I don’t know if you’re aware, but Wrathgate was a PR nightmare for the Forsaken. And the development of the plague was responsible for the Wrathgate. And the plague has aided the Forsaken in 0 matters relating to the scourge. And has aided them in, ~looks at notes~, a whole lot of matters relating to the terrible PR they’ve had since.
Benefits aren’t weighed in a vacuum. Their goal was the elimination of the scourge. The scourge was not defeated by their efforts. The plague did more to harm their relations with the world than it did harm to their stated enemy. This was not a pragmatic pursuit.
Same with Bloodstone. They not only had their Horde meat shields assassinate Forsaken people objecting to the research of the stuff, but the Dalaran officials who granted them asylum. This was at a time when the world’s leading minds were amazed at the notion that there were undead who could talk and reason. They were killed. These people could have been a bridge back to being welcomed by at least one human kingdom but they chose revenge instead. It was pursuit of things by any means necessary and that is not pragmatism. Being pragmatic weighs risks. This was pursuit of things regardless of risk. They (Forsaken leadership) wanted Arthas dead and pursued that goal to the great detriment of their people. That is ruthless. Not pragmatic.
You seem to be mistaking failure with not being pragmatic. Their failure, whether you want to place it on their judgment or execution, is not equivalent to not being pragmatic.
Again, I would say they did weigh the risks and found them acceptable.
Ah, sorry, I thought that was PR relating to non-Horde groups. Sure it basically destroyed their credibility with the Horde for a long while.
Also, we have an entire field testing questline in Wrath where the player uses a blight catapult to devastate an army of scourge, so it did have clear use against the undead prior to the Wrathgate after which the Forsaken largely disappear from the action outside the tournament (which really both the alliance and horde do the same anyway).
Not at all. That’s why I keep acknowledging when I’m using hindsight. And the reason I’m insisting its fair to bring up is because Vanilla made it clear Forsaken leadership was acutely aware of the PR risk they were taking. They didn’t care.
When you weigh risks and are willing to put yourself in greater danger for the pursuit of something, that is the opposite of pragmatic.
It was. It destroyed their credibility with the world. If you haven’t played Alliance, or haven’t in a while, this was Varian’s introduction to the Forsaken. He wasn’t happy.
It’s not “illuminating how that spite effects the Alliance” when you claim the effect on the Alliance is the purpose and not a side effect; that’s not “wordplay,” just intellectual dishonesty. It is straw manning, because it is assigning a position to your interlocutor that they do not actually hold.
Having your intentions and motives lied about for the sake of rhetorical points has never been conducive to productive discussion; Ivalesse seems to be doing it because they are aware of how rhetorically weak an explicit position of “I deserve to have you lose another warchief*” would be, so it’s easier to simply redefine the opposing position of “I am willing to accept this evil warchief because of how sick I am of replacing warchiefs every other expansion” as “I want this evil warchief so the Alliance will be unhappy.”
Let’s be clear- that latter position is explicitly what Ivalesse is claiming that all Horde posters, including those who don’t actually want Sylvanas, believe.
If you accept that as a reasonable claim, then there’s no hope of productive conversation between us.
*Damn Poe’s Law; this SHOULD be satirical, but actually seems like a decently common sentiment.
Also, interesting side question; can we actually consider something ‘pragmatic’ if it fails? the entire basis of pragmatism is that success outweighs cost.
And yet you’re using the results consistently as somehow relevant in judging their actions. You acknowledge their goal was to eliminate the Scourge. If they thought researching the New Plague was the best means to accomplish this, in spite of what it would cause people to think of them, then it is certainly pragmatic.
What? No. Acceptance of risk isn’t not pragmatic if you’re weighing them.
I think it would be more practical to evaluate it based on the likelihood of success. If the success hinges on the other actors behaving in a very specific way, that is not in keeping with past evidence, I would say you have left the realm of pragmatism.
You had me agreeing with your post, and I still do on how Ivalesse chose to be explicit over implicit being an issue pushing their post past the way I was suggesting it be viewed. But then you go and do the same thing. The Alliance have every right to want an antagonist of theirs to be removed. It has nothing to do with us wanting “… you to lose another warchief”. You’re taking our perspective and reframing it to suit your own, as though we need to frame things as an appeal to your ego at all times. You have a problem with it when the inverse is being done, as illustrated in your next quote, it shouldn’t be too much to ask for non partisan consistency.
Blizzard has made Sylvanas the antagonist of an entire faction, depopulated as we may be. It is entirely fair to want that antagonist removed. And yeah, it sucks that Blizzard has gone and made yet another leader of yours do this but spiting them and wanting to prop up the character they’ve done this to directly spites, intentional or not, the other half of the player base. Refusing to acknowledge this because Ivalesse framed it poorly helps nobody.
See, the thing about this though is the Horde player base should have seen this coming. Yeah, sure, it’s a bummer that Horde characters are continuously antagonists, but… It’s Sylvanas…. It’s the person who performed science experiments on living people in Vanilla. It’s the person that stole the corpses of Farstriders in TBC, It’s the Person that kept a literal Demon as her advisor for three expansions. Who has used chemical weapons on civilian populations.
Come on guys… This isn’t about Blizzard wanting to make the Horde villians, it’s about Sylvanas being a villain since day one. Long before Garrosh was even thought of.
Except that the situation was fine when Vol’jin was Warchief. And his death set the stage. Then, instead of any other candidate, they put up Sylvanas as Warchief. Ultimately these are the writers’ choices. They put the Horde here.
I would disagree with the first part, or else they would not have killed off Vol’jin and made her Warchief in the first place.
If instead of Sylvanas kicking things of we got a nice juicy Arthas 2.0, Alliance-centric faction conflict with Anduin going down ‘a dark path’ to rid the world of the Horde just in case we might start a War in the future and Sylvanas was just defending the Horde from an actually credible threat in her charactaristic fashion you would find a lot more Horde players supportive of her.
I wouldn’t have phrased it that way if I were paraphrasing almost anyone other than Ivalesse- they are basically a seething ball of spite towards Horde players- not the faction, but explicitly the playerbase. Ivalesse breaks the norm of “a loss for me is not a victory for you” by explicitly celebrating our dissatisfaction. There’s a long history there that has nothing to do with our discussion, except inasmuch as I’ve allowed it to influence my response, for which you have my apologies.
No one has an inherent right to dictate or demand the fate of another faction’s characters; that’s always going to be a conversation stopper, and Blizzard screwed the community dry when they decided to make one faction’s leader the explicit and overarching villain of both factions’ stories while they are still the leader of one of those factions.
You can say that Sylvanas was always a villain. I would argue that she’s had an arc, but that it’s tended dark. Either way, that’s academic because she wasn’t always Warchief.
Fair or not, putting her in that position, then feeding us one dishonest “wait and see” after another, gave us an emotional attachment to her in large part because our leaders keep vanishing from the story, generally in ignominious ways.
Many of us DID see this coming, but “wait and see,” we were assured. And really, it’s irrelevant that we did, since nothing we said would have prevented Vol’jin’s death or her appointment.
Sylvanas has always been someone the Horde would have to deal with eventually. She has never shown true loyalty to the Horde, and in fact, repeatedly has gone against the orders of the Warcheif. What did you expect? Vol’jin to just put her down? For Blizzard to give this long building villain a quick and anti climatic defeat? That’s just not a reasonable thing to expect. It doesn’t build any sort of drama, its a boring narrative. Say what you want about BfA… It has everything talking about it. It has everyone arguing about it. It is holding the attention of the audience, which is the mark of a Good Story despite the major flaws it might have.
Engagement can be just as much the mark of a bad turn in a beloved story as a good one. And a clear marker that this isn’t a good one is the primarily negative character of player engagement.
This discussion has happened on these forums numerous times- people talking about how offputting or nonsensical the story is is NOT “good publicity,” or the mark of a good story.
You can mock me all you want, but I did not believe this was going to happen when she was made warchief. And I still say there were other ways it could have gone that would still have been in character and would have made a better story.
Oscar Wilde would disagree with you. And the Negative attention is mostly a bunch of Horde cry babies complaining that this isn’t the story they wanted, as if this is their story to tell. It’s not and never has been.
Ok, got too caught up in being pithy to point out that the story is explicitly false advertising for us. We didn’t sign up to be villains, and the trailer for BfA was for a completely different game than the one they actually released.