No we don’t. It is sheer arrogance to interpret our opinions as representation of anything beyond just being that… our own individual opinions. People are playing Night Elves with as much ubiquity now as before BFA from what I’ve seen in game.
Yes, there are a good number of upset individuals. There has not however been a massive movement of players with Night Elf mains to quit the game. Which would be the definitive indicator of an upset “community”.
I’ve been maining a Night Elf hunter since the game was in beta. I fully acknowledge that others who have mained Night Elves as long as I do may not share my opinions and that’s perfectly fine. Don’t you or anyone else dare to presume to speak for me.
Speak for yourself, don’t presume to speak for anyone else unless they specifically grant you leave.
The “community” is reserved and quiet for a simple reason. Most players don’t give a damm about the story or aren’t broken up by what happened in it. They’ve got other priorities and have moved on.
So basically the post is “I decided to willingly give this company whose mere continued existence makes me seethe more money for the privilege of complaining about them on their forum more easily than using my simp as an intermediary. When I logged in I was greeted by all of my old friends immediately who were happy to have me back, but I refused to even consider hanging out with them again because of this imaginary tree”
Is that about right?
Well, first off, I’m counting three posts in my discussion with you - including the one that vanished.
Your second paragraph in my mind reflects a general confusion around elaboration and explanation. You were confused about what I meant by an “onscreen celebration of Horde formidability” - I highlighted the importance of Framing and Aesthetics. The linkage in the prior post is “onscreen”. I then noticed that you were confusing competence issues with relatedness issues as well - the linkage to the first post is “formidability”. As for your examples - my dismissal arises because once again, you’re resting on details from the text as opposed to the holistic idea of what was going on - which again is a framing and aesthetics point.
In short, we looked at the whole elephant from several different angles. The “onscreen celebration of Horde formidability” was a term that we had to unpack - and we did so in several different ways with its various elements. No goalposts were moved, the concept was the same.
As for not liking the Night Elf racial fantasy, that’s fine, you’re entitled to that. I get that you’re a goblin fan and that you’re interested in different content. Awesome. But when you’re going to suggest, or comment on suggestions to improve the game, you don’t have the luxury of proposing a situation that only appeals to you, or acting like you’re the only one the game has to appeal to. All of us have power fantasies, and the game should find ways of accommodating them without screwing over other communities. I explained how the game failed in that regard for me - and frankly for the community that you’ve no doubt noticed - of rather upset Night Elf fans who seem to complain about the same thing, and have been doing that for years.
But as for why I don’t think that further conversation with you is productive - I know how you operate, and you did it here as well. This post was pretty much a personal reflection about how I felt about the franchise given my own experience. You charged in and told me that the Horde has it bad too - and I know they do. I agree with you that they need significant help. I offered to turn the discussion to mutual solutions - you did your normal thing of trying to explain that my issues weren’t issues and that these problems aren’t real because from your perspective, you thought that your content was deficient - which if I’m being frank given your posting history: reads to me like “we didn’t trash them hard enough, and we shouldn’t have been told that we were bad while we were doing it.” To which I reply “we don’t like being blown up, Droite, or smashed, or ripped apart”.
In short, you treated your perspective as the only one that matters. It doesn’t - and seeing as how I’m not going to get you down from that, yes, further conversation with you doesn’t make sense.
I paid $15 for one month of game time just to pick a fight with droite and complain how the Night Elves are the absolute victims and no one else has it worse and if you disagree I will stop talking to you
That’s all I got out of that. Par for the course I suppose.
No, I’m really not. Did you play the WoT Prepatch even on the Horde? We have entire platoons of soldiers suiciding themselves against Malf. Suiciding themselves against Wisps. The Entire Horde advance was ground to a halt several times, relying on a lucky outcropping of Azerite to break the line of Ancients; and a mcguffin “Smugglers Path” to get pas the Wisp Wall. This was all playable, in game. Competence was in short supply, it was all dumn luck once we hit Darkshore. There is no content, framing, or aesthetics that reinforce your notion that BfA (or the WoT) of a celebration of Horde Formidability. No matter how much empty academic jargon you shuffle into your points on this, it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve constantly moved goalposts to back a point that only works if your only looking at it through a solely Alliance/NE lens.
I was not disagreeing with you assertion that the NEs have it bad. I agreed with you. I even stated that you had a well written post OP. I took issue however with a single point, that this BfA was some “Onscreen Celebration of Horde Formidability”. Which it was clearly not. Not even the WoT. Unless of course you’re trimming away anything that would conflict with that argument.
I don’t need to trim anything away. I need only point out that those elements do not undo the overall picture of what happened. Which they don’t. It’s never all one thing or another, the bag is normally mixed in some degree, but not to the extent that we are not still dealing with an onscreen celebration of Horde formidability.
Did it come with the relatedness issues? Absolutely.
Was it a perfect example of Horde formidability? No, but I never said it had to be.
Although I will add that I am glad that it appears I am misunderstanding you somewhat. Perhaps we can hammer this out after all.
And what happened? The Horde, both in game and out, barely managed to snag a single victory against a single Alliance race while the majority of their armed forces had been deterred elsewhere. Wow, truly, the Horde is so formidable. The only way you can look at that and think that is if you’re expectation is truly that that should not be the case. That the NEs alone should be stronger than the entire Horde combined? Because that is the alternative to what you are saying, given the scenario we just laid out.
What I saw in the WoT was a faction that in WoD had advanced sufficiently to be on par to the Alliance reduced to a version of itself over 13 years before. And while I truly hate the WoT, and hold nothing but contempt for the Faction Conflict, the idea that Blizz had to do that to us to make their story work says a lot. So yes, I don’t see it as us being portrayed as formidable. We were forced to do the one and only thing we knew a decade ago we weren’t supposed to do when fighting the NEs. Play on their level.
And the ironic part of it? The horde army was initially held off by mostly Kaldorei CIVILIANS. Oh yes, such a proud moment for horde players am I right?
So you’re going back to the text again and importing details that don’t matter very much to how the event was framed and presented. We’ve discussed these points already.
to be honest, one of the most powerfull races of the alliance, the forsaken beat the alliance repeatedly in cata and conquered large parts, they are also one of the most powerful races of the Horde.
I have the feeling that only technological progress counts for you.
small worgen pack? Small? YOu know, this pack was huge…and was at this time the mainforce of the resistance. it was atleast the resistance of an entire kingdom. No small Worgen Pack.
No, I’m not going back to the text. Even within the WoT Prepatch event the Horde barely snagged that win. We were hard locked twice in Darkshore, and only managed to overcome those blockades through sheer dumb luck (and an apparent Smuggler Path that Nathanos knew, but the NEs didn’t)? You are the one not getting that everything within the text was reflected within the game. And keep deflecting my points as “text and lore-nut” talk.
I am going to say - this discussion is turning into what I hoped to avoid - a persnickety lore-nerd assessment about this element that doesn’t matter, that element that doesn’t matter, this thing that lives on page 47 and this other one that’s on page 36 - and it always ends this way. This is a defect in how we discuss story elements here. The text largely doesn’t matter. Tiny details largely do not matter - how the story is told ultimately matters, and when it comes to a visual and interactive medium? Visuals and elements that convey feelings of choice? Those are king - and the gulf is massive between that and things like "where were the Draenei? Why could catapults outrange shipboard cannons? How exactly did anyone believe that the Horde was going to go overland through the Thousand needles, Tanaris and Ungoro on their way to silithus instead of turning right?
I can do this too - we can do this all day, and yet it won’t matter when we’re talking about how the story is presented - what it’s ultimate point is, and why it makes people feel the way they do.
