I mean, it’s done wonders for my 401k. Which is a nice consolation prize if I have to cash it out early.
But wasn’t it super cool how she went from being the anti-Horde hardliner that the Alliance needs, and that she had developed into through years of character advancement, back to being a masochistically forgiving pacifist just because one Tauren did a sort of nice thing?
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brain hurt make bad plot
The fact that corporations are willing to screw over their workers in order to line the CEO’s pockets says more about the lack of necessary financial regulation than the overall health of the economy. Not that those things are unrelated.
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Again, though, while this is all completely true and still inexcusable, this is also…kind of what Blizzard is, isn’t it?
It employs all their favorite tropes:
-“War is hell but also totally sick”
-“Girls are icky and will do evil if they don’t get boyfriends”
-“The only genuine emotion is manpain.”
In a lot of weird ways, BfA was a massive step backward for Blizzard. Despite featuring more women characters than ever, the ugly tropes are still there. Despite having covered Orc Manpain extensively, we got more of it. Despite having had done this exact same expansion before, they somehow managed to get it worse the second time around.
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And we’ve seen nothing yet cause we’re going to hell and heaven and purgatory etc
What horrible characters will get redemption? What good characters will be forgotten? Do all Orcs that go to heaven get eyebrows?
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I read down a ways, and I noticed something about all the complaints. Most of them, have nothing to do with the fact that Blizzard basically came out and said… "next expansion is going to be the same World of Warcraft fan fare. Nothing new to see here."
I’m sure someone mentioned this in the complaints. But the majority of complaints I saw had nothing to do with this. Which makes me wonder, how can this not aggravate you? Knowing that every expansion is going to be the same as the last. Slightly different mechanics. But more or less, the same. Blizzard only ever builds outward not upward, so it’s always a ocean knee deep. You’ve already seen it already.
…haven’t we mentioned a major bone of contention being that it’s the same story as MoP?
You tell me one post alt.
I don’t know, I’m kind of hopeful for expanding their dip into proc gen content with the tower. We’ll see how it works out.
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I, personally, have a different take on this situation.
I’ve been frustrated, mechanically, at attempts that feel like attempts to build not out, or up, but in a circle. I remember my class being fun in WoD. I remember a lot of other classes being fun in Legion. Almost all of them were gutted by the time BfA dropped. I would honestly prefer that, at a certain point, classes not change. But the most malicious and suspicious part of me suspects that at least someone thought, “Hey, we have to keep changing how every spec works every year and a half, because it’ll look bad if stuff doesn’t change after a long enough period of time.”
I don’t think I have a lot of good reason for that to be true. And some of the mechanical changes at least suggest, or make me hope, for some kind of stability in that regard. But there are so many stories about specs that used to be fun in the last two expansions that somehow got changed in the last two years.
I had one friend who swore by Legion Ele Shaman. I had several who swore by Legion Spriest. Most DKs I know, including me, really enjoyed the old rune system.
I think it would be far too tin-foil-hat and far too malicious to think that the changes are deliberately fabricated, taken years in advance so they can give it back to us years later for hype. But that’s what’s happening, even if it’s not in cold blood, decided by a corporate cabal years ahead of time.
I’d rather, at least with regard to classes, and maybe other ideas for endgame character progression, that at some point, they get a good idea and it solidifies. Maybe, if this new legendary system is fun, it stays, but every expansion, our old ones are useless, and we get some new 1-5 player content to play for the new ones. I’m content with that idea, in theory. I like solo content, and I’ve always wanted more of it.
So, maybe I’m in the minority on that one, but I hope, at some point, if Blizz is actually learning from their mistakes on a mechanical level, they’ll have to go, “Okay, we figured this out now. We do it this way from now on.”
It’s a bit of a commitment, and I doubt they’d come right out and say it, but that’s what I hope happens, at some point, especially with regard to certain specs. There are certain versions of certain specs that I would happily play forever, if they’d just let me.
It’s not malicious or suspicious at all, class design in an MMO is imbalanced by design, and it changes by design.
Buff/Nerf cycles, parallel with pruning abilities and adding abilities, keep the game interesting and nudge some players to swapping “mains”.
Hell, people who are diehard about their main class even love having a moanfest about it and, similarly, complaining about classes they believe are OP (and which very well might be in regards to being a soft/hard counter to their class if we’re talking about PvP).
Take WotLK DKs for example. There was no way they were OP and then nerfed by mistake.
Making a class OP and nerfing it is not ideal.
Shaking classes up a bit every 2 years, and giving them a hard shakeup every other expac – but not TOO hard! Is far better.
And for me, I prefer that to them being considered “finished” because if I wanted to play a balanced game where the pieces don’t change I’d go for chess, you know? It definitely needs change, to a degree, IMO.
But it needs to be nuanced.
They started overreaching with this in WotLK and around 12ish years into the game it got taken to an extreme with the outright, in-your-face design philosophy of “rented abilities”.
Losing all the perks of the artifact weapon felt awful. We’re going to lose all the little buffs from our azerite armor. The neck, at least, will retain utility in Timewalking (which is kind of cool? I’m happy about it at least!) – and we’re getting more rented abilities with covenants.
There are certain versions of certain specs that I’d play forever, too. Maybe a good design approach would be to just add new sub-specs. Perfect balance isn’t really a goal, and while it would be more work to maintain “acceptable balance” with subspecs or whatever, it would be worth it.
TLDR: no, you’re not being suspicious you’re 100% right.
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There was definitely a lot more BfA story to be told, and it was tied in to assaults on Silvermoon and Mulgore (two things which, incidentally, would have seen the Alliance being the aggressors). People complaining so loudly about Warfronts is what killed a lot of the story.
It’s also why the first races after the Warfronts were axed that got Heritage armour were Blood Elves and Tauren - they were armour sets that were initially slated to be Warfront sets (like the Alliance/Horde/Night Elf/Forsaken sets).
So yeah. A lot of potentially Alliance-centric story got cut due to feature-related backlash.
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This sounds like quite the dramatic claim.
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Citation needed
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It was there, existing, before the Titans.
ime jost sittin here
b4 the tittans
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I never understood the backlash to Warfronts.
I don’t like how they made them, but I don’t want less of them. I wanted something that involved actual decision making in the building and unit production. Which, yes, is hard in LFG content, but we could have the easy mode where the decisions don’t matter, but they’re at least different every now and again, and a hard mode where they do.
And, even then, I don’t despise them. M+ and raiding provide enough mildly difficult content, although I didn’t think TEP or Mechagon were particularly difficult this tier, for me and my purposes.
At the same time, if they intended to continue treating the Alliance “big moments” the way they treated the night elves in Darkshore and the Night Warrior content, I’m not sure that anything they were going to do during those warfronts was actually going to satisfy Alliance players. The warfronts, as they stand, don’t even have much story attached to them to begin with–not even Darkshore, the one that’s intimately related to the expansion’s opening act.
The long-awaited treatment of the Alliance as if they, too, are cool being in the cut warfront content is too optimistic of a conjecture for me.
Promised more content / depth than they delivered on, compounded gearing / appearance collecting RNG, grossly tedious with no signs of tweaking or improvement to core points of friction in the model.
The backlash seems pretty easily understandable at base, IMO.
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Hot take I guess but honestly I’m not a big MoP fan and I feel like the faction war was… slightly better this time?
MoP’s conflict starts with the bombing of Theramore, pretty much an exact parallel to the burning of Teldrassil. Passive Alliance city full of civilians gets destroyed by the Horde. Except… Garrosh had no reason to do this. I don’t even really know why he hated the alliance so much, as a dude who spent the first ~30 years of his life on another planet and first interacted with the Alliance on Borean Tundra, where he… already hated them for some reason? Maybe I’d like him better if I read some of the five dozen novels and comics with orcs on the cover that came out from WotLK-MoP but I’m not going to do that.
Sylvanas’s motives felt pretty contrived at the time (something something Azerite), and the way the Shadowlands reveal re-contextualizes everything is sort of annoying because it feels like a soft retcon when you just have a bunch of secret lore that you don’t even allude to which suddenly becomes relevant in an “exciting twist”. But I guess I prefer somewhat contrived motivations to “no motivation at all, big orc man bad”. I even find Sylvanas just more fun to watch than Garrosh was, because sneery contemptuous zombie is sort of more likable than “screaming shirtless guy”.
challenge video watch without rolling your eyes
Oh and remember how the entire horde was just OK with killing all those civilians at Theramore? The civil war didn’t start until much later when Garrosh started kicking people out of Orgrimmar and trying to assassinate other leaders. I’m not exactly sure why the outcry to Teldrassil was so much stronger among horde players than Theramore, but at least the in-universe characters objected to it right away.
The alliance reaction to Theramore was pretty dumb too. Because… there wasn’t any. A city-state was destroyed and the counterstrike was “Jaina almost attacks Orgrimmar but doesn’t because wise orc Jesus tells her not to”. In a novel. It is frustrating how they made the Siege of Lordaeron into a Pyrrhic victory (it would have been awesome for Alliance morale and human fans to capture Lordaeron in a non-blighted state, even if it was only good for some ruins to RP in), but if the alternative would be Jaina showing up in a flying boat only to have Baine calm her down and make her go home (in a novel), I guess I prefer fumigating Lordaeron.
Both war stories are pretty much low points in the game’s story for me because the faction war is dumb and awful and should’ve ended in Frozen Throne but didn’t and apparently never will. But uh at least BfA didn’t have Garrosh and Varian and the Alliance wasn’t abjectly pathetic (we’re just like 75% pathetic woohoo)
What did you think was better about MoP’s story?
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