Has Blizzard Always Hated Night Elves?

ive read somewhere that there is some kind of dopamine release when you win an argument or refute the point of view of someone, i belive this may play part on all this, i do not have a source and havent been able to find it again so take it with a grain of salt.

i agree to this, it sucks being on the receiving end tho specially on something as horrible as genocide, thats like the benchmark of a villain, a point of no return if you will which is exactly why this entire debacle sucks.

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Not anymore thanks to Void Elves. So I say Night Elves are going to be different than the Legolas Types or well your Blondish Elf from LOTR.

Anyways. Not all of Blizzard hated Night Elves. In fact if you look at Warcraft 3 Reforged. Some of them enjoyed recreating the Night Elf Race just as well as the Undead Race as well. It continues in Ardenweald in the Afterlife of Shadowlands as well. Now do I think that the Story for them could be little better and treated well? Yes.

Then again that’s everything in WoW actually.

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I can absolutely assure you no one on the writing team gives a damn about the dwarves.

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Which is unfortunate. The Wildhammers could use alot of love, from reasserting control over the Highlands, to the full AR treatment.

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Well…they kind of do ignore them, though, unless they’re killing them. I mean I appreciate your perspective, I really do. And I share it to a degree, but we’re waaaaay past that degree with kaldorei now.

It’s pretty egregiously worse.

I mean, I feel like they set us up during the pre-launch to think that since Teldrassil was important enough to destroy, the kaldorei would be a crucial part of the main story. And we weren’t, not really. Questing with Shandris was fun, and she’s awesome, and I could watch John J. Keeshan fangirl her all day, but it wasn’t really the fist-pump moment they claimed we would eventually get. And it broke my heart when that gnome died, and then the Sentinels when we go to fight that vampire whatever, just, ouch. :frowning:

They set us up during the pre-launch quests to feel awful, sending us out into the burning zone (my favorite zone in the game) to try to rescue as many trapped and terrified people as we could, and giving us a timer and a counter showing how many we failed to save, and then not letting us go back and save more. I did them on multiple alts partly because I just wanted to keep saving people and it was a punch to the chest every time. They meant for us to feel it and they succeeded. And Elegy is a whole other story, the kaldorei getting out-stealthed in their own forests, poisoned, tricked, and that heartbreaking ending.

So, as a player, you kind of expect that you’ll get something in return. Something to balance how awful that all felt. Now, idk about everyone, but I know a lot of us never got that. The warfront felt good the first few times, but even in the warfront the last bosses are our own heroes turned against us. And then it reverts to Horde control. Back and forth, back and forth. Somewhere there exists a scene with Tyrande telling us we won, but I’ve never seen it in game, only on YouTube.

Blizzard is really good at making us feel awful but they haven’t figured out how to make us feel good again. Or they haven’t bothered, idk which.

Anyway, the point is I’d so much rather they ignored us altogether than kill us off first and then ignore us. I haven’t unsubbed because I have a sentimental attachment to my main and because I still plan to try Shadowlands, but I’ve only logged in once since June, and that was to shutter my guild. And it isn’t entirely because I’m so disappointed and wearied by the story and by the way they’ve just…defanged my favorite race and ground them into ashes (literally) with no sign of building us back up, but I’d be pants-on-fire lying if I said that wasn’t a lot of it. I played for a long, long time just kind of working around canon to feel okay about maining kaldorei, but.

Eventually I guess I just felt ground into ashes too. They slaughtered thousands and then didn’t know what to do with us so…they…just… didn’t.

Yeah, idk. Hate us and kill us and ignore us, or love us and kill us and ignore us, it still nets out to feeling like my favorite race is just there to die so someone else can go fight for Lordaeron or something.

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No, I don’t think so. Not any more than they hate orcs or trolls.

When you play Warcraft III ROC, where they were introduced, you can clearly see that they are painted as a mostly idyllic society based around harmony and closely integrated with the backstory from 10k years ago. Their lore essentially says they annihilated the troll kingdoms and saved the world from the Burning Legion (after Azshara brought them there, but that is effectively different from player faction).

I think what you’re seeing in modern post-Cata WoW is that the writers are agonizing over trying to create impactful factional conflict and introducing new villain tiers for raid bosses. Note how the original three expansions, they were just based around killing established villains built up in Warcraft III.

Once Cata started, they really had to start inventing reasons to kill things, and they already killed all the troll empires off. So they invented new villains, and decided they needed to rile up the playerbase by making suitable targets for destruction.

The only difference between, say, Arthas, and Garrosh, is that Arthas was well written and charismatic. They still did essentially the same things (e.g. Arthas destroyed Lordaeron and Quel’Thalas).

I don’t think Blizz dislikes Orcs or trolls, obviously they love their art design which is why they keep filling up raids and dungeons with them, but your reason for being there in the first place is typically to kill everyone and take all their loot, so they have to be baddies. In order to justify this, you have to give a reason, e.g. OMG they reached out to some ancient evil, we have to stahp them.

That’s why we spent multiple Xpacs conducting troll and orc genocide.

In order to paint Garrosh, and then Sylvanas, with the raid boss brush, they had to do something suitably outrageous to make them godtier villains. And the Night Elves were right there.

Also, Blizz has a history of destroying stuff. Draenor (twice), Stormwind, Lordaeron (twice), Stromgarde, Quel’Thalas, Theramore (actually had to think about the name it was so obliterated), now Teldrassil. Orgrimmar has been successfully besieged and captured once. Very few areas of the map haven’t been pounded into the sand, and very few races are without their utterly catastrophic histories replete with total humiliations.

In a nutshell, no, they don’t hate the trolls, or the night elves, or the orcs, or whomever, they just hate you, the lore-focused player. They love riling you up by dropping badly written lorebombs out of left field to discourage and disrupt you so that they can create more game content.

Blizzard takes an evident and passionate joy from watching you get passionately upset.

As an example, I play an orc. I remember staring wide-eyed at Warcraft II ToD as a child and inquiring “you can play as these guys?” at the goblins and grunts. I remember reading Lord of the Clans and being utterly hyped about Reign of Chaos. I also remember all the batters and dings I sustained to my ego during the last 5 xpacs that we have been raked over the coals and in which all the buildup of the past culminated in the total humiliation and annihilation of our species (which somehow survived and is just fine now for plot reasons). This, too, shall pass. You’ll probably get another world tree in an Xpac or two. It’ll be fine.

Now go kill this boss for shinies, etc.

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This post makes me a bit saddened.

Although I can’t go into depth right now; I do hope me being concise is enough.

Throughout Battle for Azeroth i’ve found that there were less and less roleplayers utilizing Night Elves. Felt like they were vanishing off the streets.

I think a lot of roleplay right now for Night Elves are pigeonholed into unsatisfactory conclusions that seem forced. There’s no bright light at the end of the tunnel either, personally.

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NEs basically were an autocratic dystopia with even a gestapo (wardens).
There was nothing harmonic and fluffy.
You either stayed in line or disappeared.

Well, thankfully, through the Constitutional amendment process, they righted those wrongs, and became a more fair, just, and equitable society.

Their treatment of the Highborne suggests otherwise. The Sentinels only executed repeat offenders when it came to arcane magic (pretty high up there on the “criminal” scale after y’know, Legion invasion and all that, and not simply a matter of “staying in line”), and no one was willing to wipe them all out, settling for exile.

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That was unfortunately a retcon or lets say mhm change in recent history.

In fact Maiev has murdered highbornes in Cata still, she was holding up the old path that for some reason was overthrown by Tyrande.

Somebody tell the High Elves/Blood Elves that they’re just a retcon.

They retconned out the Wolfheart crap in Legion.

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In fact:
NEs were considering killing them all off after the civil war caused by the Well on the Hyjal. But they abstained from it to exile them and thus leaving them to die from starvation off theri addiction -> Withering away. Which is actually far worse.

Illidan however (The betrayer for a reason) bestowed them wth 2 vials of the wellof eternitys water. Which enabled them to create the sunwell. Else they would have just withered away.

Yeah, that’s the point I’m making. If the Night Elves operated some sort of fantastical police state like you suggested in your earlier posts, the Highborne would have never reached that state of open defiance; they would have simply disappeared.

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The police state was opend up AFTER that incident actually to prevent this from ever happening again.

Except the foundations for the Night Elf state post-Azshara had already been laid at that point. The Highborne weren’t exiled until close to 2500 years after the Sundering.

As a night elf roleplayer, you’re given three options.

A) Be sad.
B) Be mad.
C) Be a sociopath who doesn’t care about the mass death of their own race and continues as normal.

I axed my nelf DK and nelf mage by race-changing them so I could RP something other than ball of rage or a sad-sack.
Edit: Kept my nelf DH though because “ball of rage” is her default setting. Now it’s “ball of atomic rage”.

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Can’t wait for the next tragedy for Night Elves in Shadowlands. I mean there are already some tragic moments, but I bet they’ll also include Tyrande dying to Sylvanas or something like that, dealing even less damage to her than Bolvar.

This was my Huntress… now she upgraded to Maiev.

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Less than none is pretty hard. Sylvanas just went ghost-mode when he hurled the ice at her, but he figured she’d been pelted.

So far, only 3 people have wounded Sylvanas

  1. Arthas when he started this whole mess
  2. Sylvanas herself when she took a skip and a jump off of Icecrown
  3. Saurfang giving her a scar with Shalamayne