We also have Chromie, who can send up back in time to a time when we WERE at war.
There ARE explanations…
Yes and no.
I don’t want a Faction War xpac ever again.
Faction War questlines, sure. New PVP battlegrounds centered on these “frontiers”, sure.
But just end the Faction War, keep the Factions separate, and fix and stabilize the Borders
Unifying the factions is unnecessary and the difference of political umbrella ideology allows for narrative nuance and complexity
2 Likes
There is no possible arrangement of borders that everyone will be happy with is the problem, because the faction system and the faction narrative is set up in a way that intentionally polarizes players and encourages everyone to think of every faction related issue as a zero-sum game where one team wins and the other loses.
There is a reason why borders and land claims are the most hotly contested issues on these forums that regularly has people at each others throats.
Particularly in cases where faction identity ends up being tied to territory, resulting in a faction not having territory that it identifies with causing endless angst and flamewars because people don’t think straight in that kind of environment.
As long as the factions remain as they are, there will either inevitably be another faction war xpac or the lack of a faction war will itself start to look stupid and nonsensical because that’s what division does to people.
I’m personally so frigging sick of the lore constantly being a faction thunderdome where every single lore event regardless of context is weighed and measured to determine which faction/race it “belongs” to.
Even literally slipping our collective mortal coils and going to the afterlife still provokes constant debate over which faction/race it “belongs to” and the only way that this will ever stop is to canonically get rid of factions entirely. Let everything “belong” to everyone.
2 Likes
This is sort of inevitable, even if it still works with the shackle of BfA story choices (as we likely will be for some time barring a timeskip, and even then…) in terms of game health it’s important.
Moreover, nearly every major threat has been dealt with in some sense by joint Alliance and Horde efforts, so this would work just fine if we go back to the cold war era of faction conflict, ergo the best kind. We’ve had joint operations with the factions since the AQ patch, and as much as I am a night elf fan and want them to get some payback, that was never ever ever on the table, and so I’d much rather do away with the faction status that made it possible.
In terms of PVP, arenas have been canonically run by goblins since their inception so that’s no issue. As for battlegrounds, not a single one has been lore relevant and actually set in modern times since… I want to say MoP. Each one takes place as the result of a conflict that was canonically settled years ago.
8 Likes
I guess you played legion skipping all dialogues and cinematics then.
1 Like
Seething Shore took place in BFA
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If it weren’t for the faction system they probably actually would have gotten some kind of payback because then players wouldn’t take literally every single bad thing that happens to one faction or the other personally and Blizzard would be freer to write characters more naturally without having to worry about starting soccer riots by appearing to “choose sides.”
For instance, WoW’s major competitor, FFXIV, has a semi-faction system involving three different city states that are all mostly on the same side but are still geopolitically competitive and have their own frictions with each other.
This doesn’t result in blood feuds between players because
A) Each city state is multi-racial and they have similar racial compositions besides, and
B) Player identity isn’t dictated by which city-state they choose to affiliate with and thus questions about inter-faction tensions don’t automatically become a referendum on player identity that prompts them to defend their chosen city to the death.
This doesn’t feel like it should be rocket science IMO. Especially given that WoW treats race and political identity as one and the same as defined by the faction system, giving players even MORE emotional incentive to draw knives over faction conflict.
4 Likes
That would backfire as then the object of analysis is racial fantasy resonance
e.g. it would no longer be that Bastion/Ardenweald are “Alliance-ish” and Revendreth/Maldraxxus are “Horde-ish”, but rather Bastion = Humans, Ardenweald = Nelves, Revendreth = Blood Elf but Vampires, Maldraxxus = Forsaken & Orc, leaving the other 2 dozen races in the dust.
Factions need to remain as a dynamic of fantasy reduction to allow for narrative equity with less steps.
1 Like
Maybe it shouldn’t be. Not everyone wants a story that’s treated as being fundamentally about race and, more particularly, about segregating people and cultures according to race. Particularly in an escapist setting.
Hard disagree. Factions are fundamentally artificial and “faction representation” is loaded with about a dozen caveats that demonstrate this. See: The Eternal Inter-Alliance War between Night Elf and Human fans.
A Gnome will still feel out of place in Ashenvale regardless of them being Alliance in Alliance territory just like how a Tauren will feel out of place in Undercity despite being a Horde member in Horde territory.
In fact, if we are going to approach this from a “racial fantasy resonance” angle then that still makes the faction system an obstacle, because again, Night Elves and Tauren for example would both probably both feel more resonance in places like Ashenvale or Desolace than the rest of their respective factions would despite being under the same faction banner.
Humans and Undead probably feel more resonance in Tirisfal Glades and the Plaguelands than most of their respective faction members in the same way, despite being on opposite factions.
In these cases, faction dynamics are not helping racial fantasy. They’re hindering it.
5 Likes
Heck if I can throw in an example regarding my own particular lore bias, my frustration with the Lordaeron situation is in itself bizarre, because the Argent Crusade controls most of Lordaeron now and they are almost certainly going to stay that way, a situation that SHOULD satisfy me but it doesn’t, because the game has told me that I need to identify the human narrative with the Alliance specifically, and the Argent Crusade is not Alliance even though it’s overwhelmingly human both demographically, historically, and culturally.
That simple technicality affects the tenor of the story in such a way that it leads to a constant sense of dissonance in terms of the human story’s progression post-Warcraft 3, and it’s a technicality that only exists because of the faction system.
1 Like
Debatable, or rather a narrative ambiguity, given it “should be” a branch of the Silver Hand, which in BFA did go Alliance unilaterally as per Stromgarde Warfront.
The easier solution is to allow for class-fantasy to be centered on certain factions while allowing for a “subgroup” to exist of the opposing faction.
E.g.:
And I would love it if it did, but the point is that as a human fan, whether or not they are Alliance carries considerably more weight than it should, because racial identity has been tied to faction identity, which I believe is an insanely toxic aspect of this game’s world that leads to constant frustration for everyone.
Particularly since faction identity is designed to be inherently exclusionary. For a lot of people, they care almost as much as the other faction being denied access to things as they do getting access themselves. It’s one of the reasons proposals like “we should share territory” are so rarely well received around here.
This cannot continue.
3 Likes
Ages ago. But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s no way to write a reconciliation NOW that won’t come off as stupid and forced.
There’s always “teaming up to fight a worse threat”, but that’s a temporary motivation.
No, the “funnel system” of Race > Faction > World, where World is,
- The material geography,
- The immediate “plot”,
- The larger cosmology,
is fine really. The problem is that:
- They’ve undermined the Race/Geography aspect fundamentally
- They forced the player to bypass their race/agency entirely for the sake of faction plot (e.g. in no fathomable world would a Tauren Hero willingly go with Sylvanas’s will at Teldrassil or Lordaeron, BFA’s intro fundamentally broke the suspension of disbelief)
- The immediate plot dismissed pre-existing narrative that was tied to the racial fantasies
- There is a lack of narrative equity between races within factions (ie Human-centrism, etc)
- There is a lack of meta-equity in the cosmology regarding racial-factional “fantasy” in the expansion/construction of the Cosmic Forces
Abolishing the factions entirely would exacerbate the inter-racial inequities already present in the story; factions serve as a method of diluting the problem, a coat of paint or sugar or what have you.
Do that, and you remove the in-game, in-narrative reason for ever touching a race that isn’t Humans or Orcs ever again. You remove the foundation for a lot of our critiques entirely.
“It’s supposed to be a coalition of races right?”
So retcon it.
They’ve written themselves into a corner. We all see it. There’s no satisfactory solution. Everyone is miserable. Players have fled in droves, majority because gameplay sucks, but a meaningful portion because the story sucks.
It’s time to just be honest and recognize it is best to just do a massive retcon.
10 Likes
This seems contradictory to me. Factions dilute their members, so removing factions would mean opportunities to explore racial narratives without being constrained by a faction system. Night Elves would be able to interact with Tauren and Nightborne in ways that aren’t simplistic and violent. Humans would be able to interact with Undead and Blood Elves in ways that aren’t simplistic and violent.
They can’t do that right now, because everyone is weighed down by an inherently exclusionary faction system that segregates based on race. You assume that factions are necessary in order to force the narrative to focus on races with less world presence than the Orc-Night Elf-Human-Undead quad under the assumption that these races would drown out the presence of less prominent groups without factions, but I don’t see why factions encourage or prevent that at all. They are entirely incidental.
As they are now though, with racial identity tied to faction identity, it’s actually guaranteed to quash the presence of less prominent groups, because you can say that the Horde as a whole doing something was valid “Troll lore” for example even if the Trolls themselves weren’t particularly involved, because Horde identity subjugates racial identity. It’s the same problem with the Alliance. Night Elves don’t care that the Alliance won in Arathi and Lordaeron, and Humans and Dwarves don’t have any particularly strong attachments to Teldrassil or Darkshore. But because they’re part of the same faction, winning in Arathi is treated as a win for the entire Alliance whether they’re a human or a Night Elf or a Draenei (and in Cataclysm, winning in Ashenvale and Stonetalon was considered a win for the entire Alliance even though Humans and Dwarves were getting their butts kicked in the EK the entire expansion)
This applies to PvE scenarios as well. The narrative tells us that the Forsaken got their vengeance on the Lich King even though they dropped off the map after Dragonblight and the Horde’s Northrend campaign was spearheaded by Orcs. Again, Horde identity subjugated racial identity.
Factions aren’t a guarantee of equal racial development. The only thing that they can guarantee is the illusion of development.
And of course, that in itself presumes that it’s even a good idea to make equality in fantasy racial exposure a goal. The human-night elf-orc-undead quad gets a disproportionately high amount of exposure because the fictional world is set up in a way that it makes sense for most events to involve them in some way, although given recent developments, that quad might be reduced to a trinity what with the Forsaken KO’d.
In fact, future Forsaken development practically requires breaking down faction barriers because they are inextricably tied permanently to the human narrative. Even at the ironic insistence of some posters who clearly don’t like human prominence.
This is a bad idea. Blizzard already plays so fast and loose with canon that it’s already difficult getting players to care about any particular development because they just assume Blizzard will retcon or modify it post-facto as they see fit. If you establish that retconning multiple expansions worth of lore is acceptable they will never have a single person take their story seriously ever again. It’s a one-way path to sucking any dramatic potential out of your story.
4 Likes
I’d rather a body of authors come forward and admit they’ve made fundamental narrative mistakes (which, lets be honest, are probably tied to this lawsuit business and Afrasiabi’s galaxy brain) than insist they can fix it while the stain and rot settles and spreads by simply continuing to build over it.
A structure (the cosmology and future lore) built on rot (BFA) will just collapse due to rot eventually.
5 Likes
That’s subjective, and presumes that everybody is unhappy with BfA or with things that can be traced to BfA somehow. I can already tell you that isn’t the case because there’s plenty of stuff in BfA that I really liked, and my only problem with it is that Blizzard is reluctant to commit to their developments.
People who like things just tend to not post about how much they like something on the forums and that’s always been one of the challenges when interpreting any kind of customer feedback.
And it’s not just because I got Lordaeron back (although that definitely helps.) I was genuinely surprised (pleasantly) when BfA was announced because I had already settled in to the idea that Blizzard would never ever radically disrupt the status-quo on Azeroth. Certainly not to the point where they actually demonstrated that having a bank and auction house did not in fact make you immune to the plot.
So the idea of them running all that back, either via a hard or soft retcon, is extremely blah to me because it would just harden the notion that Blizzard will never significantly alter the status quo, which would suck both because I happen to really dislike the post-WC3 and particularly post-Cataclysm status quo but more importantly because an untouchable status quo is insanely boring.
Don’t want it all run back.
Just specifically the parts that transgressed into the completely inappropriate or fantasy-breaking.
i.e.
- Calia’s Lightforged nonsense
- Teldrassil being burned to a crisp and genocide therein
- The total death of the Desolate Council
It’s ultimately indeed too late to run back Evil Sylvanas AKA Totally Not Garrosh 2.0™, but what is fundamentally narrative breaking is those three things.
- Calia/Desolate Council because it writes the Forsaken into a corner due to Evil Sylvanas
- Teldrassil because it utterly decimated the narrative fantasy for a large swarth of the playerbase + pinned an act of genocide on the Horde player that no amount of “Well actually” from the writers will ever walk back
11 Likes
The simplest solution I could see is to unify the factions and keep racially restricted quests. There are already quests only Gnomes can do or only Draenei can do that, for example, my Night Elf main cannot. Much like mounts and pvp gear sets at the moment, what they can do is set quests from Burning Crusade to BfA to have only the racially specific characters that could do them at their original times be able to do them, then starting with Shadowlands let everyone share the bulk of the quests together.
In practice this would allow, say, a Tauren player and Night Elf player to group up while leveling in Stonetalon Mountains, even though they would have quests that only each of them could pick up, which would be no different from currently a Kyrian aligned player and a Night Fae aligned player being able to group up but not able to pick up the other’s Covenant restricted quests, though can still help each other complete quest objectives nonetheless for the most part.
This could also potentially drive more focus towards more race specific quests in the future, like the Heritage Armor quests.
As for would PvP - as instanced PvP already can be same faction versus same faction - I would recommend an Anarchy Mode rather than a War Mode, where all players are hostile to each other except for people they’re partying with or guilded with, much like Free-For-All areas that already exist throughout the game world. This could potentially lead to organic player made skirmishes where various guilds try to lay claim of areas of the world for their own, like in the old Southshore versus Tarran Mill days, though obviously without the game set faction focus.
2 Likes
I’ll be honest, I’ve never completely understood this sentiment. Maybe because I’ve been dissatisfied with Azeroth’s status quo for so long but I accepted a long time ago that the perceived interests of my characters are never going to be relevant or factored in to narrative decisions. The Alliance definitely would have conducted itself far differently in previous expansions if what I thought my character’s fantasy/identity was factored in.
But it wasn’t, so I just had to resign myself to the fact that the Alliance was going to be, in my opinion, a passive, wet noodle that sold out the northern kingdoms for a Carthaginian peace and that was that. I could envision all the ways that my character had a problem with that, and what I would like to believe they would be doing on the side or in their spare time, but ultimately my character is just one person who, no matter how heroic or powerful, can’t/won’t dictate to the rest of the world how things will be.
It’s one of the reasons that attempts by NPC’s to shame me for stuff that I’ve done in-game doesn’t really affect me that much. That and to be quite honest, there aren’t really any characters left whose opinions I really respect all that much. When someone like Anduin or Jaina tut tuts my actions I just roll my eyes and say “Yeah whatever. You can keep lecturing me but I have a realm to defend.”
Maybe Alonsus Faol because he hasn’t been ruined yet and remains a refreshing breeze that reminds me of the kind of even-handed wisdom that the Alliance once embodied.
1 Like