It would be interesting to see an agressive Alliance, which I do think is a thing we might see between all these people handily missing, the Scarlet Brotherhood plot thread with their apparent “heir to Lordaeron”, and Yrel in the background.
I think as odd as it sounds the Kaldorei would not really participate. As angry as he might be, I just cannot imagine Malfurion going with it. The night elves have not been expansionists in 10,000+ years. Their focus would be on rebuilding in Hyjal, though there might be some outliers.
Likewise I just cannot imagine our Draenei going with it. Velen isn’t a blind follower of prophecy and the Light anymore. Our Draenei will probably be very resistant to radicalization so long as Velen remains alive.
Our Lightforged though… who knows? Will they even be able to say no, given they are bound to the Light? Domination magic does not seem unique to death really, so… perhaps Domination magic + Light = Lightbound.
You’ve said all of this before, but it does not change my point.
The Story Forum is an outgrowth of the old suggestions forum. When that exists, it contained a lot of lore-based arguments and complaints that were broken out into this subforum, which I believe happened around the Wrath era. That purpose largely hasn’t changed.
The underlying point of a suggestion is that the status quo is bad and needs to be fixed. It doesn’t make sense then to shoot down suggestions on the basis of what the status quo is. It’s the thing that we think is bad and needs to change! Of course we know it’s bad, that’s why we’re suggesting this thing to fix it!
So again, we do not need to tack to Blizzard’s current writing pathologies. Our argumentation can move beyond them.
Of course it´çs difficult Kyalin… the data is basically the intellectual property of Activision Blizzard. They would have to make accesible to the public their financial and technnical data, and I´m quite sure the laws discourage third parties like us from getting access to that -the only ones that can demand this type of feedback are the investors-.
Tell me about it… I literally downed Jaina ONCE -and it was done in LFR- just because it was mandatory to finish the stupid faction conflict questchain (say, the BfA equivalent to the current Covenant questchains) AND a requierement for higher dps / ilvl, but I would had been perfectly happy avoiding that altogether. And the joke was in me indeed whenn a patch later I HAD TO defend Jaina in a PvE scenario from Hathorel, a Sunreaver victim. That was the moment I took a 6 month break from the game cause it was too disrespectful to entertain.
Certainly, but you forgot the actual competence and skils of the people who would be in-charge of making the scenario (heck, they ALREADY kinda lowkey villain batted Yrel, and making her a moron who easily falls for Xe´ra´s plot is no less infuriating than Sylvanas falling for the Jailer´s plot).
We can´t get everything we want in life, Droité. I may desire to have dessert for breakfast, lunch and dinner a la L Lawliet, but truth is, If I do so I´ll die sooner rather than later from diabetes and associated health sickness.
For the health of the game AND a less toxic player environment, the factions MUST take distance from each other -at least until the people at the head of Activision Blizzard get properly AND responsibly in-charge of the messes they concoct-.
An I do. Cause just like catastrophic stuff switches the attention on regular socio political stuff irl (and brings to the light other issues like the COVID Pandemic did nowadays) towards solving the catastrophy, the lore in WoW can (and should) reflect this.
I don’t think they have to. The geopolitical interests of Stormwind and the Kaldorei are WILDLY different, which is probably why Stormwind doesn’t support them. I really don’t think the Kaldorei should be supporting Stormwind either unless and until their interests become relevant. (You know, like real nations act)
Not all of it - as I said, there’s a lot of feedback you can get from social media, and that’s extremely valuable data. The challenge is in mining and cleaning it. Is it doable? Yes, but I wouldn’t attempt it unless I had a staff of at least five working with me. I’m sick of doing this sort of thing alone, and then being made fun of for it.
I’m just going to bold that because it’s important. That’s an example of the sort of data that I’m talking about. The story made you take a given action, one that Blizzard probably didn’t want you to take because if you’re not playing, you’re not engaging in their microtransactions (at minimum).
Here’s the thing Kyalin. For ANY future Faction Conflict content to exist, it HAS to be the Alliance that is with out ANY question the Aggressors. It can’t be “half and half”, and it can’t be a “shared conflict”, because only the Alliance has been allowed motives to act against he other Faction. The Horde has no legs to stand on in any way in that story thread. Hell, we barely have legs to stand on to still exist in this game, which has resulted in the Horde players being put in the position of trying to argue why we should be.
That is how bad a position the Horde Faction and its players have been put in, and how Morally Absolute the Alliance and their players have been allowed. Us having to argue why we even deserve to continue to exist in the game and story we also pay for. So you can’t be half-as*ed with an Alliance Aggressor story if thats what you want to use to support PvP on a story level. And you also cannot rely on Blizz’s noncommittal and whitewashing nature to to just invalidate that aggression either. You have to FULLY commit.
This is a rhetorical trap, and I’m not stepping into it. I can see you using this as a reason to shoot down scenarios where the Alliance side is portrayed as being in the wrong on the basis that it’s “not good enough”, which is established here as an elastic standard.
Pendulumming is also a bad call, and it’s something that I reject being done with respect to our problems towards you.
I believe that the Alliance needs to be portrayed as being morally wrong in a lot of its actions, and I’ve discussed how I believe that can be done, but I reject where you’re taking this.
I mean, Yrel’s situation is easy enough to explain as her being a Billy Batson without the Wisdom of Solomon part of his powers. With her having one of the WORST superpowers to have without training just dumped on her without training. Prophetic Visions. Leaving her absurdly open to misinterpreting those visions, or being outright exploited through them. Especially by an authority figure that she’d be predisposed to trusting (like a Prime Naaru, or something even higher on the Light Cosmology Food Chain). Yrel doing what Yrel is doing (especially given the Iron Horde history) is not unreasonable if that’s the route they go to explain her actions.
As for Turalyon. My god, even with a Dreadlord at his side; him being politically supported and propped up by the House of Nobles; him having known ONLY Warfare for 1k years; and has no personal reasons to see the Horde races as anything other than dangerous monsters … I can’t believe even tricking him into an antagonistic role is so unreasonable. Given he and the Alliance don’t have reasons not to trust the Lightbound and Yrel unless those latter two parties give them reasons not to trust. So with so many peaceniks away in the SLs right now, all it really should take to light that powderkeg is a Bladewind Clan incident. Like … the murder of Velen or Faol and pinning it on one of two easy targets. Geya’rah of the AU Mag’har for the prior, or Deathstalker Commander Belmont for the latter. Giving that spark to get the Alliance to just act on their already existing laundry list of motives. Especially under the banner of “saving the evil Horde races from themselves” the LBs wield.
You aren’t wrong, Sarm, but based on my memory (this is admittedly several years back) I think WoD was the height of Every Man For Himself’s power, which effectively enabled Human players to run double DPS trinkets in PvP (or this might have been when it gave them double CC breaks, I forget exactly) but the point was that I feel relatively certain that the Human racial specifically was broke for Arena PvP, and it caused a big tilt back towards top end players going Alliance for PvP.
In Legion, when M+ became a thing, the Blood Elf racial basically carried so hard that a lot of people changed to BE to run high keys. This is the imbalance that I think has yet to be corrected - a fair number of Horde racials were either nerfed in the Legion > BfA pre-patch, or nerfed in the 8.1 BfD patch (I think the Troll racial specifically was targeted here). Since that time, I actually think Alliance racials have had a slight power edge - if you watch the MDI at all it is like 99.9% Alliance races, but on live servers, the serious PvE population is still Horde-entrenched, because the racials aren’t strong enough to drive a mass switch.
Social media by deffinition and by the high probabily of misinformation is like the last place to get proper data, Kyalin. Nobody is making sure people aren´t posting BS on it, ergo, not a reliable source.
Remember not every data is reliable.
But then again, as soon as the faction questchain was done, I came back ASAP. Which means than in the grand scheme of things, story is maybe not a deal breaker (and mind you, i´m a LORE junkie… I pay attention to the story. The rest of my friends? pff they laugh as loud over the Jailer throwing Baine down like garbage as they laugh in the Kyrian Covenant quest in which Nelf souls appears complaining over getting burned).
If anything, my example reinforces the notion the story is not as important as people believe it is. I complained looong and hard in the GD threads related to Belf character customizations cause I felt the race was not properly -like, at all- reflected… and I´m still here playing, soooo…
I repeat: look at WHO would be the ones writting this narrative. Don´t make the same blind mistakes of Kyalin, Droité -cause that´s her mistake: for her scenario to not degenerate in the usual messes, she aknowledged new writers and devs would be needed. And this is but a utopia, cause we as players CAN´T and SHOULN´T have the power to fire irl people from their jobs, period-.
Right, the people who think GoT Season 8 was the bees-knees; that Shocking Events are good writing in of themselves; and who think “nuance” is some new-fangled brand of toilet paper thats just too overhyped right now. Which truly does suck, because somehow these fools have stumbled upon a TRULY awesome settup for a Shades of the Light invasion expac here. One that lets the Alliance get their hits in; lets the Horde roster get developed through adversity; and allows the Alliance to finally act on their own god damned motives, but in doing so actually open the door to a truly cool “invasion of the body-snatchers” through “forced conversion” foothold situation with Yrel and the Lightbound. While leaving enough outs to save Turalyon and even Yrel. As they would be Antagonists, but not necessarily mustache twirling villains. And giving the Horde a chance to also be heroic and help the Alliance clean up one of their messes for once.
It is such a damned shame. Because even beyond all that potential, I would truly love to see an ideological battle between those FORGED by the Light, and those BOUND to it. That is an awesome story idea!
You know, it think THIS is one of the core problems brough to the light -no pun intended btw- to me with the Tyrande 9.1 revelations: the devsseem to mistake Antagonist with Villain… anyone on an antagonistic position from their “message” (the most prominent mouthpiece used by them is nonironically Anduin) gets either downright framed as a villain (Garrosh, Sylvanas) or gets retroactively taken back form the antagonistical view towards a view totes in line with “the message” (Tyrande, Genn).
And for this exercise to be semi useful, we unfortunately DO have to take into account our lore dev team has proven themselves VERY ill equipped to deal with the nuance requierted to properly pull out a faction conflict narrative.
You know man, this phrase loses SO much steam in this thread… you would get much more controversy in either the Nelf qq thread or the anti-Sylvanas qq thread.
Yet the narrative of WOW would need exactly that, antagonists, I mean, the Horde itself has proven again and again to be the antagonist of the Alliance, however …the Horde actually lacks a good Alliance antagonist.
And pray tell, how did that “antagonism” ended up for the Horde, again?
In pretty much downright VILLAIN batting. Which I´m sure is NOT what you people are asking for. You guys delude yourselves in wanting to get the cake and eat it. We are telling you you WON´T ever achieve that, not as long as the current executive direction of Blizzard stays in power.
Tl;dr: stop pretending factional conflict can truly be “well done” this time around, is not as if Blizzard has a historical record proving otherwise.
As I said in the previous post: for the current Blizzard dev team Antagonist = Villain, no more and no less.
Ergo characters with antagonistic development get villain batted OR the characteristics that made them antagonistic are removed from them, period. Heck, even the whole “potential antagonist” angle for both Turalyon and Alleria is being slowly eroded (remember how many reasons to justify their one naughty action in “Shadows of the Horde”? Heck, Turalyon had basically complete military command and he just wanted to catch Sylvanas, no mention ANYWHERE about him entertaining “punishment” for the Horde et al, Just like Genn´s revenge went from focus onto the Forsaken to focus on Sylvanas alone, I bet Turalyon´s one will go the same way).
And the whole Alleria angle will probably stay as it is right now: she like her sister sprouting Helfer stuff but never doing anything about it apart from making barbs towards the Belves and staying salty and impotent in Stormwind.
Obviously, we Hordies ALREADY quested under those characters even while they insulted us to our face while we saved their sorry butts, why would devs expose themselves to another “buut, buut!! why do I have to take orders from Thrall / insert Horde character, this is HURDE BIAS!!!” shtstorm when we Horde players already proved we will endure the Alliance flavored NPCs if we absolutely have to?
