Not to sounds too harsh, but that is something you should make very specific initially. Like, which aspects of Scarlet lore you’d want to have removed, in this hypothetical scenario. You very well might have already done that and I missed it, so again, not trying to be harsh or anything.
But. If you’re going to remove problematic aspects of Scarlet lore to make the scenario work, like “was unknowingly corrupted to extremism to serve the Legion,” then you’ve got a slipperly slope.
Why not have them recruiting from surviving Lordaeronians instead of purging the unclean, since that’s also kind of a hard pass for the Alliance? Especially when both the Forsaken and Scarlets are murdering civilians the Alliance is hoping to save and reclaim that land for.
Why not also remove the racism, which should have more precedent since they have statues of high elves and dwarves they never bothered to get rid of? I mean, both dwarves and high elves are (or were for high elves) a big part of the Alliance, so do you really expect Varian to accept the Scarlets if two of his biggest allies are gonna have a problem with the guys snobbishly calling them “lesser races?”
So the question becomes, is it morally nuanced to invite into your multi-national conglomerate a group who murder the people you’re hoping to save and will offend and possibly distance two of your reliable allies, or just really poor decision-making?
I’m all for a more morally nuanced Alliance, but I don’t think there’s much to salvage with the Scarlets.
Or option c, I don’t support either especially considering my goal is specifically to protect these people. And instead focus all my support on the Argent Dawn who will protect people from both factions if the need arose and also are fighting the Scourge.
You can fightt he scourge with being a racist maniac that denies help just because they ain’t human. That is why the Scarlets were our enemies and the Argent Crusade our ally.
Unless they retcon the fact that we fell for a genocidal tyrant not once (Gul’dan) not twice (Garrosh) but THRICE (Sylvanas), then the Horde is forever poisoned.
Seriously, how can you possibly walk that back? The Horde is canonically a bunch of braindead savages with no agency who commit genocide at the drop of a hat when their leader says so.
Blizzard made us stupid evil psychopaths. They have proven that the Horde is incapable of functioning as a political entity without the Alliance to put them back in their place. You can’t fix that. You can’t walk that back.
On top of this too, the Horde needs to really expand its own intelligence agency. The Deathstalkers exist, and that is all well and good, but that is a pretty Forsaken centric thing (not that SI:7 isn’t super human centric). Belmont often appears more as a field commander, even Executor, than an equivalent spy master.
There is no lack of potential or development either. Tauren long walkers, the OG/non-clan Shattered Hand, the Farstriders, the Gob Squad, shadow hunters, deathstalkers, I could probably go on. We have all these sneaky beaky folks, but no central intelligence agency doing CIA and James Bond stuff.
Just thinking off the top of my head too, imagine if Belmont was as involved and out there as Shaw and he had to contend with an actual, cut throat, leave no witnesses, deader who doesnt need to eat, sleep, drink, etc. That nice personality might have to be dropped pretty quick and become more gray.
I never thought that was out of line with his character. It really just felt like postering. He seemed to care about how he appeared. So, he postered and talked. But he didn’t actually do anything. He allowed her to continue.
To me at least, it felt like: ‘I will pretend outrage to keep up appearances, but wont do anything as long as you ultimately get me what I want.’
I was referring the the missed memo more in reference to the idea that Blizzard changed directions in MoP as some ‘placate Alliance’ strategy. Yes, Stonetalon was in game. And it is lore, as I don’t believe it has been retconned. But, Blizzard saying it was a missed memo does tell us when Garrosh arc was decided. It was not MoP, it was Cata.
But he was looking for it long before that. He had already tried juicing his soldiers with the Sha via the Bell.
Yes, and the Horde would riot if they got the Alliance treatment.
I don’t care who you feel had it worse (entirely subjective), bottom line: I was bad for BOTH sides and should never be repeated, mirrored or not.
The way this conversation started was a response to another post talking about how the faction conflict should have been more nuanced rather than just hot-wars that break out periodically.
Cold War era stuff, spying, proxy wars. So on.
The goal wouldn’t be to “remove problematic aspects” but rather just change certain aspects that makes sense.
For example, the slaughtering of villages never really served the goals of the Crusade, even from the perspective of it’s demonic shadow leadership. Isn’t the entire purpose of the Crusade, for Balnazzar, to build up a powerbase that rivals Sylvanas in the same region?
If that is the goal, one would think the master manipulator Nathrazim would use the Alliance as a mechanism to obtain that power, and prey upon the desperation of the local, living inhabitance to radicalize them against the undead (Which imo, most living creatures, even on the Horde, should be somewhat radicalized against undead, simply for what they are).
Why self-sabotage your own operation? Imo, it was writing without direction. “This is a bad guy, lets have him do bad things because he’s evil, with zero thought to his greater goals” essentially.
Keep whatever problematic aspects you want, but it should make sense. Let it be a human supremist group. Let it be plagued with paranoia that makes the organization prone to adopting scorched earth tactics, even if often times unnecessarily, extreme circumstance calling for extreme measures.
I could sit here and go over the minute details of how I would have written them different, but it’s the broader picture that actually matters here. Which is, imo, The Scarlet Crusade was a missed opportunity as a mechanism of nuance in Alliance story telling. That’s really the main point I am making here.
When did the Alliance ever protect those people? The Alliance never intervened in Tirisfal or the Plaguelands. If you were living, you have 2 options. Scarlets or Argents. The Scarlets may have had a reputation for torching villages, but unless you were on the receiving end of it, those villages were plagued for all you know. We as the readed have meta knowledge, but from the perspective of someone in-world, the Scarlets have plausible deniability.
And the other alternative being Argents, who are probably a major turn-off to most considering the presence of Horde races in their ranks. If you want to reclaim your home from the undead, why would you trust an organization that actively works with the undead?
He literally put a minder in place to keep an eye on her. Garrosh didn’t do nothing; he did the exact thing he should do in that situation.
He can’t pull her off the field; the Forsaken are already at war with the Alliance in general, and Gilneas specifically, and there’s no one else who can lead that fight. Not even the minder, because the loyalty the Forsaken have to Sylvanas.
And it’s not like he can personally go there to take over operations either. The Barrens, Stonetalon, Azshara, Darkshore and Ashenvale, those are all also happening and right on Orgrimmar’s doorstep. While the Eastern Kingdoms situation is going well, in spite of Sylvanas’s methods, the Kalimdor campaign is very much at risk.
You’re seeing this and thinking it’s performative. I don’t know why beyond letting the future taint the past, because Garrosh had displayed during Cataclysm a clear moral line; no schools, no Blight, no necromancy. All of which fall perfectly in line with his view of honor and glory. At that time, he wants to fight the Alliance in a war of blood and blades and rended flesh, lok’tar ogar. It’s literally why he had no qualms about sending his air support to go fight the Alliance ships in Twilight Highlands; while Garrosh is tactically lacking, but his motivation is absolutely unchanged. Blood and thunder, victory or death, strength and (read: IS) honor.
But if Silverpine is performative… To what end?
If Garrosh is already MoP-levels of evil, why isn’t he already MoP-levels of “victory justifies all?” Sure, he’d still hate the necromancy (orcs kinda already hate that, and he’s the orciest orc to ever orc), but why would he oppose the Blight? MoP’s prepatch shows he’s cool with WMDs, and he’s never been one to care about the state of conquered lands after they’ve been conquered. So who is he performing for here?
The one lone orc he specifically sent to reign Sylvanas in?
Weird person to put on a big show for.
And once again, I don’t much give a single crap about that. I don’t much give a crap about the inner workings of their development (y’know, as long as they don’t go cube crawling and other creepy stuff).
I care about the actual play. I care about the playable experience. That’s it, end of statement, no exceptions.
But if I did care about that, if that did make a difference to my actual played experience? I’d call a big pile of liquid bullcrap on that whole “missed memo.”
“Well, the entire quest team missed the memo” only works if there’s examples of them course correcting pre-MoP. And there aren’t. Instead, there’s stories written where Garrosh is shown caring about the plight of the everyorc. It’s literally how he won public support among the orcs prior to becoming warchief; Thrall is more worried about how taking resources will look to the Alliance, while Garrosh is more worried that Joe’gar Warsong needs more lumber. So I guess authors missed this same memo. Did the dev check to make sure it even got sent?
I honestly don’t know why this one “missing memo” line from a developer holds more weight than his appearances in Cataclysm, the novel “The Shattering” (sparing survivors of his assault and giving them supplies, caring more about the orcs’ survival as a people than hurt night elf feelings, going full rage-monster at his duel with Cairne not being fair even though he’d won, so on and so forth) and even novels that don’t depict him in a good light (As Our Fathers Before Us, Wolfheart) that show him as a tactically-limited orc, whose only goal is straightforward bloody combat, but still with moral limits.
If there is all that proof weighed against one late-day “missing memo” line from a dev actively working on MoP at the time, then I’m sorry. That dev needs to show the memo.
He didn’t stop her from using the plague or raising the dead. Nor did his minders. Which says the minders were not there to stop her from doing the dishonorable things. They were there to cut her down if she turned on Garrosh.
The Shattering into most of his representation in Cata through to MoP was a pretty straight line of escalating extreme choices. Every step was just a bit further. Every new thing he did was just a bit further. He didn’t instantly change from Wrath Garrosh to sucking down Sha juice. But he took step by step actions that way. From starting a war, to turning wild animals loose on towns, to attacking an independent nation just to get a harbor to advance his war, to allowing Sylvanas to continue using blight and raising dead, to blowing up a city, to sha infecting his soldiers, to consuming the heart. In game his actions progressed straight down that path.
Narratively I see it as a very straight path. If you don’t agree, that is fine.
Generally, I agree.
However, If the argument is: They decided to make Garrosh more evil in order to placate the Alliance players because of Cata. (Definitionally inner workings)
Then: Their inner workings become very relevant.
In this context the ‘missed memo’ explanation does matter and is relevant.
If you want a lore explanation for Garrosh choosing the darker path I 100% would agree that the missed memo doesn’t matter. But that wasn’t really the point of contention.
Garrosh literally told her “cut that right out” as soon as he learned she was doing it; he gave her an order, then he put someone in place to ensure that order was obeyed.
Full stop: There is nothing here to show he was acting performatively.
You can certainly make the argument the minder in place didn’t do his job, and you can certainly blame Garrosh for choosing poorly when he sent the guy there, but to create the narrative that he intentionally chose an incompetent person so he could performatively rebuke Sylvanas to an audience of that same minder because everyone else there was a Sylvanas loyalist is an absolute massive reach that has zero evidencial back-up beyond MoP-era events that fundamentally altered the character arc of Garrosh.
I editted this bit because your “Garrosh was just play-acting with Sylvanas” is highly speculative and flies in the face of Garrosh’s own surrounding behavior, Garrosh’s past as a mag’har orc, and requires that he thinks so highly of his alleged dupe Cromush that he put on an entire display for a guy who, in this scenario, knew he wasn’t even actually offended and sent Cromush there for the luls. Which, once again, is without any evidence.
Of the rest of it, none of this is an actual escalation of Garrosh’s actions. It’s all war, war, war. It’s all pretty standard behavior in war, up to Theramore. Which also follows military logic perfectly; Theramore was the port the Alliance used to support the Southern Barrens campaign. Remove Theramore, remove resupply, remove Alliance. Tactically, this is perfectly in line with Garrosh’s actions. Morally this is in line; the Alliance were trying to take Orgrimmar out through invasion, so taking Theramore out is morally acceptable.
This is all still a far cry from gulping void juice.
Yeah, if I’m talking about dissecting the whats and whyfores.
But, like, I’m not. I’ve been adamant that what I’m concerned with is the actual play experience.
I feel like I’m at the point where I need to explain what that means so you’ll properly understand why internal memos don’t matter to me when I’m talking about the actual play experience.
So.
When, for instance, a new major patch drops and I only have Tuesday and Wednesday to play the game. Because of bugs in the patch, the game is unplayable for Tuesday and Wednesday. I do not get to play for the week.
I do not suddenly get those two days back because it turned out what made the game unplayable was someone added an extra 0 to the code that broke the login server. Knowing that behind-the-scenes tidbit does not change the fact that the game was unplayable. I do not suddenly get the story progress, the gold from quests, the possible gear and other rewards I would have gotten had I been able to play, just because I now know there was an extra 0.
Knowing what broke the game does not change the fact the game was broken.
This is why some memo that got allegedly missed about Garrosh’s direction? It means diddy squat to me, a Horde main, who played Cataclysm. The Garrosh presented to me is different from the Garrosh of MoP.
You can whatever the opposite of rose-tinted glasses the Silverpine quests and decide it was Garrosh being an A-list actor and a D-list leader with unnecessarily convoluted schemes against literally no one.
Because, again, I’m shown a “charge ahead forward, skull first into that brick wall and trust my skull is stronger” Garrosh who has moral limits. I have developers in the pre-Cata launch reassuring me that Garrosh won’t be as bad as we expect, then I’m presented exactly that in my actual played experience.
SO MY ACTUAL PLAYED EXPERIENCE ISN’T CHANGED WHEN MONTHS OR YEARS LATER DURING A Q AND A, ONE LONE DEV SAYS THE PROBLEM ISN’T AN ABOUT-FACE WITH MOP, IT’S A MISCOMMUNICATION DURING CATA
Thus: the memo doesn’t change what Cata was, and why MoP is when myself and others might consider MoP the start of Garrosh’s villain arc.
Actually it was.
Because this whole discussion started about why I feel the Horde is beyond repair, and you disagree.
ACTUAL PLAYED EXPERIENCE IS A CRITICALLY IMPORTANT COMPONENT OF WHY HORDE MAINS FEEL THE HORDE IS BEYOND REPAIR
Dev promises to fix things? Because dev statements? I gotchu a list.
Pre-Cata: “Give Garrosh a chance, he won’t be as bad as you think.”
MoP: “Well actually, that whole not-as-bad-as-you-think Garrosh was someone missing a memo.”
Also MoP: “Now if you love the Horde, you’ll get to fight for the Horde.” (Actual experience: We just fought against the Horde.)
Pre-WoD: “We want to show what would have happened if the orcs didn’t drink demon blood and how different of a Horde it would be.” (Actual experience: It was just the Old Horde with technology)
Pre-BfA: “We won’t be repeating the same mistakes from MoP.” (Actual play: They did, and they made whole new ones)
Pre-BfA: “This time the faction conflict will be more shades of grey.” (Actual play: It wasn’t)
Post-BfA: “While Shadowlands won’t address the factions, we have plans to repair some of the damage done coming real soon.” (Actual play: that was over five years ago)
And I’m just playing the major hits right now, because if I kept going through dev promises left undelivered, this post would take an hour to read.
The Actual Play Experience for Horde players is horrible. It’s beyond repair. A dev promise not only wouldn’t matter regardless, but matters even less when you keep hammering home about how the Cata depiction of Garrosh was unintended, even when a dev said previously to expect what we got.
BECAUSE THAT IS A MAJOR PART OF THIS WHOLE DANG PROBLEM
…I did Nagrand, Garrosh was my guy – and we … lamented the fact that we couldn’t bring the Warchiefs back in Burning Crusade, and we did it by proxy, by progeny. We went look, we can’t bring Grom back, but what if he had a son. And that son was Garrosh. So with that, we’re like okay, we’re going to do this, we’re not going to just do this lightly, he’s not going to just be some throwaway, he’s Hellscream’s kid. We’re going to make him something legendary. He’s going to have a fate, and there is destiny here, and we just need to figure out what that destiny is.
And originally, it was a much more heroic, redemptive arc for him, that would have potentially ended up with a strong Hellscream leader.
Garrosh was Afrasiabi’s creation, and he is the one who wanted to push for a redemption arc (and is the one responsible for his Stonetalon characterization). So yes, the original plan was for him to grow and mature into something. However, Cataclysm wanted to dial up the temperature on the faction war, and Garrosh transitioning to a wise leader doesn’t jive with that. Cataclysm’s questing experience was a bit of a mess, so Garrosh’s depictions seem to be something that slipped through the cracks. Afrasiabi was still operating under the original plan, while the lower resolution plan was to have him ramp up the war.
You put them in as one person and they represent two sides of a person. We all have that depth. And that’s really what we’re going for is like look, Thrall is kind of the light and Garrosh is the dark. But their goals were both always to be like, for the Horde. And we started to kind of go down different story paths with Thrall’s character, and that started to necessitate Garrosh becoming something other as well.
Here is evidence that Garrosh’s hard edges were not always intended to end with him being a villain or raid boss. Put another way: he would be someone easy to hate for the Alliance, but he was all in for the Horde. Notably absent is his orc supremacy arc. Like, Garrosh’s core drive is daddy issues—he idolizes Grom. That lends more credence to his MoP characterization being a departure, because he begins forcing corruption onto orcs and subjecting himself to it as well.
Which brings us to Kosak:
The Alliance spends much of the zone reacting to the Horde, whereas Horde is more proactive. Cataclysm balanced out the map by removing some Alliance territory from vanilla, so a common criticism of the expansion is that it felt like the Alliance was getting beat down.
We felt that criticism and listened to it, so for the next expansion we thought we’d give the Alliance a win by having them storm the enemy capital and overthrow the warchief.
MoP Garrosh is not Cata Garrosh, and you’ve got the creator of the character and the lead on MoP saying as much. I think the actual events bear this out, especially in MoP, where he abandons his defining feature (daddy issues/Grom) and turns on The Horde.
I think this might be where we just need to break it apart.
I get you are concerned with the played experience. And, great. I generally agree.
The part that I kept coming back to was the person who made the contention that the reason for Garrosh’s MoP character arc was from Cata feedback. What was done or not done is not the question there. What was lived vs not lived is not the question. The question ISwhy.
In that perspective 100% the ‘missed memo’ is relevant. As it establishes that the direction of his arc was decided before the Cata feedback. It doesn’t change the arc itself. It doesn’t change whether it was good or bad. It doesn’t even establish the actual reason for the arc. It just rules out the proposed theory that it was because of Alliance Cata feedback.
We know Alliance feedback was not the reason for the direction they took.
Great, the memo is done.
Not arguing that. Garrosh arc was a mistake. Fully, and completely it was.
At his introduction they laid the groundwork for two paths. He could learn from Thrall, reject his father’s path and be a noble warrior. Or he could fully embrace his ‘daddy issues’ and rinse repeat his father’s mistakes becoming a mirror. Even in Wrath I saw aspects of his story that could have gone either way. To me, from Cata on it was clear they were fully going down the ‘apple does not fall far from the tree’ route. It was a mistake. They shouldn’t have done it. (Honestly, I think most of Cata falls into the ‘should never have happened’ bucket.)
I do think Garrosh actions from Cata on absolutely fit the Grom 2.0 arc. It was a bad arc, but they do fit.
I agree.
Yes.
But that is NOT what he said. Having the Alliance storm Orgrimmar doesn’t say anything about Garrosh arc.
That is quite literally Grom’s arc. He didn’t abandon his daddy issues, he fully embraced his ‘Son of Grom’ identity.
Grom abandoned and turned on Thrall’s Horde in WC3. He drank the blood again and had his soldiers drink it so he could win the war he was in the middle of. Thrall had to fight him, the demons, and his demon infused followers to take him captive. Then save him and purge the demon control. MoP was Garrosh repeating Grom’s arc. He abandoned Thrall’s Horde, drinking the Sha and having his soldiers take in the Sha, so he could win the war he was in the middle of. We (heroes) arrived with Thrall, fought the Sha, his Sha infused followers, and him. We beat the Sha out of him and take him captive.
That is where the difference in the two came in, specifically WoD. When captured and cleansed Grom admitted his mistake and then helped Thrall fight Mannorath. Garrosh didn’t admit his mistake, and blamed everyone else.
I have a suspicion that Garrosh was originally supposed to be cleansed and have a redemption ac post MoP, finishing off his Grom 2.0 arc. But they decided to use him to start WoD. At which point players had largely soured on him and there wasn’t a real good way to do it. So, they just killed him. But, that is just my personal theory.
Are you suggesting that Garrosh idolized Grom for drinking demon blood twice? His north star was the idealized legacy of Hellscream—throwing off demonic corruption and striking down Mannoroth. Retreading Grom’s abject failures flies in the face of that north star.
I don’t know why we’re basing anything off of suspicions when the creators/writers have told us exactly what happened and why with Garrosh. Afrasiabi and Kosak have plainly spelled out (as block-quoted above) exactly what and why.
Edit: for my own clarification, are you merely stating that you think the events played out in a way that pointed towards Garrosh becoming a raid boss, or are you saying that the intent to make him a raid boss was there since at least Cata?
Shameless self-promotion: check out my thread linked below for further reading on the particularly egregious mismatch between promises and reality in BfA
But. We’re here talking about why Horde players might feel that the Horde is unfixable. Sure, the why of the mistakes made might matter.
But the important part is the mistake.
You notice when people are listing the problems with the Horde, they’re listing what happened in game, and not the behind-the-scenes why? Sure, it gets brought up later, because this is story Forum where a bunch of nerds with an extra-level of attachment to the story exist. But the event itself always gets the most debate, the most back and forth.
Because when a car skids off the road and slams into you while you’re on the sidewalk, you’re more concerned with the fact you got hit by a car than the black ice that caused it to skid. You don’t tell the doctor about the black ice when he asks how you broke your leg, just the car.
I don’t care about that, because I don’t care for any situation where the dev’s choices are made the fault of a portion of the playerbase.
Like, why is ruling this out even relevant when we’re talking about why Horde mains feel the Horde is broken beyond repair? Beyond some side comments, I think the majority of us, the overwhelming majority, are aware that the devs, not the players, are responsible for the devs’ decisions.
And why, dear god why, does every discussion I have about the Horde player experience have to bring up Alliance players too somehow?
