Comic #178: Deserter (Patreon)

Originally published: February 22nd 2009.

I don't know if this one is still accurate to retail. Can you AFK out of Wintergrasp now? I think you can. I haven't done PVP in YEARS. Back at the time of this comic, in early 2009, I did a lot of PVP. I always hated players that AFKed out of battlegrounds, so this comic was likely me just putting Keydar in place of all those annoying players.

I think I often made Keydar the representation a lot of my annoyances with the player base as a way of making sure people knew it was tongue-in-cheek. Though I found sometimes people thought by using Keydar I was advocating for certain behaviors or playstyles. It ended up being a bit of a tightrope sometimes.

So I went into the comic file for this one and found a hidden layer underneath the green flag with this horde flag:

I tried looking at previous comics to see if I had used a horde flag but couldn't find any. Maybe some of you have better eyes and can find something I missed.

The other option I can think of is that I initially made a horde flag, thinking that like in Warsong Gulch PVP, you pickup the enemy flag inside their base, which would be the opposite faction's color. However, in Eye of the Storm, the flag is in the center and remains a neutral color throughout the game. Once I realized this I had to edit the flag. It just goes to show you, even back at the beginning of my comic, before the rise of social media, I was still afraid of fan corrections.

I do find it funny that I literally copy and pasted both horde characters from panel 2 to panel 5. Their expressions and everything.