We had a damn simple option - freaking kill Guldan instead of letting him go free. He is absolutely helpless and exposed and just damn well stab him!
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Yeah but Troy Baker can talk his way out of anything.
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It comes from a behind-the-scenes leak reported by YouTubers Taliesin & Evitel. They tweeted on 1/23/2022,
“The way I’ve heard it (and that’s all it is) is that Afrasiabi was set on Sylvanas’s turn in BfA and was moved off the team (for now obvious reasons) after it was announced but before it was properly worked out. A ‘Dude trust me’ that he never saw through.”
More information, including a link to a video with screenshot, is in this thread:
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Thanks for sharing the link! I’ve seen that video and vaguely remember that tweet, but it’s been awhile and I’d forgotten the specific wording. I read “before it was properly worked out” as meaning before Sylvanas’ arc was concluded, which didn’t happen in BfA and indeed didn’t happen until the end of Shadowlands, so that wouldn’t have indicated anything about which BfA patches he worked on. Danuser was definitely in charge by the time Shadowlands launched, but I’ve never seen any indication that he was responsible for the shift from the faction war to the fight against N’Zoth, as Badmaa seemed to be indicating.
One of the things I find so frustrating about BfA is that I think the zone stories are actually quite good! I just hated the war campaign, or rather specifically, the Horde war campaign, since it required Horde players to just go along with mustache-twirling-level villainy and terrible tactics, and it felt like there was no plan in place about what to do with that in the long term, because there wasn’t one. I’d forgotten about the “Lost” comparison Taliesin made in that video, but it’s very appropriate.
To be fair, I don’t think there actually being a long-term plan in place would have improved this issue. 
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Afrasiabi was terrible for many reasons and we should be glad hes finally gone.
It would have helped with the “just wait and see!” sentiment that got thrown at us every patch while we waited to see if maybe this update would somehow make the story make sense.
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“Wait and see” is the same as my mom telling me “maybe later” growing up.
It means they got nothing but dont want to outright say no.
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Yeah, I don’t think we’ve ever gotten official word on exactly when Afrasiabi stopped working on the story. But one of the messages Taliesin quoted from his internal sources makes it sound like it was pretty early on: “Alex Afrasiabi unilaterally made the decision to burn the world tree and set Sylvanas on her villain path—and he did it without a plan… and then he left the WoW team. None of the current Narrative Designers are happy with the World Tree burning, but they couldn’t couldn’t just pretend like it never happened.” We don’t have a date for that message, but it kind of sounds like he left relatively soon after the burning and they’ve just started trying to fix the mess (Night Warrior?).
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I think the only “sense” we were going to get from Afrasiabi was “You’re doing this because your warchief is the Evil-est Evil to ever Evil out of Eviltown.”
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He could have just slapped a stick-on mustache on her and called it a day. At least Garrosh’s fall made some amount of sense; Sylvanas went from being a character who in theory was a brilliant tactician to “I’m going to destroy my own military assets because I feel like it”. Even Nathanos was feeling weird about it.
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Like I’ve always said, the worst part about BFA is that it basically lobotomized half the principal characters to tell a bad story.
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For me it was “five more minutes” from my older brother.
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