One of the on-going problems is that Blizzard is a big fan of “tell don’t show”, especially in BfA’s story. This was compounded by the fact that the Alliance and Horde war campaigns didn’t really intersect at all until the very end, so if players who favor one faction over the other saw a drastically different story.
Basically, they wanted to tell a story about all these far-reaching impacts the war would have, forever changing all of Azeroth. But, they didn’t really change Azeroth. So, they might have a quest-giver NPC (Jaina, Talanji, whomever) say, “You did great, Champion!” But that was the extent of it.
For example, I’ve completed Vol’dun on the Horde side, and everything Alliance side. So, I had no idea that Rastakhan was even a character prior to BfA, and I had no idea that he was a major character until I started reading these forums. To an Alliance character, Rastakhan was a “mid-raid” boss, because he never showed up in the Alliance campaign at all. His death really had no emotional weight on me, like… at all.
“You killed Rastakhan!”
“cool”
Like I said, everything feels like a half victory, because it never really impacted the game world at all.
“You destroyed the Horde naval fleet!”
“Uh… were they a problem? I didn’t ever see them outside of Zandalar.”
“Yeah! Well, no. But, they could have been!”
“So, does that mean we’re going to blockade Zandalar now?”
“No! All of your ships will be destroyed in the opening cinematic of the next patch!”
“cool”
I’m not saying that the Alliance, on paper, didn’t achieve some great victories. They did, and their victories likely outnumbered the Horde’s, even if those victories were costly. However, I have a major problem with the disconnect because players were only told about those victories, rather than being shown the need for the victory and the pay-off for achieving (or not achieving) it.