Roleplaying is fun when done in context to the environment. However, what is occurring here is no different than looking and my rotting corpse on screen and pretending I didn't actually get infected by the plague and am in fact a perfectly normal human that just happens to be on the skinny side. Maybe even a feathered foul floating across a pond, aimlessly gulping down guppies I spy beneath myself. There is clever, and then there is idiotic.
If he/she (I'm leaning toward he personally) wants to pretend he is a high elf, there are plenty of other games out there that have that as a playable race. WoW is not one of them. Frankly I like RP'ers in general and I think its pathetic when idiots like this give them a bad name.
Do note that I don't disagree on the stupidity of the said high elf.
Roleplaying is not always fun when done in context to the enviroment. The world of Warcraft is static, neverchanging and whatnot. It equals boring. It's a boring world. In time, the roleplaying also gets boring.
Pulling off a high elf is not hard. Roleplaying that everyone started in the same starting area is bullshit. Might aswell say "I grew up in teldrassil, and now I'm 100000 years old" as a night elf. It simply doesn't cut it.
High elf = Highborne that did not follow Kael'Thas, and therefore has to find other ways to deal with the addiction. Pretty simple. Blue eyes? Sure, why not? Why limit yourself with the shitty models Blizzard provided us with? There's a LARGE difference between "changing" the eyecolor and pretending your undead looks like a perfectly fine human. That's why many roleplayers use(and misuse, egads) flagRSP and other addons that helps spicing up the roleplay.
I'll give you a similar, but less used example in my own main, Elanos.
Born in a cave in winterspring, raised as a bear, stolen, raised as a tauren. Shapeshifting was there from birth, and as he was born by a druid in bear shape he spent the years before his capture as a bear. I developed that into a split personality case, where the bear mind stopped developing when the Tauren mind started.
My point is, you add minor tweaks to make your character a bit more fun to roleplay. You don't go over the top(I don't think our elf in this case has) and give yourself the ability to track japanese schoolgirls and fetch them with your tentacles.
Everyone wants to be special, some people just massively overdo it.
Hrm, reading this over I'm not sure how much sense I'm making. Oh well.
Edit: I swear, it didn't look this big. o_O
I'm here to hurt your feelings.