11: Vault: World Of Warcraft Assassin Girl

Summary

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The Bert Show – Episode 11: Vault: World Of Warcraft Assassin Girl

Date: February 11, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the addictive nature of the video game World of Warcraft (WoW) and its impact on relationships—with a unique, tongue-in-cheek mission to “assassinate” a listener’s boyfriend’s WoW character to win him back for his girlfriend. The Bert Show cast (Bert, Kristin, Abby, Cassie, Tommy, and others) riff on the perils of online gaming addiction, the mechanics of griefing in WoW, and organize a playful yet elaborate plan with their listeners to disrupt one devoted player's in-game life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. World of Warcraft: Addictive Gameplay and Its Impact

• WoW's Allure: The hosts discuss how immersive and time-consuming WoW can be, leading to real-world relationship issues.

  • Bert: “People are spending hours and hours and hours a day on it. ... Everything else in their life is fine, but he’s just consumed.” (03:39)

• Gaming Mechanics & Frustrations:

  • Running jokes about trying to put pants on gnome characters and failing basic combat controls.
  • Jeff’s struggles: “I don’t know how to swing my sword. I don’t know how to swing my sword.” (01:49)

• Difference from Retro Gaming:

  • Discussing how character death in older games forced players to restart, whereas WoW lets you resurrect and continue.
  • Bert: “Those days are over. Now if you’re in World of Warcraft and you’re building up this character for years... you basically start from where you were right before you died.” (03:05)

2. Listener Dilemma: Love vs. WoW

• Holly’s Challenge: Listener Holly calls in, upset that her boyfriend’s WoW obsession is ruining their relationship.
  • The cast proposes an “assassination” of his game character to reclaim him, sparking further listener engagement.

3. The 'Griefing' Solution: Assembling an In-Game Hit Squad

• What Is Griefing?

  • Allison (listener/expert): “Yeah, you can’t kill somebody forever, but you can pretty much make their life really, really difficult and really, really annoying.” (04:38)
  • Griefing involves repeatedly targeting a player to make the game unplayable and frustrating.
  • Allison adds: “If you have a large enough group... there’s literally no time that he can be on where somebody’s not gonna annoy him.” (06:12)

• Organizing the Attack:

  • The show plans to recruit a “griefing guild”—listeners who will ambush Holly’s boyfriend in-game every time he logs on.
  • Allison’s advice: The more griefers, the better, especially because his guild may come to defend him, escalating the ‘war’ (06:34).

• Technical Barriers:

  • Challenges like server restrictions (must be on the same server), having multiple characters (alts), and PvP (Player vs. Player) rules addressed.
  • “If he’s got different alt characters, like several different characters, he could... log off of the one you keep killing him on, and then log on to one of the others. ... So basically, his girlfriend would need to tell us every character name he’s got.” (08:56)

4. Memorable and Humorous Moments

• Debating Assassin Names:

  • The team debates what their in-game assassin’s name should be:
    • “There has to be a female assassin name, like Boris, Lena, Nikita...” (10:13)
    • “How about Melissa?... Melissa’s such an evil name.” (10:50, 10:53)

• Listener Debbie Calls In:

  • Debbie discusses her own experience with gaming, her massive guild, and the limits of the griefing strategy:
    • “You’re never gonna get rid of them. A true dedicated WoW player is not gonna leave.” (12:35)
  • Reveals the real-life impact: “My brother’s wife is leaving him this morning because of his game.” (12:46)

• Pantless Gnome Running Gag:

  • Ongoing cracks about the difficulties and absurdities of acquiring pants for gnome characters.
    • “Can your husband loan me some pants?” (08:26)
    • “I saved all the emails from people who wanted to give me my pants.” (14:29)

5. Community Engagement and Next Steps

• Recruitment Effort:

  • The show asks listeners to join in the ‘mission,’ and coordinates with Debbie and Allison to lead the griefing campaign.
  • “Let me find out more of the information on Dude’s character, and I’ll email it to you today. And then we will start recruiting assassins to grieve him every time he comes online.” (11:04)

• Gaming Culture Commentary:

  • The crew pokes fun at the sometimes-obsessive dedication of WoW players, encouraging them to “enjoy the sun” as an alternate activity.
    • “Perhaps they could go outside and enjoy this ball of fire in the sky called the sun.” (14:00)
    • “Don’t be ridiculous. Now you’re just being ridiculous.” (14:10)

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Notable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• On WoW Addictiveness:
  • Bert: “He’s just consumed. So, the idea was, find a World of Warcraft assassin ... kill dude, be done with him. And then Holly would have her boyfriend back.” (03:39)
• On Griefing:
  • Allison: “You can pretty much make their life really, really difficult and really, really annoying.” (04:38)
  • Cassie: “It’s called griefing.” (05:15)
• On WoW Marriages and Relationship Drama:
  • Debbie: “My brother’s wife is leaving him this morning because of his game.” (12:46)
• Pants Gag:
  • Jeff: “Can your husband loan me some pants?” (08:26)
  • Debbie: “Sweetie, I can make you some pants.” (13:41)
• On Sunlight and Real Life:
  • Cassie: “Perhaps they could go outside and enjoy this ball of fire in the sky called the sun.” (14:00)
  • Bert: “Don’t be ridiculous.” (14:10)

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Important Timestamps

• [01:00-03:20] – WoW’s structure, addictiveness, character death, gameplay mechanics
• [03:39] – Holly’s Relationship Struggles & the 'Assassin' Mission Proposal
• [04:17-08:18] – Allison explains griefing; organizing the in-game harassment
• [08:56-09:38] – Explaining multiple characters/servers and how to adapt the plan
• [10:03–11:12] – Choosing assassin names; organizing the attack with Allison and Debbie
• [12:35–14:10] – Debbie’s warnings; real-life impacts of gaming; jokes about sunshine and real-world alternatives

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Summary & Tone

The episode is light-hearted, irreverent, and full of gamer in-jokes, making fun of both their own (lack of) gaming skills and the wild world of MMOs like WoW. Jokes about pantsless gnomes, guild drama, and “griefing” serve as a comedic backdrop for a real-life look at how online games can impact relationships. The Bert Show uniquely involves listeners not only as callers but as direct participants in their playful (and slightly mischievous) WoW intervention plotline.

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Show so we got to talking about this video game World of Warcraft a while ago and this thing, I mean it sure sounds like from the outside looking in this can can get pretty addictive pretty quickly.

[C]

Yeah, if you're simple minded.

[B]

Jeff has been.

[D]

He's just jealous because he couldn't get pants on his gnome.

[E]

Or a gun.

[D]

Or a gun.

[C]

It sounds so creepy.

[D]

You couldn't get pants on your gnome.

[C]

On your gnome. I can put pants on my gnome if I wanted to have a panted.

[B]

GN on Worlds of Warcraft. It's a little bit too advanced for him. We saw him get killed by some boorish looking thing after you tried to put your sword in his butt.

[C]

I didn't.

[B]

He did poke his.

[C]

That's how you killed him.

[D]

Well, what I thought was funny is watching him because we did off air see him fight this boar with his little pantless gnome and then I love the words given in Jim's mouth. I don't know how to swing my sword. I don't know how to swing my sword.

[C]

Which should be easy considering I'm not wearing pants.

[B]

In this World of Warcraft game. And again, we are just, we are simply amateurs talking about this. But people are spending hours and hours and hours a day on it. And you build a character and you try to get to different levels, you can actually pay to get to different levels. Also can actually hire people to play for you.

[D]

Well, I think the little stuff like finding the pants and things that could get boring to a player that, you know, wants to do something more advanced like the fighting or, you know, searching on a quest for something specific. They. Yeah, they either have a family member. We've heard of people using their children to level up their characters, they call it. Or like Bert said, hire somebody to do it.

[B]

So the idea was if you're, you know, if you're. If you don't play World of Warcraft and you're not aware of the rules of the game, you know, back in the day when you played a video game, when your character died, you were done and you had to start the game over again.

[D]

Right?

[B]

Yeah. Those days are over.

[C]

And you had. Remember when you had three lives?

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

And there would. As you become better and better at a game, there'd always be a point where you would have to get with your first life or else you would reset and start over. You know what I mean? Like. Like if a Super Mario, if you don't get through level four. Four on your first Mario, screw that. Reset.

[D]

Right.

[B]

Those days are over. Now if you're in World of Warcraft and you're building up this character for years at a time and you get killed. I don't know, they have like this little ceremony for you where your little gnome type creature sort of fades out. Then you go to a cemetery and then you start basically from where you were right before you died.

[D]

So you're gonna resurrect. You have to go find your body.

[C]

Yeah, it's just like real life. You just gotta walk from the cemetery. You just walk from the cemetery to your corpse and you stare at your little dead pantless self and you're whole again. Yeah. And you push accept on the computer and there you are. Hey, what's up? No pants. But I'm alive. Come on, boars.

[B]

Which absolutely killed what I thought was gonna be a really, really fun storyline that we could have had on the show for weeks and weeks and weeks. And this girl Holly called us up and she said that her relationship is deteriorating because of this game. Her boyfriend is on it all the time. Everything else in their life is fine, but he's just consumed. So the idea was find a World of Warcraft assassin in our listening audience. Just send him up to level 42, kill dude, be done with him. And then Holly would have her boyfriend back. Well, we got a ton of emails from people going, it just doesn't work that way. It's never going to work. But I believe it's. Is it? Ashley? Allison.

[F]

Allison.

[B]

Allison.

[E]

Hi, Hi.

[D]

Hello, Allison. How are you? Good enough?

[F]

I'm good.

[E]

Good. How are you?

[D]

Good. I'm glad I didn't jump out of a plane today, but I'm good.

[B]

Alison was one of the few that emailed us and said, you know what? I think there is something that might work.

[F]

Yeah.

[B]

All right, Allison, let's hear what you have, because I would really, really like to pull the trigger on this.

[E]

Okay. Well, yeah, you can't kill somebody forever, but you can pretty much make their life really, really difficult and really, really annoying. And I got the idea because my husband actually does this to acquaintances of his. Basically, he and a group of friends have two targets that anytime that they see them online, they all group together and kill them over and over and over until the guys get so angry they don't want to play anymore. And that's basically. I mean, it's funny. Basically it's funny.

[C]

It's called griefing.

[B]

It's called what?

[C]

Griefing.

[E]

It is called griefing. And in order for it to work to its fullest extent, you have to be pretty dedicated to it often enough so that it becomes pretty much pointless for them to even log on because they can't do anything they want to do. And then sometimes when you die, you have to run a really long way to your corpse, and that gets really annoying. And so eventually they'll just be like, screw it. I'm not going to do it anymore.

[B]

We've had people suggest this idea before, but they did it in a way where they were only going to recruit, like one or two people that would go online. So what you're saying is the more in the grieving guild or whatever you want to call it, the better off we'd be. So if we got 30 people that were interested in being part time assassins at any time, their. Their assignment at any time is as soon as dude signs on and we already know his screen name and all that stuff, as soon as he signs on, it would be their job to find him out and then just harass the crap out of him.

[E]

Exactly that. That's exactly it. And if you have a large enough group of people, that means that there's literally no time that he can be on where somebody's not gonna annoy him.

[C]

It's a good point.

[B]

Pretty much.

[E]

So how I think it can work, I really do.

[B]

How many people would I have to recruit for this to be a successful mission?

[E]

I don't know. I mean, you can do it with as little as like six people that are just like hardcore gamers. That are there all the time. But the more people, the better. I say just as many as you could possibly get. Because chances are this guy's in a guild. And so after a while he's going to want his friends come defend him. So you got to be able to like put up a fight. You know what I mean?

[B]

See, that's exactly what I'm hoping happens. Because the way I'm hearing this happen is dude goes online and we have some of our assassins call up and say, look, it was an all out assault yesterday. The dude just ended up signing off. And then a couple of days later we check in with him and then they tell us that he got all of his guild fellows in on it. And then we create a war within some level of World of Warcraft to kill this guy off.

[E]

That will totally happen. And you know what, you can also actually like record it so you can watch it later.

[B]

Really?

[E]

Yes.

[F]

Yes.

[C]

Now what happens if he's not on that level that allows player to player combat?

[E]

You can kill anybody no matter what level they are. I'm pretty sure that this guy is level 70.

[C]

No, I mean not level, but there's different.

[B]

There's player versus player. There's player.

[E]

Yeah, well, that's definitely consideration. If he's not on a player versus player server, the only thing you can do is throw harsh words at him.

[B]

He is, basically. He is.

[C]

Throw harsh words at him. You're not wearing pants. Stupid gnome.

[D]

Gnome.

[C]

He is gnome man.

[B]

In fact, what I would like to do is can I send you the information about his character that I know?

[F]

Okay.

[B]

And then you'll be able to tell me if it's possible to do this or not. But I do know he's on one of those PvP type deals.

[E]

Do you know the name of the server? Because that's a big factor too.

[B]

I do. I just don't have it in front of me right now. But it has been sent to me.

[C]

Can your husband loan me some pants?

[E]

Well, that's basically all the information you need. If you know the name of the server he's on, anyone that's on that server can contact you or people that are really hardcore and really want to help you out. Can't transfer from whatever server they're on. It's just that's not free. So, you know, they'd have to be really hardcore.

[B]

Becky was calling up, but her phone went out. Let me throw a question at you that I have zero knowledge on. She says won't work unless assassins know all his characters. What does that mean?

[E]

Well, that means that if he's got different alt characters, like several different characters, he could, like, easily log off of the one you keep killing him on, and then log on to one of the others. So basically, his girlfriend would need to tell us every. Every character name he's got, and then they can put all of them on their list and basically kill all of.

[D]

Them and go search them, and then.

[E]

They'Ll really irritate us.

[B]

Search them all out. I love it.

[C]

And what if he has multiple characters on multiple server things?

[E]

Well, then that's more of a chance for people in your listening audience to be able to be on that server and go kill him. I mean, especially this cross server. This guy won't know what to think.

[D]

I like this woman's attitude. I do, too.

[C]

I like the use of the word cross server. Yeah, I can handle a cross server assassination no problem.

[E]

Yeah, I'm a nerd.

[B]

Alison, can we use you as our chief assassin?

[E]

You can, but I no longer play, so it would be my husband who would be doing it. But I can talk to you because he won't talk to you.

[F]

He's nervous.

[B]

Okay.

[D]

Okay.

[B]

We are going to need to assign you a better assassin name than Allison.

[E]

Okay.

[B]

And I'm not exactly sure what that is yet. I'm sure you and your. No, it's World of Warcraft.

[C]

It's Boris. Boris is our assassin name. Yeah. There's no better assassin than Boris.

[D]

There has to be a female assassin name, like, Boris, Lena, Nikita, or, I don't know, something.

[C]

Killers, Russian.

[D]

I don't know. They always are. In the Bond movies, she sort of.

[B]

Are Lara Croft, but you don't want to get your video games all mixed up.

[F]

That's true.

[B]

You don't have to come up with. I'm sure your husband, who's really into Warcraft, will come up with some that will turn him on.

[C]

How about Lucy?

[A]

Lucy?

[C]

Doesn't that seem violent?

[B]

I got one. Abigail. How mean is that Abigail?

[D]

I wonder if, like, people in Russia or. Because I was thinking of, like, some other, like, Anthony. Do they use American names as their assessment?

[C]

How about Melissa?

[E]

Melissa's such an evil name.

[B]

Yeah, it is. Don't we know it. Yeah. All right, so let me do this. Let me find out more of the information on Dude's character, and I'll email it to you today.

[F]

Okay.

[B]

And then we will start recruiting assassins to grieve him every time he comes online. And then Holly will eventually have her boyfriend back.

[F]

Sounds great.

[C]

It's not grieve. It's grief. Grief. Grief.

[B]

Grief him.

[C]

So just give him grief.

[E]

Exactly.

[C]

Hey, you Warcraft man. You're gonna throw this ball of fire.

[D]

At you, at your pantless nose.

[C]

You got grief from me and all my guild.

[B]

All right, Debbie, throw one at us. Why isn't this gonna work?

[F]

I don't want to be a Debbie Downer here.

[C]

But that's your name.

[E]

Yeah, no, he.

[F]

I mean, if he gets set up with it, he can go to Blizzard, record him.

[E]

He can change his name again.

[F]

You know, he can go to it, he can change his character over to a new server. And I mean, my guild, we have almost 300 people, so most of them are. We wanted to turn around and gang up. We could take them out easily. You know, it's not about, like, you.

[E]

Know, being the winner. It's about giving them a hard time. And the good thing about it is that we have somebody on the inside, his girlfriend, who can tell us if he changes his name or move servers. Yeah, whatever. We can find him no matter where he is.

[C]

I don't know if you heard our assassin, our chief assassin, Beth, but we could go cross server and take him out. It's not about winning. It's about going cross server.

[B]

These girls rock, dude.

[F]

You're never gonna get rid of them. A true dedicated wow player is not gonna leave.

[E]

I mean, my brother's wife is leaving.

[F]

Him this morning because of the game.

[C]

Hold on a minute. What's that?

[F]

My brother's wife is leaving him this morning because of his game.

[B]

Really?

[F]

It's ridiculous. I mean, she begged and begged him, and I had to chill out. I mean, you know, my husband was getting kind of, you know, mad at me, so I don't been on it for like a month, but, I mean, my family's all on it. Like I said, we formed two guilds together. Serves over 300 members. And. Jeff, I even sent you an email and said if you were serious about wow that I would walk you through it and not help you get your pants.

[C]

I have an issue. I have an issue because in the part, you know, because obviously I'm married to Jessica, Jessica Shops, and they wanted 12 boar pelts for one pair of pants. And she explained to me that I can go to a different server and go to TV PJ bore pants and get the same pair of boar pants.

[D]

House O boar.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

How's the boar pants? I could get the same ones for only four pelts.

[E]

Sweetie, I can make you some pants.

[F]

Just get in contact with me.

[B]

Debbie will all 300 of your guild family. Would they be willing to help?

[E]

Oh, I'm sure they would.

[F]

They're always looking for something to do.

[B]

Because some I know are going to be so hardcore, it's going to go against their World of Warcraft craft. Integrity.

[C]

If they're looking for something to do, there's no integrity. Perhaps they could go outside and enjoy this ball of fire in the sky called the sun. I mean, like the real sun.

[B]

Don't be ridiculous. Now you're just being ridiculous.

[D]

Don't be stupid.

[C]

Perhaps they could hop on that two wheeled vehicle called a bicycle and enjoy some good family time with those who love them in the real world.

[E]

Well, Jeff, I don't know if you.

[F]

Kept it or not, but you do have my email.

[C]

All right, I'll look for it.

[B]

Do you have it?

[D]

Because if not, freaking it.

[B]

Do you have it?

[C]

I saved all the emails from people who wanted to give me my pants.

[B]

Debbie, will you resend one today? Because I want to send this guy's information out to both you and Allison.

[F]

Okay, I'll email you. No problem.

[B]

Thank you very much.

[F]

Yeah, we've been playing this game for like two years now. I've got all different kind of characters. I've got Horde characters. I got one named Dreadster. That's really wicked. I like playing the Horde too.

[C]

That's cool. We didn't ask.

[A]

The Birch Show.