You can’t invoke Occams razor when it defies existing logic of known interactions. How do you go from sacrificing yourself for a group to actively trying to kill them unprovoked?
And neither is Occam’s razor absolute when there are other equally likely possibilities. Shandris was general of the sentinel army. Fandral was a powerful leader as well who did have some sentinels under his command.
Tyrande may have found out about it, but after it was already done. There’s a time lag between receiving information and getting a pull back command through across the ocean.
Such things happen in real life. Why can’t it happen in WoW where modern technology doesn’t exist?
Technically it was published. It was the collectors edition of BfA(the only one I ever thought about buying) but yes it would be nice if this was revised or even just a Malfurion didnt about the whole thing tweet or something.
Or… they could weave it into the story. It could come up in conversation in game.
Malfurion might be reflecting on Lorash and the roots of his hate. If not exactly regretting his decision to cast out the Highborn, he may feel a new level of responsibility for what happened to the Highborn. While discussing it with Tyrande, he may say:
Malfurion: “We aided young Kael, and our people have not set a hostile foot or raised a hostile blade in Quelthalas…”
Tyrande: “Well… I knew those Highborn would be up to no good. I sent agents with an ambassador from Ironforge, to cripple their infrastructure, before they could become a danger. Our agents and the ambassador did not return…”
Malfurion: “Your sass to Thalyssra sent the Nightborne to the Horde. Your plan to send our forces to Silithus left Teldrassil vulnerable. And now this? Why is it always your fault, woman!?”
This story beat is even funnier with how useless Azerite was as an actual macguffin/weapon in BFA.
If the night elves would have shrugged their shoulders and not taken the bait, and just been content to let the Horde have what ended up basically being just slightly better incendiaries, the whole WoT would have probably been called off due to lack of feasibility, since Saurfang would not have been onboard for a prolonged siege/invasion.
Malfurion was in a coma at the time and the whole thing was a Black Operation. Presumably Tyrande didn’t tell him or anyone outside her circle in order to maintain plausible deniability for both him and Stormwind.
It’s also quite possible that not even Golden knew about it. She’s a writer, not a game player after all, and the story is a pretty niche part of the Horde experience.
He’s too much the strong silent stoic type to be having that conversation. It’s not like he felt guilty about killing a blood elf assasin who tried to kill him and had no doubt killed others in Ashenvale.
Ask the leaders of any (influential/strong) country whether they think their espionage/spying activities count as an “attack” or not, and I promise you they’ll say no.
As previously stated, Malfurion’s comment was a mistake, but even if it wasn’t… the above logic can very, very easily just dismiss the whole issue entirely. In that case, the Night Elves still spied, they just didn’t consider it an act of aggression—just like how it happens in the real world.
I guess I don’t see this as a particularly lore-changing situation even Malfurion’s statements were true (from his perspective).
First off, it wasn’t a "Major Military operation. It was a single recon team whose purpose was to observe and report.
Second, it wasn’t “coordinated directly with Alliance intelligence.” It’s debatable that the Dwarf (the only other party involved) was Alliance Intelligence, and not a mercenary or rogue agent or a pawn himself. And there was no indication that the Alliance had any Knowledge of the events taking place.
And Third, We KNOW Fandral was running personal operations as acting head of the Cenarion Circle and basically second in command of Darnassus, behind Tyrande’s back. Why would THIS be any different?
Occam’s Razor tells us it was Fandral who ordered this and Tyrande never even heard of it.
This is actually just fallout from what was, at the time, a fairly hamfisted way to push the blood elves to the Horde. They specifically had to use night elves for this because in WC3, the only interactions had between blood elves and night elves were pretty positive (Tyrande saving Kael’thas). It should also be noted that, at the point in time the blood elf PC is going through the leveling zones, blood elves were still aligned with and serving Kael’thas, and Kael… didn’t really have any issue with night elves at all.
Thus the story frames what the night elves were doing as far more egregious in order to help sever those ties for the sake of the narrative flow. In addition, the night elves did something very out of character in order to create antagonism. Hating arcane and thus damaging the sanctums? Totally in character for them, sure. But leaving their forests to go aaaaaall the way over to Quel’thalas to start with? That’s the weird part.
So, to sum up:
Did the night elves go to Quel’thalas? Yes.
Did they do anything that could be construed as an attack? No.
Did they sabotage the blood elves’ magical sanctum and do some advanced spying? Yes.
Did any blood elves die? No.
Was it a totally uncool move on their part? Yes.
Was it needed for the sake of the story and barely a blip in the narrative quagmire that TBC was? Yes.
Like c’mon, in one of those books Night Elves sacred moon wells became a SPA for dirty dwarfs. And those cross continental catapults…
Let’s just act like those books never exists.
I suppose we can argue about the use of the terms “construe” as well as “attack”. Because, imo, these two statements can contradict each other.
Many folk do construe the offensive Night Elf presence on Quelthalas as an attack - even if you some how think sabotage is completely separate from an attack.
This another one of those topic we ended up discussing. Did the night elves actually sabotage it? Even the quest npc at best seem to only be guessing the answer and even the incriminating evidence says they are only watching the malfuction, not causing it.
The questgiver starts out presenting a completely logical reason for the Arcane Sanctum’s failure. She’d warned her peers against increasing its energy load, and expected this very sort of thing to happen as a result. She’s even got this exasperated attitude about it all, like a middle-management magister who has to deal with fixing a problem that her superiors caused without being able to actually make them take responsibility for it.
Then night elves are discovered, along with documents from the dwarf indicating he’d been sent to observe the goings-on, and suddenly her expert, informed explanation as magister of the West Sanctum is hastily chucked aside in favor of “oh, it was night elves then. Guess by bosses’ reckless overloading of the Sanctum was actually just fine.”
Almost like she deliberately preferred that new assumption over having to deal with the situation of cleaning up the mess without being able to openly address her superiors being responsible for screwing things up by overtaxing the Sanctum.
They might have sabotaged it, but they as likely may not have, as the on-site magister was already reasonably convinced of an equally possible cause when the player showed up.
The night elves had no cause to sabotage the blood elves nor any reason to weaken them in the face of the Scourge.
What they did have cause to do was investigate them, given the nation was, at that point, affiliated with/in service to Illidan, against whom Tyrande and Malfurion had been fighting in TFT.
They had stopped fighting, and left on amicable terms. It was only when he went “mad” in Outland that they resumed hostilities.
Anyway, if the Draenei questing events happened before this, then the blood elves had already perpetrated a major attack on night elven/ draenei territory so it provides a reason for the espionage after the events of TFT.
Again - that leaves comfortable enough room for Malfurion to be ignorant. And good cause for Tyrande or even Fandral to agree to such a mission.
I mean - it can make sense enough for both sides to have just cause. Which is a good thing for the whole “fog of war” schtick they seem to be on.
It is kind of funny that even the Devs are ignorant of Alliance transgressions against the Sindorei and the Horde - to the point that Alliance leadership being ignorant makes perfect sense.