Replying to your last point - because the others were addressed by other posts.
Have you ever been in a Casual BG?
This character alone has been in 2,228 battlegrounds, the majority of them being casual BGs (at least according to the website’s limited statistics. I could have sworn it was more). I used to do them for fun. I would put up a buff that would give me an hour timer, and my objective would be to do as much damage as I could while not dying within that hour. Typically that meant going through several of those BGs - and I was pretty good at keeping myself high in the charts, supporting battleground objectives AND not dying.
Warsong Gulch alone accounts for 428, or 19.2% of those battlegrounds.
That is with this one character. I had others. So I think I have the requisite background to speak on this BG, and to state that your characterization of how random WSG battlegrounds go - while certainly something you can back up with a particularly bad go of it - is not representative of the experience generally.
Yes, other buffs do get used. Yes, most teams do some form of blocking and tackling, and yes, I feel that extra mechanics would get used. Regarding extra objectives - there are no extra objectives. These mechanics support the existing one.
I’m not sure if it’s really appropriate for me to drop in my doomer 2 cents since I’ve never liked PVP anyway, but I feel the same way as Frankenfiend and Azighan. It’s like that defeatest mindset in BGs of “oh just let them win” but on a meta level; I’d rather take a big fast L and move on than have a long drawn-out hypothetical “win” that I won’t feel good about and is keeping me from moving on to something else anyway. I don’t really have any interest in fighting the alliance, or protecting the horde (either NPCs or land). You’d have to drag me in there “against my will” ala the MoP legendary cloak questline if you’re going to make me participate, and then that’d only last until I got what I needed out of it. And I imagine people who just want to PVP won’t really care about the lore reasons, although they’d likely appreciate your tutorial BG idea that walks new players through them.
I really do love this conceptually. But I’d sooner expect myself to be crowned Emperor of the Moon than to see anything of this nature implemented in general, much less implemented well.
PvP has always been handled as a second class version of the game. If you have no interest in it you can play this game without ever having to engage in it. The same isn’t true of PvE. Like I regularly do PvE content so I can have better stuff for PvP content and the reverse of that just does not happen.
And even when the PvE was PvP flavored Blizzard was still terrible at implementing it storywise. Take the Warfronts.
There we had the Kaldorei trying to drive out the Forsaken and Goblins who were occupying and desecrating what land they had left. And in Arathi we had humanity trying to reclaim and rebuild their oldest seat of power.
The Horde’s motivation for the Warfronts was uh, to stop them. That’s about it and that’s why I knew the Horde would canonically lose. Because winning meant nothing for their narrative. It didn’t even attempt to explain why the Kalimdor Horde armies were in Arathi and why the Forsaken were in Darkshore. Despite the Forsaken and Orcs having entire specialized armies with a decade of experience fighting the humans in Arathi and Kaldorei in Ashevale. I guess the deployment orders were given on opposite day.
Hell when the Zandalari finally had a reason to join the fight and hound the Kul Tirans with avengeance the war story abruptly stopped and that subplot was resolved later in Shadow’s Rising. I’m still kind of shocked there wasn’t a Zandalari VS Kul Tiran warfront and that I never got to open the door, get on the floor and walk the dinosaur all over fleeing Kul Tiran marines.
Blizzard simply isn’t very good at telling a nuanced narrative. The bad guys are typically chaotic evil gods and monsters hellbent on the enslavement or eradication of all of creation, and this continues to be the case when a Horde character has to wear the villain hat.
Going back to the Warfronts, it wouldn’t have been that hard to put the Forsaken in Arathi. That’s a territory they’ve had interest in because of resources and also because it’s the only buffer zone between them and Khaz Modan. Stromgarde also had an undead population living in it, and as many Forsaken could easily be Stromgardi there could be the actual argument that they had just as strong a claim to it as Trollbane.
Hell the Black Bride is a blank slate. Couldve made her have a legitimate claim to the throne. They invented and resurrected other royal siblings for BFA no reason they can’t claim she’s also one.
But that would be a nuanced story. Perhaps with some internal intrigue as the Kaldorei could be miffed they’re out in Darkshore struggling for their homes while the humans are on the otherside of the world fighting for one they’d left in ruin for years and arguably doesn’t belong to them.
And as I said, Blizz has neither the ability or desire to tell a story like that on a grandscale. So until they do I’m very comfortable with them leaving PvP as it’s own thing so at the very least they stop ruining ideas I had for RPPVP campaigns.
Right, but in the context of “they’re not going to create a third faction”, there has to be some resolving of the situation that keeps them in the Alliance. And it’ll likely end in finger wagging. A bit like…
… that. Condescending downtalk. Varian talking to Tyrande as if she were a petulant child. Albeit less on a prattling of tactics and moreso about sparking a war, and with Anduin or someone else offering the spiel. That seems more inflaming than just leaving the 4th war in the past.
Because it wouldn’t be a background conflict. It’d be a straight up act of war to go after someone of high standing like Gargok. An armistice isn’t a peace treaty, it’s the agreement to stop fighting while peace is negotiated.
They’re not going to change that, I’d sooner begin viewing options on how to work around this frame, rather than try to smash it and work with something new.
I feel that what you’re trying to pursue is just a return to BFA, and that is where we break. In every regard, BFA was an unmitigated disaster. They revisited the story arc of Mists of Pandaria, thinking they could do better, and proved that not only they couldn’t, but even did so worse than the last team.
Which is why it baffles me why you so doggedly chase after this failed project after a remarkably poor showing of their story telling capabilities. The evidence is compelling that they can’t give you what you want without twisting it into something even worse.
As someone who enjoys pvp and the lore as well I disagree with the idea of mixing the two more than they already do. I’d prefer if they actually removed all lore from future BGs and just focused on making cool maps with all the leftover assets they have from previous expansions.
I thought an AU Draenor themed ToK would be cool back in WoD. The pit in the middle would be some kind of orc fight pit like the one we read about in Garrosh’s short story.
They could also finally make that Battle for Azshara map that was scrap sometime back.
I’d even just enjoy some new CtF or node based maps like TP or BfG.
Regarding your first two points - I think they illustrate where our disconnect is. You’re injecting elements that are not in the proposal, or that are part of the overall philosophy that sits behind the proposal. I am putting together a conversation on how I feel that Blizzard should move forward, and you’re trying to react to that with speculation on what they might do in the future. Now, I sympathize with cynicism over Blizzard’s writing direction - talk to me sometime about a proposal for Night Elf paladins and you’ll see it from me on full display, but I don’t think it’s fair to look at a proposal to fix the error and reply with a determinism that they will just repeat the errors.
So, I am going to ask that you evaluate the proposal on its own terms, or not do so at all. If I say to you that this is part of a conflict where the PVP content is an optional part of content - something that can live in the background - you don’t get to come in and change aspects of the proposal to validate your own argument.
This. PvP does not require story support, and honestly I am very, very sick of being the villain every time the Faction Conflict rears its ugly head. Just embrace the idea that PvP as a game mechanic is enjoyable, and focus on making it fun. And admit that the Faciton Conflict itself has been run too deep into the ground to ever make it a positive playable story experience again. SWtoR handled the interfaction fighting better than WoW ever has, and they thoroughly embraced the “PvP is just a game and sport” ages ago.
I’m sorry, but I disagree pretty vehemently with this sentiment as well. Story is a statistically significant factor in video game enjoyment, and when you propose to just divorce it from a game mode, you are devaluing that game mode. Christina Norman was ultimately right as well that story has utility in games. As she put it - it inspires players and helps them immerse.
So, I am going to have to toss this out as an unproductive means of discussion as well. If you’re walking into a “how do we write the lore for PVP more effectively” thread and make claims like this - I don’t see that as being helpful.
Which is why for the last 2 and half years I have been actively shamed by the writers for even considering participating in a PvP story and hurting the victims of it. The “inspiration” I have gained is just enough motivation to not commit myself to pure apathy all of the time. So long as you try supporting PvP with the story, the Horde will always be portrayed as the Aggressors and the Alliance the victims. I am done with it. Its too ruined. I would rather devorce PvP entirely from the story if it means I might have a better chance of enjoying PvP AND the story as separate entities.
They are a match made in hell, its time for them to break up.
You’re making the same error that Gladwell is. You’re not evaluating the proposal on its own terms, you’re injecting elements that it doesn’t include.
Again, that’s not a fair method for evaluation - you may as well tell me that the proposal sucks because I don’t know if a meteor will fall on Blizzard’s headquarters tomorrow or if Bobby Kotick will repurpose the franchise into a Teletubbies tie-in.
Humor me, because I’m not just talking out of my posterior when I’m talking about stuff like this.
Take for example when I say that this will escalate and that it couldn’t be just a background skirmish. Let’s say that they don’t make a big deal about the aforementioned problem. We just stumble across this like Ashran was pitched. The first, immediate question around these forums are; “Did the Horde break the truce? Are we back at war?”. It can’t just be a skirmish. Nobody will let it be that. And then we’ll have threads like this, where we pursue exact dialogue like this and like others, and before long, suddenly the writing team has a target to scope in on, and, boom, Faction War 3.
And my commentary about third factions and why it has to be resolved that way. Take for example the Blood Elves in the Mists of Pandaria storyline where they try to engage in talks to actually leave the Horde, only for Jaina to see them, go berserk and purge them from Dalaran. They had a real opportunity to cut them from the Horde story and they didn’t. They won’t. It wasn’t done then, it won’t be done now. There has to be a reason why the Night Elves are in the Alliance, they’re not just going to let the story decay into a situation where the Night Elves could feasibly stray from the story.
I’m attacking the philosophy behind it, because that is the end of this road. That is where it leads. These threads you’ve been creating, as you’ve said so yourself, exist to change dialogue about the overall subject of BFA’s ending and a lack of satisfactory conclusion for the Night Elf story. If we just beat around the bush and humor ideas that all make up this road while not addressing the road itself, then, we effectively reach the end of said road and all the consequences that follows.
Yes, BFA sucked, for everyone and especially the Night Elves. But the end-game, your end objective, is to invite something even worse than what we got.
Why? Because the Faction Conflict has never been a positive experience for the Horde STORY since WC3? Or how, no matter what the NEs do, I will not be given a proper motivation to fight back against them; because with how BfA left us … the Horde even fighting back in self-defense would be considered us beating up on our victims at this point. Especially if we were “shockingly” allowed to not be completely bodied by them. Blizz has created a situation where as a Horde fan, there is no possible positive experience I can get out of PvP on a story level … unless the only thing I want is to “kill the blue team”. Because I will always feel like the bad guy for participating in it.
Humor me, because I’m not just talking out of my posterior when I’m talking about stuff like this.
Take for example when I say that this will escalate and that it couldn’t be just a background skirmish. Let’s say that they don’t make a big deal about the aforementioned problem. We just stumble across this like Ashran was pitched. The first, immediate question around these forums are; “Did the Horde break the truce? Are we back at war?”. It can’t just be a skirmish. Nobody will let it be that. And then we’ll have threads like this, where we pursue exact dialogue like this and like others, and before long, suddenly the writing team has a target to scope in on, and, boom, Faction War 3.
That it is a faction war does not mean that it can’t exist in the background for a PVE player. I ended up having to edit this in - but there’s a link to another thread included in the background lore section now, which discusses the contours of what that would be.
What I take issue with is not that there would be a faction war - but that it necessarily would follow BfA’s contours, which included making massive changes to the world like Teldrassil, and trying to ramrod the war into a global ubernarratrive. This proposal does not do that, nor is such a model inevitable. The point of this and other proposals is, yes, to continue the faction conflict, but to do it in a more balanced and optional way - keeping more in line with the objectives of a competitive rivalry, in an MMO that supports multiple game modes.
Regarding your commentary on third factions - I am not proposing a third faction. I am proposing greater disharmony in the Alliance though, such as what we have in canon already.
I’m attacking the philosophy behind it, because that is the end of this road. That is where it leads. These threads you’ve been creating, as you’ve said so yourself, exist to change dialogue about the overall subject of BFA’s ending and a lack of satisfactory conclusion for the Night Elf story. If we just beat around the bush and humor ideas that all make up this road while not addressing the road itself, then, we effectively reach the end of said road and all the consequences that follows.
This is not a fact, this is a prediction, and there’s nothing written in stone saying that Blizzard has to continue to keep its existing writing staff, its existing proclivities, or its existing pathologies. Suggestions like this one are encouragements for them to replace those things - and that’s why I find this attitude unhelpful.
I don’t mean to snipe at subsections of your post, but there’s a lot to unpack and all tackle different parts of a whole package. So, with that all said, I want to touch on your first point - that it wouldn’t cram itself into the overarching narrative, which I genuinely believe that to not be true, if you’re giving an entire storyline surrounding the situation with a quest experience, it inserts itself into the story, it becomes relevant.
It isn’t just a “collect bear posteriors” quest we’re talking about, from Classic. We’re talking about a full-on narrative.
As for your point regarding a third faction, the reason why I bring it up is because when I bring it up as a concern that could have larger dangerous implications to the story, I got a response that was;
that. Which, naturally, leads to a point where the conclusion is to just secede and would require a third faction. Because that can’t happen, it would require a hook to keep them in the Alliance and nobody would like that hook. Not a soul.
But to come to the end of this -
It is no longer a point of conversation about Blizzard itself. I’m talking specifically about your threads and the purpose of them, and why I cut right to the chase on the central point, explaining with the metaphor of “the road”. I find the method in which you try to shift this conversation rather underhanded and it requires addressing.
While you are doing this for a far less nefarious purpose and that I’m thankful for, there is a tactic in American discourse (and, more broadly speaking, politics itself, but primarily from hard right leaning bodies) where you don’t just cut to end point and explain what you’re looking for, because that runs into opposition immediately. Instead, you host several conversations, throughout a long stretch of time, breaking the idea up into smaller parts and begin to wage them as something sensible, as a sort of lubricant to ease them into accepting the next bit of conversation, and so on, and so forth, until it reaches the original end-game. You can see this in a lot of PragerU content.
Any conversation about the actual end goal is discouraged, or considered unhelpful, even if it leads to the same place in the long run.
I’m not accusing you of this, mind, you have been transparent in your interest, you’ve said as much and have made no secret of it, and I don’t see you as a dangerous person because at worst case scenario, the conversation you try to stir could just have consequences on how people engage a video game and could lead it down a path that it won’t come back from.
But, in the future, it behooves you to acknowledge where the conversation can lead and allow people to hit the heart of the point with either the points they make or in general in regards to the conversation itself, otherwise your point can come from a place that looks dishonest.
Depends on the context. If the Kaldorei were say trying to burn down Tarren Mill I’d feel nothing wrong about Blight bombing them into goop. But I’d not feel great about an offensive in their territory. The Horde laying down and dying because Teldrassil is sad would be pretty dumb.
Plus the Horde lost every battle after the initial War of Thorns invasion which was a sucker punched blitzkrieg. Which the Kaldorei holding off on their own for any length of time is impressive. The only ones who came off inept in the War of Thorns was the rest of the Alliance.
Who after not doing anything to provide relief for the Nelves decided to invade Lordaeron. After Teldrassil was destroyed and Darkshore is occupied. Not even Orgrimmar- where Slyvanas currently is. That felt like a strategy to open up a second front to drag Horde forces away from the Kaldorei, long after it would’ve done any good.
The Forsaken, by the by, are completely overrun by the Alliance instantly and off screen despite having some idea this would happen.
It isn’t just a “collect bear posteriors” quest we’re talking about, from Classic. We’re talking about a full-on narrative.
Yes and no. I critiqued the ubernarrative, which is why I pulled this item out in particular. I feel that it’s important to highlight the difference.
Some of WoW’s best writing - to this day - can be found in questlines. These often allow us to follow the small and personal stories of people within the world - and through their lens tell us more about the society that they come from and the world they inhabit. This is how Admiral Taylor and General Nazgrim became memorable. It’s why we still remember Mankrik. These small, personal stories are in stark contrast to the global “ubernarrative”, centered around larger than life characters like Anduin and Jaina.
I want to move away from the latter model back to the former, with some of my reasons being.
The ubernarrative tends to result in massive changes with implications that individual characters can’t opt out of. Forsaken and Night Elf players for example can’t choose not to care about losing Sylvanas or Teldrassil - the narrative won’t let them. I think this sort of thing is death for player investment and agency, especially when it’s negative.
Stories in a smaller narrative are allowed to begin, go through their motions, and end in a timely fashion. They don’t have to, but you don’t have the same imperative to drag things out as you do with the ubernarrative.
Because quest content is often less-resource intensive, you have more options about what you want to present, and as well, the player has more options about what they want to engage with. Players could for example, do this PVP quest, but they could also say “I don’t want to get involved in that again - but I would like to fight these void fiends (or whatever it is) over here”. This greater level of choice also meshes well with the point of an MMO - which is all about character identity being expressed to a larger world.
Disparate, and disconnected quest content makes the world feel bigger, richer, and fuller. It allows for a greater sense of exploration and mystery, and a sense of scale that the ubernarrative in its desire to dash all over the world to follow the various story beats often tramples.
Regarding the rest of your point - being on the right, I see the other side of that conversation - when you actually do hold the position that you’re defending and someone tries to divine your motives based on examples of people who - to your credit - are like that. When I talk about taxes, for example, I come at it from the perspective of the application of Adam Smith’s four maxims of taxation, as well as a laser-focus on the accounting concept of income - but if I talk to a non-accountant friend on the left, I’ll get accused of wanting to advantage the rich or benefit some group. Again, some people really are like this - like the ghouls who proposed the SALT limitation. (A transparently political move that has no relation to any kind of theory or framework having to do with fair taxation. State and local taxes are an unavoidable expense. Hence to get to income - that thing that we’re constitutionally allowed to tax (as opposed to revenue, which would lead to directly violating Smith’s fourth maxim as you put every small-margin enterprise out of business) - you have to remove them.) But, it’s not true of everyone (or even I think most).
Speaking as an auditor, I find that it’s usually very difficult to accurately guess a person’s intentions, and the fraud examination literature generally guides you away from L.A. Noire-style accusations and leaps in logic divined from things like body language. Instead you ask lots of questions, sometimes obvious-sounding questions, questions that get your clients pissed off at you, but questions that you ask anyway to make absolutely sure that you’re not getting them wrong - and then you try to confirm that you have them right. Then when all misunderstanding is cleared away and you have it documented, you can proceed.
But, that’s somewhat of a tangent, so let me share my thoughts on factions.
I have always held to a “four pole” model, or a “four factions in two factions” idea - one that I think Vanilla - Wrath did justice to. The Alliance and the Horde existed, but each felt as though they were made up of two parts, western and eastern. I believe that no matter what you do, you are not allowed to uproot the poles - who stand, for their respective factions, and against the other faction’s “pole” - but are also different and independent from their same-faction pole, even if they work with them and occasionally appear on the same fronts. It also does not matter to me if the Night Elves or the forsaken need allies so long as they hold up the pole.
Warsong Gulch sits on one of the friction points between two of those poles, just as Arathi Basin does in the East. These should act as centers for where the desire to participate in the faction war can and should be expressed in a balanced fashion.
I hope that helps to sort of “let you into my mind” on this topic. Unfortunately, you’re right - there is a lot to unpack. Unfortunately these topics are always bigger and more complicated than I tend to envision.
Dude, no matter what we will be portrayed as deserving it; and fighting in self defense (and doing any amount of damage in that role) is likely to be taken very negatively. Because “the NEs deserve to slaughter us evil monsters, how dare we kill more of them”. That is how morally unbalanced BfA has left us.
As for actual “competency” … I honestly have no idea how to gauge the competency of the Horde’s actions during the 4th War. We were following a commanding officer that was deliberately fixated on constant escalation tactics, and causing as large a death toll on both sides as possible. It is very unlikely “reclaiming and holding” previous Forsaken territories was on her to-do list, as she was going to bail anyway. As a result “Competence” and “Capability” are impossible to judge for the Horde in BfA. On either continent.
EDIT: In short, we were never supposed to win this conflict. Planning for that was not important. We were just supposed die and take as many Alliance members with us. Which is why the ARs are a thing.
Droite, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to just leave this thread.
The background lore post contained information to explain the Horde’s position morally. You have not disputed a word of it. Instead you have arrived with your usual flavor of deterministic doomerism about how the Horde can never be fixed in this fashion, and appear to be trying to derail the thread on that basis.
… and I have lost my patience for it. I worked all night last night on this post, and I don’t want the potential discussion on the mechanics and the lore squashed by stock-doomerism.
I’ve looked at your statistics, it’s fairly clear to me based on them that competitive PVP isn’t your thing, and that’s okay. My proposal has room for you to completely ignore these developments and do something else - but you do not, and should not get veto power over whether PVP should have tie-in content. You are not the only one playing this game.
So please, see yourself out. There are a dozen other threads where you can, and have brought this line of argument, but I don’t want to see it here.
You want PvP on a story level, but have yet to give ANY benefit to the Horde story for that to be the case anymore. ANY reason? Anything at all? What value does that story thread have for the Horde anymore, after two rounds of merciless villain batting from it? And tbh, the one thing tying PvP into the narrative constantly does for me is remind me that population numbers do not matter. They never matter. It is the most obvious example of this in the game. Which means a tragedy like Teldrassil loses a ton of its value, because … PvP being catered to by the story will always demand infinite respawns.
Sometimes I swear Anduin is the only one self-aware enough to realize the absurdity of all these near extinct peoples trying to kill eachother in between constant, escalating, end of the world style conflicts.
It’s in the background lore. I realize that I’m asking for quite a bit in the way of reading on that - but it’s a required element of this discussion. You can’t just skim or skip it and assume that you’re equipped for this discussion.
If you feel that something more needs to be done to improve the Horde’s motivation, I am happy to entertain that discussion. This after all should be a balanced conflict. What I will not entertain is the stock-doomer script. It’s not helpful.
