How do you gain levels? Can you be permanently barred from a level?
From when the new forum launched, but roughly right.
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So it looks like if someone’s flagged or suspended, they’re blacklisted from Trust Level 3. The former’s absolutely in no way open to abuse 
You can get back to Trust level 3 if you been flagged or suspended but it takes a lot of work. I have managed to do it only to get suspended for mentioning a certain part of the Jailers body and I mean, who wasn’t. It was a meme after all. And I have been falsely flagged as well.
Sadly you do not get back your trust level 3 if you win on appeal. Which is really stupid.
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Given their contempt for that meme, I’m surprised “nipple” isn’t a banned word.
If anything happens to me…
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Playable blood elves did not make sense regardless of the faction.
High/Blood Elves should never have become a playable race.
But then again, I think the same of Night Elves and Forsaken.
Why do you think so?
Night Elves and forsaken are quite obvious I would say.
They just don’t fit in whatsoever, and them being in the factions are hard to justify overall.
Just look at the forsakens overall presence in the Horde as a majorly evil race. And imagine Thrall and the tauren being absolutely thrilled with all of their obvious, evil shenanigans, yeah, no.
The Night Elves are just the Night Elves, a xenophobic, secluded race that just does not play well with others… at all. Them being a part of a faction have severely lessened them as a race that was otherwise quite powerful.
The High Elves are just plain boring and a redundant race. The Blood Elves would have a much better time as a non-playable neutral race that people did quests for. They are very good at holding grudges, and they had absolutely no love left for either Horde or Alliance at the point of their introduction. I could not see them as a large enemy faction, what we got with Kael’thas and the rest was bad enough. But them joining a faction was stupid.
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The blood elves were borderline a villain faction. You can say it’s weird they joined horde/alliance all you want… but they weren’t planned for either. At the end of the day they made the right choice with the horde.
At the time, night elves were shunning arcane. Hence no mages. Blood elves were dabbling in fel and then some. There’s contradicting lore for both sides, but blood elves were 100% too “dirty” to be welcomed into the alliance, especially with how they were written at the time. Just because Tyrande was nice to kael on what was pretty much high elf land, doesn’t mean the night elves would accept the race by the time TBC happened. It makes perfect sense the night elves were spying on them.
The horde provided help and were willing to tolerate their dirty practices. Remember, they weren’t the closest of buddies when they started. There’s a blood elf merchant that refuses service to trolls in game to this day, and thrall said something along the lines of “they need to prove they can fix their own threats at home if they want to be a part of the horde”
Now, blizzard ignores most established lore, blood elves are goody two shoes light elves and void elves are continuing that lineage of “dirty” magic. But the blood elves inclusion to the horde really isn’t that crazy at the time. Especially with Sylvanas hard vouching for them. A race that barely survived extinction starts using whatever means necessary to survive was the hordes motto for the longest time.
All in all, this topic harkens back to the Nightborne. They’d work on either faction, but the horde took them in. You’ll have people dying on either hill but saying it makes no sense they (blood elves/Nightborne) joined Horde is ignoring some crucial bits of lore.
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Silverpine Forest… part of Lordaeron in the north and Gilneas in the south was “high elf land”?.
Tyrande was kind because of the High Elves that died to defend Mount Hyjal and Nordrassil from Archimonde. You know, the world tree whos very power the High Elven ancestors rejected and gladly went into exile to avoid? The WotA also brings in a personal reason. Dath’remar Sunstrider and his allies broke Tyrande out of prison as a gesture of good faith to the rebellion.
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This chat is already arguing over BE. Just remember the reasoning is pathetic
Tell that to the portal mage inside of the Temple of the Moon.
The reality here is, the Night Elves only ever shunned the practice of arcane magic within their own ranks. As we saw back in WC3:TFT, Tyrande, Malfurion, even Maeiv at the time, weren’t exactly slaughtering Kael’thas and his followers for their use of arcane magic, or leaving them to get destroyed by the Scourge for it either.
In other words, WC3:TFT had set a foundation on which the Night Elves and Blood Elves could have worked to mend bridges. This foundation, of course, had to be ripped up for the Blood Elves to go join the Horde. I mean, the Night Elves had joined the Alliance, a faction FULL of mages, with one of the Alliance’s key figures, Jaina Proudmoore, being an exceptionally powerful sorceress. Keep in mind, her using magic didn’t exactly count against her at all during the Third War, as far as her relations with the Night Elves went either.
This idea that the Night Elves condemned the practice of arcane magic by anyone and everyone is fundamentally flawed.
A product of the writing.
Had the Blood Elves been joining the Alliance, I doubt there would’ve been any Horde presence in their zones at all. At most, maybe some Forsaken trying to take Windrunner Spire for Sylvanas, but even that would feel like a stretch when the Forsaken were struggling to hold onto what bits of Lordaeron they had. Meanwhile it would’ve been the Alliance providing assistance to Quel’Thalas, and tolerating the Blood Elves mana siphoning techniques.
As I said before, it failed to address a number of questions. Namely, what did the Horde have to offer the Blood Elves as far as sources of magic for their addiction, and why would the Blood Elves ignore thousands of years of history in which Trolls, Orcs, and Undead (those latter two being VERY recent) trying to wipe them off the face of Azeroth (with one group succeeding). It’s hilarious that the Forsaken named themselves that for the living turning their backs on them, but the moment the Horde needed a pretty race with Paladins, the super judgemental elves just overlook it.
Like… this even goes into a whole other slew of problems. Some of the biggest justifications I see as to why the Blood Elves hate the Alliance stems to, “Well, Arthas destroyed their kingdom,” or, “Garithos imprisoned and tried to execute their prince.” Okay… so what does that have to do with the modern Alliance? Arthas and Garithos were both part of Lordaeron. Lordaeron, you know, that nation all those Forsaken were a part of?
It’s just mind-boggling how the Alliance gets the bad rap for what essentially was Lordaeron’s actions, when the Forsaken joined the Horde. You’ve got Orcs stilled P.O.'d about the Internment Camps when it was Lordaeron running them, for example, yet somehow this is all Stormwind’s fault, despite Stormwind being located on the opposite side of the equator. I mean… what happened when an Orc comes across the shambling undead corpse of a former Warden at those internment camps, who is now a Forsaken?
Of course, we’ll never see those scenarios or questions answered, because the obvious answer is, if the story had not taken a back seat to game design, the Forsaken would not have joined the Horde, let alone the Blood Elves. I don’t think Thrall would’ve let either in, and in the case of the Blood Elves, the Horde had nothing to offer them.
They made the most sense with the Blood Elves. Them joining the Horde was solidifying their alliance with the Blood Elves, just with some extra baggage.
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What makes the criticism of “product of the writing” not equally valid in the case of portal mages being in the temple of the moon, or the night elves joining a then-arcane-packed alliance?
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I would argue WC3 had established why the Night Elves’ attitude on magic was the way it was. Again, we never saw Tyrande or Malfurion balk at either Jaina, or Kael’thas using magic (heck, even Medhiv got a pass on that one). Clearly, the Night Elves’ problem with magic was allowing it to be practiced within their own ranks. They determined it was taboo for their own people, not everyone else in the world.
(Edit): That said, why the Night Elves joined the Alliance never made much sense either. In WC3, they were equal to the combined might of the Horde and Alliance. The Orcs cutting down trees in their sacred forests hardly justifies why they’d join the Alliance. Like the Forsaken, this felt more like a, “We want this race playable in a two-faction game, so screw the lore!”
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Maybe if they didn’t drop fel and become just another light culture the belves would fit in as a horde race.
Reminder: peak blood elf is represented by the dungeon Magisters’ Terrace.
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The Horde was never heavy on fel usage in the first place.
Can’t tell me that to be the case with the orcs officially being against it, the tauren officially being against magic overall (At that time), and the trolls not really being huge on fel either.
The forsaken and the blood elves were outliers, abnormalities within the Horde.
That said, not even the Blood Elves were high on fel. That is a player-fantasy derived partially from an early concept of the blood elves, as well as a huge chunk of misconceptions about what was going on in Quel’thalas at the time of The Burning Crusade.
They were dark, in the sense that they were kinda vampiric in their dealings with magic. They did use fel, but officially, only as a way to power their floating structures, but not as sustenance, that is where their ‘magically-vampiric’ abilities come in. While High Elves have always been able to draw magic out of inanimate objects, the Blood Elves learned to draw it out of living beings.
If people actually decided to read the darned quests in Eversong Woods and Ghostlands, they would know a lot more.
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It made sense at the time but wasn’t fleshed out as well as it could have been. Remember Kael’thas allied with the Naga, which would automatically set the Night Elves against the Blood Elves joining. Not to mention older lore had Night Elves hate High Elves more than Orcs and Blood Elves even moreso than that. (Yes, despite the positive interaction between Kael/Tyrande prior to his Naga Alliance).
I will say though it doesn’t make any sense sticking around, Thalassians have always been fickle with their Alliances. Sticking with the Horde post-Teldrassil after the Horde couldn’t even defend Lordaeron just seems ludicrous.
Blizzard’s first word on Horde blood elves was actually pretty solid: the Alliance had no interest in fighting for Quel’Thalas again after its abysmal conduct in WC2, Kael shacking up with Vashj and Illidan’s monster faction had broken the Tolkienesque alliance of old twice over, and its only source of earnest aid came from a zombified national hero aligned with its reformed enemies of yesterday. There was an interesting story in there; the Sylvanas novel, of all things, touched upon it with the blood elf leaders’ odd accord with Thrall/Cairne/Vol’jin.
I’d argue the problem is less that the blood elves were made too nice and more that the Horde was made way too evil, to the point where their closest contemporaries are no longer the Forsaken but purple versions of themselves. They had good reasons to join Thrall’s Horde, but no great incentive to stick around in the mess Garrosh made of it and the veritable Scourge Sylvanas warped it into.
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Honestly I think this applies to pretty much every Horde race.
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Indeed. That Sylvanas somehow maintained majority support across BfA is a bigger “gameplay first” sin than any others alleged in this thread.
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