainly-Alliance activity. (If I didn't know for a fact that there are Alliance out there who are both honorable and skilled, I'd snark that this is the only way they can actually win. But this isn't true — I ran into a VERY good dwarf warrior my level a few weeks back who won even after I got the drop on him, waited for me to rez, waved and thanked me, then headed off on his own way. And I have been ganked two or three times by high-level Horde on Laughing Skull, though I've never been camped there.)

(On second thought, the only people who've ever stolen a chest or mining node from me when I was fighting right on top of it were Alliance, too. Same with battleground whining. I think I've just gotten very unlucky in my interactions with other Alliance players, with the exception of instance pugs, where Horde has been generally awful with lots of ninja-ing and obnoxious e-peen behavior, and Alliance is generally pretty good.)

Now, I love PVP, and there's something very tempting about killing lower-level characters. VERY tempting. But aside from the single time I gave in (killed a really annoying gnome who'd followed me around trying to steal my kills for about half an hour, then did it again when I ran into him later while he was AFK ... I know, I was ashamed of myself after), I've never done it. Why? There's absolutely no honor in killing someone who can't kill you back, even if you technically get honor points from it. And RP-wise, Ideale (and pretty much all of my alts) has no reason to gank lowbies.

So today, when a gnome mage six levels below me tried to gank me while I was fighting dragonkin in the Swamp of Sorrows, I shook my head, pointed at the next captain, let him take the first hit, and helped him kill it. We took turns for about twenty minutes, waved at each other, and went our separate ways. And I felt good.