Nope, hard to count her as a horde character when she left the horde and is the villain.
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So in your mind Garrosh is not a Horde character either?
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He was and Sylvanas was as well until they were villain batted.
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So as soon as they become villains whatever story development we saw and continue to see about these horde problems, horde characters and horde challenges with conclusions that involve almost entirely the Horde and their evolution.
Does not count. Alright well I understand why you would feel that Horde gets no content if you readily dismiss it all.
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I mean they are not part of the horde any more so I do not consider them horde. Before they were villain batted yes they were part of horde. Sylvanas got screen time as a villain, her screen time in BFA wasn’t alot.
Her screen time in shadowlands has nothing to do with the horde. If you want to consider her time as a part of then horde then might as well consider all natural character screen time as part of the given factions(Bolvar, Uther, etc). So even then the screen time horde characters get is still dwarfed by their alliance counter parts.
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On that I don’t disagree its nice to see Turalyon, Uther and etc come back home and be involved again. Horde does need more representation in the stories… no argument from me. I just wanted to be clear that Sylvanas wasn’t just a nobody we followed and her storyline is not deeply interconnected with the Horde.
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All players are left out of the narrative. The WoW story isnt about factions. It is about the heroes, which is a mistake IMO, but that is a result of the shift from a virtual world to a collection of games within a game, and trying to connect them all through a story that is less and less connected to the player character.
Vanilla WoW’s experience seemed much more connected to you, despite your character’s considerably diminished power and relevance. It didnt have lfr, normal, heroic, mythic, m+ infinity, torghast, random BGs, rated BGs, 2/3/solo arenas, brawls and timewalking. It had the world, and even the curated instanced adventures that existed were placed in that world and felt relevant to that world. Your success or failure in those experiences was contextualized by place.
Our passion for these factions and sense of justice inherent in our understanding of the story is informed by place. I would be willing to bet, that the people who downplay the war of thorns spent less time in Darnassus than the people who place great importance on the event. I personally would not have felt any sense of victory regarding cataclysm’s Hillsbrad revamp had I not spent so much time in Tarren Mills; that isn’t because the content in TM was so good or that it was so important to the narrative. Thats because it was a place, that felt important. It was the first contested area that felt like a contested area. The ganking and reciprocation that happened in Hillsbrad made the place feel alive. There is no set of quests or cinematics that can tell that story, because it was our story. Yours and mine.
I would wager, that had the Nelves established a city somewhere in the Broken Isles, or Kul Tiras, and Sylvanas had torched that instead, it would hardly have made a blip. While that is, in part, a result of the passage of time, it’s also because WoW is a new game, making changes to a game that no longer exists anywhere but our memories. WoWs story now cannot make us feel any way about new zones. We can like Ardenweald, but we will never be emotional about its destruction. Because we watch the story and play the instances. Even when we play the events, it is practically in a bubble. We do so to complete the chores, and get the mount, or the catch up gear, or the backpack transmog. There was no transmog for completing a series of quests about repelling groups of horde soldiers trying to get For the Horde by attacking Darnassus. You repelled them because the city was yours. The story was real people were attacking something that was yours and you did something about it.
Thats an MMO, and WoW is not that. Its a multiplayer game on an MMORPG framework, and those cinematics and experiences are no longer designed to make you feel faction pride, or anything. They are designed to tell a story that pretends to tie the instanced experiences together.
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And then there was the first season of pvp where the Alliance got a totally unique mount model (that if the devs followed statements they made about basing mounts on each faction’s island, should have been horde as the animal came from Zandalar) that has yet to have a non-pvp version. Which is a shame as more people should be able to get an actual hippo as opposed to the river beast mess.
I’m just going through the bfa page on warcraftmounts, and I’m not seeing any new dinosaurs. I mean, you might get new armor here and there, but it’s all on the same bases as the other ones. And anything the horde got has ways to get that aren’t faction locked.
I’m not trying to say that so many horses is a good thing, but while that is a problem for the alliance, they still gave the alliance more unique models (At least up to BFA when I took the time to count, and basing this on what’s under the armor for mounts that may have armor, so counting a raptor and raptor with armor as the same model if it is the same raptor model under the armor model.) So it’s not all bad.
I don’t know if you mean this, but you seem to be suggesting that it’s only possible to feel real faction pride/attachment if you PVP. Do you think that’s true?
The end of Legion, lmao.
You haven’t been around here for very long, have you?
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They have a funny way of showing that if that’s the case.
Because since CATA there’s been this funny trend of the Alliance being weak & incompetent.
The Alliance since CATA has pretty much just been the Humans, Night Elves & Worgen showing up to get crushed in a humiliating defeat or to look incompetent while the rest of the races sit in the background being ignored.
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I love when horde fans claim blizz loves writing for the alliance. I’m like Yeah, go ask any worgen or Night elf fan how that’s working out. I hear that claim and my first thought is What game are you playing and can I get in on it?
And the sad part is…these people are serious when they say it. It always boils down to God Emperor Wrynn and The Occassional Non human companion who gets beat up.
If that’s considered writing for the alliance, than I want a refund. 
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That’s not fair.
Sometimes Jania gets the spotlight too.
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Just because Blizzard has seen the Alliance as the central actors in the story doesn’t mean you will like their writing.
Some of it is unrealistic expectations. That the Alliance should always be the good guys and always win.
But it is also true that the plot of the Alliance hasn’t been that great. Part of that is how Blizzard baits players in the faction war, and more attention to the Alliance means more baiting. The use the villain bat to stoke Alliance outrage, using the same sort of the approaches they use with the Legion, Zovaal, the Old Gods, etc. But in the end, the Alliance can’t destroy the Horde in the name of Truth, Justice, and the Alliance way."
I’ve seen posts where some demand the writing treat the Horde as the bad guys. But that is what you got with BfA. Others complain about how Blizzard has made the Alliance boring, but interesting writing requires conflict. Since faction war can never be resolved, the Alliance can either be interesting, or it can never do anything wrong, but not both.
I switched to Alliance because the treatment of the Horde was so bad. And I do find it better. But not great.
We will see if the shakeups at Blizzard mean a change in direction.
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She’s part of the problem too. I was just too In the moment to bring her up 
Seriously Nazjatar is funny to me because Thalyssra really gave the place some much needed personal context.
We’ve walked through quite a few highborne ruins over the years but this was the first time I’d seen someone who lived there walk with us. This was a real city once that bustled with the sound of markets and school children goofing around. All destroyed in a collective scream. Felt like going to Pompeii with a Roman tour guide. We put down some of the restless spirits of her loved ones and then run into Azshara. Who is such a petty, vindictive little witch. Deliciously evil.
It’s genuinely a great story moment.
I’d presumed on the Alliance perhaps Shandris or Tyrande would show you around. But no. Inexplicably it’s Jania. The Horde had better Nelf representation and ours got here like ten minutes ago.
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Unless I’m mistaken, the Devs themselves have outright stated they prefer writing for the Horde, that they find it more interesting to write for (granted this was before Golden became an actual member of the writing team, and only wrote novels for them). Of course, that doesn’t mean they write for the Horde particularly well.
MoP presented this fact to us in a very straight-forward manner. I remember when the Isle of Thunder first came out, some Kirin Tor NPCs/Quest-givers actually used Horde dialogue on the PTR, because Blizzard had just copy/pasted it over. The, ‘High King,’ questline we were supposed to get ultimate amounted to Tyrande being made a mockery of and then the Dwarves getting told to play nice. That’s to say nothing of the, ‘Robot Cat,’ fiasco prior to the Siege of Orgrimmar.
That there is a clear passion for one faction that is found lacking in the other is quite obvious.
Though personally, nothing will ever quite top the atrocity of, ‘Void Elves,’ in my book. How that ever got the green light I do not know. You can’t even call that, ‘lore.’
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I do not get how they are shown to be weak. One flying ship wreaked the forsaken fleet, attacked the warcheif(who ran away from the attack mind you). They have one all major wars, warfronts, bfa campaign. The only time the horde wins or gets the upper hand is though underhand tactic and a super weapon. Horde hasn’t won a single fight head-on. While the alliance can has countered with just a couple of characters. You can say alot of things about the alliance, but has never shown to be weak, that was the entire reason the horde signed up to go to war.
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I can understand why it may come across that way. In reality, thats not what Im saying. What I am saying is that in Vanilla and on into further expansions, in a diminishing way, your character mattered. His or her place in the world— their sense of place— was informed first by your race choice which assigned you a faction. That choice was reinforced over your experience in the game, no matter what content you enjoyed, because it was a game about a world, and you belonged to a faction fighting for its place in that world.
PvP is an example of how that sense of place informed everything, and then slowly evolved into something else. It started with wpvp and battle grounds. The battle grounds were not a game within a game. They were places in the game world. They had factions and you could build a reputation with those factions. Your exploits in either form of PvP content earned you ranks in the military of your faction. They felt moreso a part of the world than later versions, because your access to them wasnt in the UI, it was in the world. It was objective based PvP, in the setting of the world, only different because it tried to ensure balanced grouping and larger scale than the spontaneous open world pvp.
Then came Arena, which turned PvP into a quick minigame, and that became the preferred method of developing, balancing and engaging with PvP. Arena is completely detatched from the narrative, the world, your factions. You literally just play a minigame against a stranger. Every type of content has become this, its not exclusive to PvP. Gates of AQ, even outside of PvP was a PvE race against other people in the virtual world… based on faction (your chosen faction, again it was about you). Spiking up the head of Onyxia. These experiences were completely narrative independent. No one gave a flying duck that cannonically Varian killed Onyxia. So what? On this date, at this time my group did, on our server, and the horde got the buff.
This isnt to say that modern wow is bad, nor worse than vanilla. Thats just to say that the story now really has nothing to do with your faction no matter what faction you are on. There is no horde centric story, nor an alliance centric story. One would only think there is in the context of the earlier WoW experience. The story only exists to have the heroes (who only superficially associate with the factions we pretend still exist) explain to us how the current raid fits into the overall narrative.
Edit: That said, if you don’t play classic on an RPPvP server, IMO you are doing it wrong.
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No, not really.
In the context of Sylvanas only, they tend to write her enemies stupid to showcase how smart she is.
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