part of the reason i’m turned off from playing alliance is that it’s not very unique feeling compared to the horde. i don’t think it’s bad necessarily but it’s more of a thing like where i’ve seen “medieval tolkien fantasy” so many times that it just feels boring to me. the concept of a “good guy” faction is pretty underwhelming when there’s very little edge or “ends justify the means” or doing bad things for the greater good. what do you think?
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The answer is, nothing.
The Alliance doesn’t appeal to you. That’s fine. The factions and the races on them appeal to different players, and at the end of the day, that’s a good thing. Maybe you find the Alliance boring for being, ‘Tolkien Fantasy,’ tropes and, ‘Lawful Good Overdrive,’ but there are players whom enjoy that and detest the Horde for being, ‘Edgelord Fantasy,’ and, ‘Fake-Morally Grey.’
The game is better for appealing to different players, and providing them factions that fit their preferences. Rather than trying to change one factions to entice other players, it’s honestly better to just respect what players enjoy to begin with.
Granted I say that knowing full well both factions have been utterly trashed and now exist in name only as far as the narrative is concerned.
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i mean there’s room for multiple types of identities within a singular faction besides “Lawful Good” and different ways to explore “Lawful Good”. i don’t think there’s ever been quite anything where those kinds of characters have their high ideals and morality tested when those things become cumbersome and detrimental (like in a survival situation, or a situation where they have their backs to the walls)
Blizzard would actually have to start writing the Alliance as an alliance of individual nation with their own goals, identities, and morals instead of just being homogenized into humans and friends.
Constantly neglecting the most unique Alliance race doesn’t help either.
Humans make up the vast, vast majority of Alliance content and after Cata they’ve just been whitewashed to such an extreme. Every other Alliance race either gets no screen time in Alliance content or is just made to blindly follow the pure as the driven snow humans.
Most of the “Alliance council” meetings during BfA were all humans with maybe 1 token non-human present. The only disagreement was between Tyrande wanting to retake Darkshore and Anduin wanting to sack Zul’dazar for no reason and literally nothing came from the disagreement and it was never mentioned again. Every other thing in the expansion was humans talking to other humans and agreeing.
There’s probably no saving the Alliance at this point.
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Oh those come. We’re dealing with the aftermath of such a situation right now. Anduin Wrynn’s going to be in our faces probably for the next decade because the Jailer made him do a naughty against his will.
Alternatively, feel free to look at any of the, ‘Heroic Self-Sacrifice,’ type moments with Alliance characters. Bolvar standing his ground against the Lich King after Saurfang Jr. got one-shot. Varian Wrynn sacrificing himself so the Alliance forces on the Broken Shore could escape. Maraad dying to protect Yrel and protect Shattrath, etc…
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Blizzards phobia toward anything negative about the Alliance limits them to one archetype, the noble pure hero. It can be a fine archetype, but it only one and makes the Alliance so narrow. Given how long they have been doing it, it is also very tired and boring.
Look at Jaina. They are pretending that the attempted genocide at Orgimmar, the Purge, etc. never happened. That essentially resets her to the Jaina from a long time ago (before cataclysm) with essentially no character development. Contrast with that with have her rise above and reject what she had become. Making her a character the not only works for the side of good, but understands what can lead people to darkness.
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I’d argue here that the Purge itself was a mess of bugs, retcons, and cut content, but it generated so much player engagement that the devs slapped themselves on the back and figured they did a good job.
It was only years later when they realized they had to address it that they realized they should have done more to clear the air back in the day.
Because of that, players saw it as, ‘attempted genocide,’ when it was never meant to be portrayed that way at all.
To begin with, Jaina’s reaction seems disproportionate, because it IS. The original scenario had the Horde launch an assault on Teldrassil using Kirin Tor portals to steal the Divine Bell, unleashing it’s power to make their escape in the confusion, and resulting in MASSIVE civilian casualties. Jaina was to arrive on the scene with Vereesa and have PTSD induced flashbacks of Theramore that pushed her over the edge.
Thus, why she came off as borderline deranged in the actual Purge of Dalaran.
After the backlash over Tyrande being made into a stooge in, ‘A Little Patience,’ the developers changed what happened in Teldrassil so Night Elf players wouldn’t feel as if they were being kicked while they were down. They didn’t have time to change Jaina and the Silver Covenant’s roles in the Purge, however, and had to let it go live.
Another bug was Jaina killing civilians, but they did say that was a bug. The problem was, players who never read the forums or twitter never heard about it, and the Devs never fixed it.
One can also consider how the cutscene where Aethas is blackmailed into keeping quiet was bugged, and rather than fixing it, they just left it out, but canonically kept the fact Aethas knew what was going on and turned a blind eye to put his people first. So, it gave him the false impression of being innocent and a victim of Jaina’s deranged hatred.
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It wasn’t genocide. It was ethnic cleansing. But yes, I don’t think the dev’s at the time realized it, which is, in itself, a bit of a sad commentary.
But it wasn’t just one fumble event, Jaina did a series of bad things. I mean, the scene at the end of the Siege of Orgrimmar is an attempt to violate parley by assassination and to spark a war of extermination. But there was so many things that Blizzard didn’t think through, beyond even Jaina. Not just in the consequences, but in how they were portraying the immediate events.
But, to the point I was making, they had a choice. Regardless of what they had intended, it was what it was. In moving past it, they could have had Jaina rise above it or they could pretend it didn’t happen. Having her rise above actually makes puts it firmly in her past as something she new rejects. As it is now, the fact that it is still in the game, has a subtle implication that she still doesn’t see such things as wrong.
And it, to the point about boring Alliance characters, it removes a lot of complexity and development from the character. And, IMO, if they had her address it, her fans wouldn’t feel the need to keep trying to justifying her actions.
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Did we watch the same scene? Her words were literally, “Dismantle the Horde,” not, “Break the Horde,” or, “Destroy the Horde.” They were in a position of strength. She wanted the Horde as an entity ended, yes, but at no point is it implied she’s seeking assassination. I mean, Lor’themar was right there and not a patch or two beforehand she’d made her peace with him on the Isle of Thunder, and by the time of War Crimes the Sunreaver prisoners had been released.
The problem is (and I believe the Devs themselves realized this), much of Jaina’s behavior was out of character for her. I mean, this is the woman who saw the aftermath of Theramore getting nuked, and AFTER the arcane radiation stopped warping her thoughts, went to become head of the Council of Six and back to trying to promote peaceful co-existence between the Horde and Alliance.
I think its more a matter of, Jaina never needed the development to begin with. She’s a character who witnessed the man she loved spiral into evil until he became the Lich King. She’s the daughter who saw her father consumed by hatred and prejudice and could not be saved, and so stood aside.
Jaina was already a remarkably complex and well developed character. Most of her modern characterization did more to harm the foundation that had been built for her in WC3 than anything else.
I think the Devs finally realized they ruined her, and have been back-tracking ever since. The problem is, the damage was already done. They were content to let her stay ruined so long as they thought people liked the story enough to engage in forum debates and faction antagonism.
As it is, it feels like she flip-flops between peacemonger and warmonger at the toss of a coin. What was once an interesting, deep character, became nothing more than a plot tool for devs eager to tell the story they thought was, ‘new and cool.’
Massive gladiator tournaments with the Horde. 
I am not sure they really can. They are extremely conservative about messing with the notion of Alliance and Horde being Humans and Orcs with some allies. The Alliance should really be more akin to a fantasy edition of the EU except with an actual shared army for collective defense. They have only had one major dispute ever show up in the game between alliance members, and it was done to justify the Darkshore battleground. Not to drive story.
You can’t really take the same approach of making the Alliance “cool” or "edgy as you would with the Horde.
You can see various races that could have been the Alliance’s Forsaken but their edges have been soften down to fit in with the Alliance. The greater Alliance’s theme is too encompassing for different cultures or races to add a “cool” factor so you have to tinker with the “theme”.
I think the easiest approach to adding edge to the Alliance is going all God Emperor on the Horde and other threats. An aggressive, antagonistic Alliance has the potential to be truly terrifying.
Be subversive by arming hostile factions to your enemies such as the Scarlets or maybe have start your own crusade with the goal of purging the Horde from Lordaeron and Quel’thalas(not that it would ever happen).
I believe if you want to be edgy or cool you have to embrace a bit of darkness.
They would need to do what they did in Vanilla, ergo add some internal issues for each race to add more nuance to them. The key is to focus on racial lore as opposed to factional lore. This creates more ‘coolness’ for a given race because you can have more variance in characters and more complex issues and situations for them to deal with.
This goes for Horde as well. As it stands, all the focus is on each major xpac threat, which the factions engage with as a whole, as opposed to individually. This means that all the races fall under the umbrella of the factional ‘default’, leaving less room for variation and so they get boring. Even the other human races fall victim to Stormwindization, as a result.
Kul Tiras at launch, for example, had a ton of darker and more complex themes, and characters who weren’t always exactly ‘nice’, and much more flavour than Stormwind. Hell, Stormwind itself suffers from its own issues, since Cata there’s almost no real inference about Stormwind culture or anything, we don’t even know what kind of fashion they have.
Inviting people to a parley and killing them is assassination to me.
“Dismantling” the Horde is "elimination to me.
You can quibble about words, but she was going to kill people protected by parley and fight a bloody war to destroy the nations of certain races. That isn’t good.
I’m not sure she was “out of character” or a “changed character”. The arc between Theremore and BfA was a character who changed. And pretending that didn’t happen has the problems I mentioned.
All characters need development. A character that is unchanged over such a long period of time would be boring.
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Blizzard chose to soften the edges. They didn’t have to do that. This could choose to stop doing it.
they tried king being a blue warchief and it wasn’t very cool
I say go opposite direction and have alliance be incompetent and falling apart. like in classic you had your prestors and van cleefs worse was better
There’s only been bits and pieces of negative stuff from the Alliance; Genn attacking the Forsaken in Legion, Camp Tajauro.
I think it could work depending how it’s done. I think it would cheapen the story if the Alliance went bad due to external influence (which has been done death, even with the Horde - hi, Sylvanas and Jailer!)
Just focus on characters other than humans.
Blue team has the potential to be more interesting. It is afterall Alliance by name. Different races joining forces against a common danger. It’s more of a political cooperation than a real friendship, (at least at the beginning) Far from safe home that the horde offers everyone. We have dark elves, half-robots, space demons, werewolves, races fused with void, light and fire. But they cannot step out of line, lest they outshine people and go beyond their borderline moral supremacy. Humans were face of this faction, so most people sees the Alliance through the prism of Stormwind. It was like that from the very beginning and continues to this day (the night elves got a bit more screen time during the BFA-DF, but you can tell Blizzard was forced to write about them) when the Horde had a larger cast of characters, we see, in the form of Orcs, Tauren, Trolls, and Forsaken.
Internal quarrels would also add some flavor. Night Elves should still be resentful towards Stormwind for how they were abandoned in BFA. Moira shouldn’t forget who killed her husband either. The people of Stormwind should not ignore Man’ari or Void elves roaming on the city streets. Let’s hope the return of the Scarlets will stir things up a bit.