I’ll add to this, I am fine, more than fine with displaying some of the Alliance’s darker traits in response if we can get a more balanced presentation out of it. I should not be able to let a Godwin’s law comparison land credibly on the Horde - yet I can. This is not what people signed up for.
The faction war should not be good versus evil. It should be grey vs. grey at best, with each respective side acting as collections of nations reasonably would act.
And you would be among a minority then. At least within these subs. Because as far as I can tell, a majority of Alliance players who scream to “take the gloves off” … really just mean they want their expected power fantasy reasserted. They in no way advocating really for the Alliance to get their hands dirty in that act. They revel in moral purity. After all, if you can’t play a all good AND all powerful faction ALL the time … what’s even the point? The capacity for flaws and negative traits are for the Horde; and they must shoulder all those unsightly humanizing characteristics alone (making them all the more pronounced).
I don’t think that’s true. I think what instead happens is that a Horde poster proposes a scenario as extreme as what Blizzard gave to the Horde and the Alliance poster says “no, of course I don’t want that”.
I would analogize that to me asking you if you would like to go through the Night Elf experience for the past eleven years. These are extremes that no one would agree to.
The answer to both issues is not to whipsaw into a mirror image position. It’s to get things into a stable rivalry that both sides can enjoy participating in.
Hrmmm, i can’t agree with this statement. Since almost 2 years are thread and answeres from allianceplayer created with a single demand: in core : stop make us this white knight moraly image expect zerde
Literally what Baal and the other pointed out, Kyalin. We are NOT the ones trying to deny racist views have been present in Horde writting, quite the contrary we are VERY aware of it.
People like the Iron Dwarf on the other hand seem to operate under the assumption the racist views of the Alliance towards the whole collective of Horde races are A-OK and “justified” ergo “not racism”… and sorry but it IS racism simply because in no actual moral system we can judge as a whole entires ethnical entities based upon the acts of portions of it (as Baal correctly mentioned).
Tl;dr: nobody is saying the Alliance in-universe having racist prejudices and preconceptions about the Horde is incorrect or bad or even unexpected (as a matter of fact is quite logical considering the awful way the Horde has been written lately), but it IS incorrect to say this behaviour is “not racism” just because it´s the Alliance the one behaving in this way.
I think you’re mostly on point, and thank you for the clarification, the only quibble I would make is that there is a path to objecting to the Horde as a political entity, which is a question of ideology, not race.
Indeed… but then again the factions ARE part of WoW´s brand, and I doubt Blizzard will simply erase one of them just because they are too irresponsible and foolish regarding the stuff they write in the game. That´s not how business work.
I agree, but if one slides into irrelevance out of sheer neglect, then they have constructively done that.
I would also not accuse Blizzard of being business geniuses.
Any billion dollar company that commits the blunders they commit in plain sight -I mean, they have even lowkey lied in interviews that people can STILL access and check nowadays, so there´s a historical RECORD of it- is evidently not managed by business geniuses.
If anything them taking so much controversial and erroneous decisions since the last decade point precisely to them having a gross misconception about good business practices. Now we percieve this as such, unfortunately we don´t have 100% certain information to prove our arguments (as disgusting as it sounds maybe the game IS a financial / comercial sucess and we don´t know it cause we´re too busy complaining over the stuff we don´t like… it is a possibility too).
This just reminds me that I’m slacking in looking over their 10Q. I have a Gsheets document now tracking key metrics…
But, if there’s one thing I learned in transitioning from auditing small enterprises to doing work in a GSIB, it’s that responsibility is diffused in large organizations, and you get a lot of people getting sloppy on the basis that “oh, someone else will catch it” or a belief that it’s not their responsibility. Management then flies in and tries to propose a magical technology solution that just has all of the same problems of the last system, and then get confused as to why nothing’s been fixed. I got disillusioned pretty quick when I assumed that controls were going to be tight, that technology was going to be there, and that practices were going to be fine tuned.
As for not having 100% certain information. You’re right, we don’t. Major game companies do not have to disclose disaggregated data by franchise in their financial statements - although having been a consumer of those financial statements for some time now, I argue that they absolutely should. Most large publishers have concentrations in key franchises, and most accounting literature suggests that public facing entities should disclose concentrations data in order to give investors an idea of just how big the risk of putting one’s eggs in too few baskets is. For game companies, investors often buy and trade stock on the basis of some big new release or the performance of a given property.
I’d figure that’s information that they’d want to know, instead of getting periodic drips of information through flux explanations.
Except the political entity is based on a coalition of races. So here we are.
If a nation chooses to make itself an ethnostate on the back of exclusionary or hostile policies, opposition to it does not by default become racist.
You’re super imposing Westphalian Nationstate logic onto WoW when not a single group can accurate be described as a Nationstate with fixed borders and a formalized social contract that is outlined.
Furthermore all Nation-states were born on ethnic claims from their onset, or specifically divided to the end of instigating ethnic conflict during the late colonial period, which have been sustained formally (such as US laws banning interracial marriage until the 70s, or redlining) or informally (cultural dynamics). Please read:
I think this is playing semantics. Whether we can dispute that the various kingdoms, organizations, or factions can be precisely considered as nations, I use the word to denote a state that has some notion of having its own laws, political systems, and concepts of sovereignty, which WoW’s races mostly do.
And I think this attempt to try to get me to go read five books to settle this tangential definition debate is obscuring the overall point here, because I notice that nowhere in that did you respond to the abstract position that I was taking.
My point as always is you cannot separate the racial nature of the factions from the factions. The factions and the races are intrinsic to each other, which both have an in-game dynamic (ie the Forsaken’s sins are the Horde’s sins, and Horde’s sins are collectively shared, same for the Alliance) and a meta implication therein (most countries in the world retain an ethnic character, and the west also did until anti racism efforts in the 20th century)
It is true that the factions are heavily racial in nature, but again, I assert that it is not by default racist to criticize or oppose the policies of an ethnostate.
For instance, if an ethnically homogenous state makes it its policy to exterminate an “opposing” race, or otherwise end them as a people, a desire to stop them or prevent them from doing so again in the future through reform of their political system is not by default motivated by racism.
It is when both sides are supposed to be conditionally equal (ie conditionally simultaneously superior and inferior) to each other and both have subjugated forcibly, passively let die, or committed mass murder against each other within recent or cultural memory.
As you’ve stated racism is not a one way street yet as it stands in-game it is.
The Alliance must have some racism added to the mix for it to be a two way street because the alternative is walk back or retcon the Horde side problems
Which is a statement of how the game should be going forward - and I agree with that, but the stance that I took was couched in the game as it is.
So pretty much what we’ve been doing since vanilla lol!
If anything the Alliance playerbase is just going to vanish all together. Its already wildly unbalanced population wise.
I do find it a little funny you’re posting on a DI:Dwarf. If there was any Alliance PC race that is the living embodiment of Blizz’s obsessive need to whitewash and sterilize the Alliance to a pearly white shine it would be that one. And no … while the Alliance were always “mostly good” in the WC3-WotLK era, they did at least have the capacity for grey and flaws. Most of which have been retroactively cleansed since.
It wasn’t until Cata really that you saw this rapid shift to Blizz being hyper noncommittal with Alliance aggression. Where everything they did that even fringed on grey or nuance was buried under mountains of justifications; handwaved even by their victims; or whitewashed until they were proven right in the end. “Coincidentally”, its during that same period that you see this transition of the Horde being rendered little more than a plot-device. Not even really being allowed reasons or means to do what Blizzard was forcing the faction to do, but they still had to do those things anyway. Cuz how else we gonna settup future content and villains?
Its why you can end up with absurd things like Varian declaring War on the Horde in WotLK in response to the Wrathgate; but having Garrosh “start” the War in Cata. Sort of pseudo-reacting to the fallout of Varian’s declaration (which had since been invalidated by a VERY convenient treaty in “The Sundering” just in time for Garrosh to break it. Not the last time Blizz would use that tactic either by a LONG shot).