There aren’t any Horde characters left.
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Well, when I ask if these characters are infallible, you say “Nuh-uh,” and then you go on to shoot down every suggestion for how they might be fallible … what I am I supposed to to think?
You tell me, in what ways are they fallible?
That’s hyperbole. How about if a new character gradually emerges from somewhere and manages to get what he wants in some specific situations, and then builds on that?
It doesn’t even have to be because of moral failings on the part of the more experienced characters. They can’t physically be everywhere at once.
Again, I never said “front and center”—that’s your addition or assumption. I don’t think this hypothetical new character needs to be the focus of a whole expansion or even a patch, at least at first. He can be a subplot happening alongside the main storyline to start with and take center stage when it makes sense for that to happen.
You don’t believe that a story about conflicting groups within your own faction is really a story for your faction? That makes no sense to me at all. Blizzard has done that basic storyline many times already, on both the Horde and the Alliance side. We’re not expected to love or want to follow every character who happens to be in our faction.
That said, depending on presentation, this character might be more popular than you think. If he’s written as ruthless but effective, some players will probably appreciate that.
This is hyperbole again. I didn’t say the character would win over the entire Alliance, nor that he would be specifically tasked with committing heinous acts against the Horde. He might, to grab just one alternate possibility, be the sort who acts first and asks later. (This is why I favor a military commander for the role, btw, because he could have a lot of leeway in taking action. And if his official report says “The Horde started it” and his soldiers back him up, well, who are his superiors likely to believe?)
Again, it looks to me like you’re just hostile to the idea. You immediately leap to assuming the worst possible way of implementing the story. You don’t even try to think of ways around the obstacles you keep throwing up, and it feels like that’s because you don’t want to find ways around them.
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That’s an interesting idea! It would also allow the character to be a bit older. Maybe a discontented noble who got frustrated by never being able to do anything against the powerful characters at the top of Alliance leadership, so he made contracts with demons to put himself more on their level.
He could even team up with the brash young military commander who’s recently become popular thanks to a string of spectacular victories against the Horde.
Well, we started this exercise trying to create an Alliance character who could be the aggressor in a hypothetical future AvH conflict, so we want him to do some pretty major damage eventually.
But I do like the idea about him using a “War Forever” Horde group to build his popularity and provide “evidence” of continuing Horde treachery. With the help of the warlock politician, this could start to sway public opinion.
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I believe a story about a conflicting groups within the Alliance could be a story Alliance players are interested in, but the way you’re pitching it, it isn’t meant to appeal to Alliance players, it’s meant to create a story for Horde players to enjoy. This friction is meant to lead to some antagonistic character starting a war with the Horde, for the sole purpose of the Alliance being the aggressors and the Horde being the innocent victims.
Conflict in the Alliance can be great. I’ve been a proponent for that myself. Consider if you will…
The Dark Alliance is VERY real. The Alliance now has:
- Cursed Humans (Worgen)
- Dark Dwarves (Dark Irons)
- Corrupted Elves (Void Elves)
- Deranged Gnomes (Mechagnomes)
- Demons (Man’ari)
An internal conflict wherein the Alliance’s MANY dark versions of its core races find solace and acceptance among one another that they do not so readily experience with the greater Alliance at large, would be interesting. This Dark Alliance’s members are hamstrung by Alliance morals, held back from unleashing their power in ways they would find effective, because it’s not morally sound. Among one another, they could become as ruthless as they please. Even the Void Elves whom at least pay lip service to holding back might be encouraged to be a little more reckless by such accepting allies.
This leading to the establishment of two factions within the Alliance would be a natural and interesting form of conflict. On the one hand, you have the traditionalists, the ones whom believe in moral purity, the Anduin supporters who think he was right to avoid destroying Dazar’alor to give the Zandalari time to mourn Rastakan’s death. On the other hand, you have the pragmatists, those whom have had to struggle to survive and overcome stigma. These are the sort who think the ends justify the means.
A story between these two groups, on in which we see the Dark Alliance succeed more in battle than the traditionalists, but the traditionalists succeed more in diplomacy, would be interesting.
This story being entirely contained to the Alliance is what makes it interesting and even plausible. Were it to spill out and affect the Horde, at that point I would expect the cast of demi-gods to put their feet down, because then this Dark Alliance is threatening the Alliance itself by provoking war. The heart of this conflict is in how best to strive for the Alliance’s prosperity and safety, not to lash out at the Horde when its not longer a threat.
What about it is unappealing to Alliance players? You think that having a character in your own faction that you may not agree with is automatically unappealing?
Because that’s what you asked for! You said there was no way for the Alliance to start a war with the Horde without ruining existing characters. And when I said we could create a new character who could be the aggressor, you asked who that character would be and how they would be able to do it:
You don’t get to grill me about that and then complain when I answer the question.
That does not answer the question of how the Alliance could start a war against the Horde without destroying existing characters. (There’s also no reason why you couldn’t have this storyline in addition to the other.)
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The answer to my question was, “No one,” and then you launched into inventing a character, which was not something I felt was going to work for the reasons I’ve outlined since this conversation began.
That’s because you can’t having the Alliance start a war with it’s existing roster without ruining those characters in the progress. That has been my point this entire time. We’re so far past when this could’ve been feasible that its not even worth entertaining anymore.
Maybe I’m sick of the pointless faction conflict. Maybe I’m sick of poor writing. All I know is, the idea of the Alliance starting a war with the Horde, at this point in the setting, is dumb on every level.
With all due respect, baldercrap.
I’m with you there.
With all due respect, baldercrap again.
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This is the same baldercrap it has always been, as this whole discussion traces back to this post:
Posts about making the Alliance more “interesting” that ultimately come down to actually being about wanting a patriotic Horde war story. Same song and dance that has been posted here over and over again for years.
Yes. The answer to this question is most obviously yes. It’s why I dislike the serial killer Night Elf Supremacist in Classic WoW’s Season of Discovery. It’s why players who were fan of Thrall’s Horde in Warcraft III automatically found Garrosh unappealing. It’s why fans of the Horde having a warchief find the Horde Council unappealing. It’s why people who want Night Elves to be shoot first and ask questions never again found Malfurion unappealing for so many years. There are many people with many opinions, and I believe it can be safely said that in general people find opinions they don’t agree with unappealing.
Case in point:
I don’t think most Horde fans here found the problem that Garrosh turned out to be appealing.
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It’s unappealing because frankly it’s boring. Plus it’s never going to fix the issue of some people finding the alliance to be completely justified in their actions, regardless of how dark those actions are
Than we will right back to square one with people complaining about not having a heroic horde story
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The two are not mutually exclusive. I think a patriotic Horde war story could be done without ruining the experience for Alliance players.
I actually suspect the aggressive character or characters might be fairly popular, because they’d get stuff done. The single biggest complaint I hear from Alliance players on this board is that the Alliance can’t be effective against the Horde, and these characters would provide that. They’d just be looking for their own power and glory as a side benefit.
Finding the character unappealing doesn’t mean it’s impossible to have a good story featuring that character. And I do think the story should provide Alliance players with the option to say “I stand with Anduin or whoever against these new guys and I don’t trust them.”
But as a general design principle, I think both sides should have to deal with some people on their own side that they don’t like or agree with. I would have far less objection to the treatment of Garrosh (and even Sylvanas to an extent) if both sides had to deal with similar problems. What I dislike most is the one-sidedness of it. Because having a variety of characters with a variety of motivations, some of which are selfish, is realistic.
The story of a character rising to prominence by taking a hardline anti-Horde stance is boring? Or do you mean something else?
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I am generally in favour of what you are talking about, but I am curious about why you think this is true since Blizzard has failed twice in MoP and BfA in doing that very thing when the shoe was on the other foot.
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I don’t think anyone has the slightest faith that Blizzard could actually pull it off anymore; we’re merely thinking up what we feel would be more interesting than what we’ve been getting.
First we’d have to get an entirely new creative team, possibly by putting the current one in a wet paper bag and telling them the only way to escape is to write their way out of it, thus trapping them forever.
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We already do.
Trust me, any admiration I had for Anduin Wrynn as a character died out a Loooong time ago. At best, the rest of the Alliance roster I either don’t care about at all, or only marginally like for how they’ve grown, or the niche roles they set in a fantasy setting.
I think it’s rather strange for you to suggest that every Alliance player uniformally likes and agrees with the sentiments of every Alliance character/leader, particularly when those characters often disagree with one another.
It couldn’t possibly be more boring than the current status quo, which is the Alliance Leadership being comprised of a bunch of super powerful characters who are pretty much in ideological lockstep with each other.
And “some portion of a faction’s playerbase will support the horrific actions of thier faction no matter what” is an unsolveable problem so I don’t think Blizzard should be limiting thier writing choices with that in mind.
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What Alliance fans here are even calling for the Alliance to be effective against the Horde? (Which would be mutually exclusive with the original call for the Horde to retaliate in victory and hence making the Alliance look as ineffective against the Horde again as the Horde ended up being against the Alliance for the totality of BfA after the War of the Thorns.) Most Alliance fans seem to be saying they want no more war stories between the factions any more. Heck, even in the Night Elf Supremacist thread most people who are finding the extremist NPC interesting are also pointing out how the nature aligned Night Elves have more in common with various Horde members than with the industrial based members of the Alliance. If the Alliance needs aggression injected into it said story could also be done without involving the Horde whatsoever.
Yeah, that didn’t work out for the Sylvanas Loyalists. Blizzard has shown no track record of being able to continue multiple view threads and has always collapsed the stories down into a singular piece of string by the end of an expansion as production can’t keep up.
Howlingfrog already answered this.
Though I would also add:
The World’s End Tavern forum is not just for role-play. It’s also for such fan fiction.
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To some extent, it’s what @Howlingfrog says—just speculating on what could happen, rather than what I trust the current writing team to pull off.
But also, I think they really only made two major missteps with Garrosh. First, they should have given the Alliance problems of similar magnitude with their own leadership. And second, they should never have made him the “big bad” of an entire expansion that both sides were expected to fight, unless they were preparing to do the same with the leader of the Alliance at some future time.
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The factions having equal and parallel stories negates the need for there to be factions at all.
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I wouldnt really call a discussion about the story and potential ideas to improve it “fanfiction”. We’re just spitballin out here. If you’re not interested, you’re free to not participate in the discussion.
At the time I had pretty mixed feelings about Garrosh, I thought he was a strong character that carried a lot of the story with his actions, but the writing around him was a bit inconsistent. I also thought it was a shame that MoP, a story that could have been about how an innocent third party is the victim of the war between the Alliance and the Horde became a story about how Garrosh is way too evil.
Of course, then I saw how Sylvanas was handled in a similar role and now I’m nostalgic for Garrosh’s villian arc.
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I would not call ideas that one believes Blizzard’s writing teams could not implement anything other than fan fiction.
I participated in the discussion exactly to express my disinterest in the ideas. I did not like when Varian was Blue Garrosh during Wrath, and I would not like any other implementation of an Alliance Garrosh, either.
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