I’ll put it this way, I don’t care that Joe Orc hates humans because he thinks they’re small and weak, when there’s bigger and far more important things to worry about.
For me, it’s reached the point of Okay Joe Orc, don’t care. What I do care about is that giant fire dragon , Fyrakk, over there trying to turn Azeroth into charred remains
Both sides have banded together so many times to save the world since Vanilla that an all out faction war should be the least of everyone’s concern.
I’m older now, petty faction differences no longer interest me. I get that others do still find the faction war interesting. I personally don’t. I just want a good story to play through, regardless of who the main cast is
Unless Blizzard gets better writers that don’t default to “Alliance good, Horde bad (except for the Tauren)” then I have zero interest in the faction conflict being a thing anymore.
I do not think this is quite the same thing as going to war with anoither nation. People generally tend to loot their own city’s shopfronts, not rush to declare war.
I’m actually a really big fan of my own ideas. So I want to expand upon this more:
You can actually forgo almost several years of expansion releases and deadline adherence with a team that mixes old zone over hauling with raid boss mechanic “testing” or “priming”.
There has been a concerted effort on blizzards part to make visuals more outstanding and able to be interpreted better, most of which I have noticed they are taking directly from diablo 4.
With Jenga Block zonefronts with zone story progress and Zone Boss confrontations, you can effectively use them as a test bed against the more casual player base in priming the mechanics for the mythic player base by and effectively stripping a barrier of ignorance.
“Oh i’ve seen this mechanic being used by a centaur warlord zone event boss out in desolace, I can explain this without needing to datamine or relying on DBM.”
In dragonflight we already used several zones for dungeons. We should be able to reliably do the same with old world content in an effort to keep them up to date.
Plus Jim Pirri’s voice was smoother than butter. Say whatever you want about that character but the performance was S tier from start to finish.
Also frankly we get enough praising from characters. You’re declared Grand Champion of Mount Awesome for successfully walking and chewing bubble gum at the same time. Having one real unimpressed guy who seemed to openly hope you’d die was if anything refreshing.
Oh for a world when he ultimately rebelled against Sylvanas and now sat on the Desolate Council. Now there’s no one here to bully Lor’Themar.
The point is that you can’t use “It’s irrational to be at war” as an excuse for why there isn’t war. The other previous wars weren’t hyper rational either, and in real life most wars aren’t hyper rational lol.
I understand that. I didn’t bother trying to dispute that. I’m saying you should find a better comparison, a more fitting one where the world is on the verge of collapsing, but two nations want to marshal for war regardless.
Looting during a hurricane is just not the example.
I mean I might’ve taken advantage of a fire sale in 2020. Might’ve being an operative word. And in this hypothetical maybe it was non stick pans from a Target.
Some, not all, but I’m not going to debate that on the wow foruns lmao.
But also, Azeroth has finite resources, so this still applies. Take cata dor example, the massive destruction to zones would have disrupted trade and agriculture and made life worse, so thus more aggression to secure resources would have been very plausible and believable, defeating death wing wouldn’t magically fix all of these problems. So while, I’d say a war of extermination against the Horde or Alliance would be illogical as you’d need them to help defeat deathwing, securing resources to avoid famine and maintain pre-cata levels of quality of life at the cost of the opposing faction makes perfect sense.
But you literally brought it into the conversation, Ware!!
Garrosh’s Unnamed War was literally heating up before Cata even began. The Cataclysm did not cause the war, and it’s silly to pretend that trade had a single thing to do with it beyond orcs want night elf trees.
I decided to paste the text into this thread just in case the messages become inaccessible sometime:
“I’m very proud of Southern Barrens, but looking back, there’s some fair criticism. The Alliance ending doesn’t have the closure of the Horde ending. The big Alliance conquest (Taurajo) happens off-screen. Blowing up a goblin camp isn’t nearly as satisfying as exploding Bael Modan.”
“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. This zone didn’t help. ”
“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. That way they couldn’t possibly complain! [Narrator: “They did.”]”
“Anyways, in some ways it’s 2010 all over again: you can play the Cataclysm as it happens in WoW Classic right now, and they’re gearing up for Mists of Pandaria in the coming year. I hope you enjoyed this little Barrens chat! [End ]”
I still think Sylvanas should have shacked up with Varimathras instead of Nathanos. Making him an obvious traitor was an idiotic choice and waste of a potentially great dynamic.
Cataclysm repaired what the Horde didn’t have. You know like a leveling queue that is actually fun and not limited to just the Barrens. And actually having quests in endgame content. Alliance got the Onyxia questline, the Horde had nothing that was even similar.
Faction Conflict became boring too.
I’d wager it was the writers fault more than the concept of it though.
The reason being is that when it eventually came to MAJOR confrontations — the Horde were always portrayed as the bad guys and the Alliance as ‘The good guys’ – It got ridiculously repetitive and rather depressingly demoralizing for the Horde and quite painstakingly predictable for the Alliance.
Faction conflict’s glory days
Faction conflict prior to major campaigns against one another, such as mild skirmishes and fights spread out in different areas where one would hold the advantage in X area but the other prove superior in Y area — was great, because it wasn’t necessarily a “stalemate” but it was well received in the story upon both ends too … You could get behind the faction pride.
The questing in Cataclysm was pretty neat with faction conflict since it was aggression or finally achieving success (depending on which you played) – and felt like the story was progressing … If they had a pushback later on but maintained the status quo that neither is fully “evil” / “tyrannical” / “bad” etc — They would’ve done well.
Sadly however, MoP villified the Horde to greater proportions and BFA later followed in similar – nay perhaps even almost a complete mirror view of one faction being the controversially offensive in a rather inexcusable manner & dishonourable conduct — and the other faction (the Alliance) being more of an understandable retaliation to such.
Faction conflict, I only see working again if the Alliance are the ones who make the bad choices or are the aggressors in the situation and the Horde are the ones who rightfully retaliate to them … If such events results into not necessarily a full-blown war but the status quo it use to be? … I’d probably be fine with that too.
And also, in fairness to Alliance-centric players, frustrated them because “If we’re the good guys and we defeat all our other [NPC] evil foes, why can’t we defeat this one? Why do the devs suddenly write us as unable to have a solution to the problem of the Horde, when we have solutions for Onyxia, Arthas, C’thuun, etc. that work just fine?”
And I have to admit, as Horde-centric player, that it infuriates me to no end that they did this because Alliance players felt bad about how their invasion of the Barrens (i.e. the one designated Horde leveling zone) didn’t go very well.
I admittedly felt this way for a LONG time about the gilneas starter zone and the worgen victory feeling hollow and them never getting a proper revenge arc against the forsaken
So I do understand the sentiment even if I don’t care much these days about the factions as a whole
If you make one side lose and kill them all the losers stop playing. That’s why swtor makes the player win im their own Story. Bfa made the mistake of forcing the Horde against each other a Second time.
”
]”
Sadly however, MoP villified the Horde to greater proportions and BFA later followed in similar – nay perhaps even almost a complete mirror view of one faction being the controversially offensive in a rather inexcusable manner & dishonourable conduct — and the other faction (the Alliance) being more of an understandable retaliation to such.