Of course not. This is why I structured my post the way I did.
Establish the background situation
Identify/categorize/recognize an issue
Suggest a fix for that issue
I emphasize again that my hypothetical is not meant to be a “this is the one and only thing that will work” but just a way to illustrate a particular point that was brought up earlier in the post.
One of the limitations I put ON MYSELF regarding those suggestions was ensuring it took nothing away from the opposing faction or its constituent races.
Eh, in a way though it still had to involve them, and established them as the reckless party that caused a lot of damage to the Horde - and some could present this as villain batting or somesuch. I’m not saying that you were necessarily wrong for doing that, but it does establish that this conversation is incomplete if you consider only one side and that it’s almost impossible to actually do so - and that again is the exact criticism that I get whenever I do go in Night Elf threads and talk about Night Elf issues. That’s happening right now in fact in the 8:1 thread.
We have problems in the narrative that were built on our relations to each other that are not likely to be solved without addressing them.
In the hypothetical, yes. But the point of the hypothetical is just emphasizing that if there is a story beat that logically only involves 1 faction it should not include the other, but also that other faction should get its own story beat.
Yes, there have been a few that interpret it this way. Likely because they are seeing the hypothetical as a suggestion unto itself instead of what it was meant be, just emphasizing a previously established solution to an issue.
I can follow this in one respect - the PVE stories surrounding the big bad I agree could stand to involve different stories for the factions that don’t have to include interaction, and given that it’s PVE, they probably shouldn’t. I discussed my issues with the hypothetical of course, but I can sign on to this claim.
I just don’t feel that other issues in the story, most of them having to do with our relationship as far as the rivalry is concerned, can be left to fester. You might see it as not taking things away from the faction - I see it as something very dear to me having been taken away by your faction, and the other side now saying “nope, we’re not giving it back” - which may not be active, current damage, but it’s locking in previous damage.
Gilneas: Reclaimed, under Alliance/worgen control
Alterec: Horde controlled, including AV. Ruins rebuilt as New Frosthold with MU and AU Orcs. Also, plenty of Forsaken refugees.
Hillsbrad: Horde control half north of the road (Sludgefields, Tarren Mill, durnhold Keep), Alliance control the south half (Southshore, mine, other farm, Dwarf fortress)
Silverpine: now Contested territory between Worgen (Pyrewood, Fenris Isle) and Forsaken (Selpchur, Amber Mill)
Plaguelands/Stratholme: Forsaken territory/new capital city. Not sure what to do about the Argents though
Tirisfal: now contested territory, with UC now a dungeon to replace Strat. Got some dangerous escaped Alchemic/Plague monsters down there.
Hinterlands: still contested, more clearly divided between dwarves and elves (western half) and trolls (eastern half)
Arathi: Alliance controlled, including AB, aside from far eastern corner- possible add second tunnel to connect it to eastern Hinterlands like current tunnel connects to central
None of this actually has much to do with ‘Redeeming’ the Horde’, but does do a bit of ‘Rebuilding’
Well, I haven’t finished the hypothetical yet and I’ve already laid out, in my head, the justifications for PvP (battlegrounds or whatever) so as to involve those that participate in PvP.
For the Horde: it’s the bitter holdouts that are mad at Alliance for closing the rift ahead of the Horde and want to prioritize hitting back instead of damage control.
For the Alliance: it’s those still bitter about the fourth war and those opportunists who want to press their advantage while the Horde is down/ focused on other things.
I mean, I know a lot of people who would love to assist in rebuilding Quel’thalas. If elements of the Alliance attacked them while the rest of the Horde was busy with all the stuff in Kalimdor…
Quel’thalas is Blood Elf core territory - I believe firmly that PVP activity needs to happen on the peripheries, not where it’s so close to home that it makes you question the competence of the defenders.
I don’t see the Alliance’s logistical path there. From a naval perspective, it looks like a nonstarter to me as long as the Zandalari are there, and I would imagine that the Forsaken returning to the area would want to refloat at least a few ships. Overland, the Alliance has to somehow get through mountain pass after mountain pass, then over the blighted river and through the plague-ridden woods just to get there. I know that Blizzard has deprioritized logistics to the greatest possible extent, but it does still matter to me.
I could see the Eastern Alliance and Horde clashing in Arathi again - which really presents itself as the territory that both sides must have - either to take the fight further into the subcontinent or to deny that fight depending on whose perspective you’re on - but further north from that? Not so much.
Sorry man, but a rando Orc farmer that joins the military to kill Nelves cause they attacked him when his race basically genocided theirs is PRECISELY a character that indirectly channels the disgruntlement Horde players felt after the whole WoT fiasco. No matter how bigger the “puppy eyes” you attach to him, at the end he´s just another hypocritical Orc qqing that the Nelves hit him when his race did waaay more againt those Nelves, period.
This may work in an actual PvP scenario, NOT in the freaking focus of the narrative, cause as you correctly put it, the historical data points to a bigger chance in the Horde getting “a leg sweep” indeed and going back to becoming the villains of the story.
Her scenario SUCKS as a wide focused “solution to the Horde problem”. It works for an upgrade to Warsong Gulch on the other hand. THIS is the issue, the way it´s framed and the reach it has IS what hurts Kyalin´s suggestion.
Gan´s suggestion literaly works in 2 out of the 3 (the interfaction development AND the personal stories parts). He like me probably wants to give some healthy distance to the factions before dealing with the PvP crimes fiasco, precisely because it´s too much toxic and there´s a player perception that points to a lack of investment towards REBUILDING THE HORDE from the part of the dev team (who literally only touch the faction to villain bat it… and guess which narrative media they use to achieve this? YEEEESSS!! faction conflict stories… ergo, the reason why maybe it´s better NOT to use the freaking faction conflict as the stepping stone to “rebuild the Horde” in the first place, when the data record points to it causing the opposite effect on the faction themes and it´s characters).
We don´t “deny you” for the sake of denying you. We just tell you to either participate in the scope of the thread (rebuild the Horde, NOT the Nelves -sorry, this is not the goal of the discussion-) OR leave if you are unable to separate one from the other.
And we do discuss why some of your suggestions actually focused on Horde work or don´t work (and people has issues different opinons regarding the Orc clans for example). If you can´t accept people pointing out why some aspects of those suggestions don´t work for them and automathically brand us all like big bad bullies cause we didn´t inmediately accepted your ideas well that´s a YOU problem.
Is based upon actual historical data related to the results the “faction conflict narrative” had on the Horde faction. You know, like the science method establishes. Yours on the other hand even had to concede the “we will probably have to fire the whole story dev team for it to work like I want it to work cause yes, the current devs don´t have the best record reagarding intelligent and fair portrayal of the faction conflict” pre-requisite. Ergo, yours is the one with LESS chance to become an actual solution to the problems the faction has right now and simply works as a “maybe/if” utopic scenario.
Different from you, I don´t pretend to talk for all the other Horde players nor Horde posters participating in this thread. And in consequence, I think it´s more than a little bit hilarious to pretend to attach to ME their behaviour.
Tl;dr: the less you try to globalize a whole group of people using the behaviour of particular individuals, the better for your arguments… cause if you don´t, you risk issuing calumnies towards other players.
Oh, but I´m sure than when you are trying to solve the Nelf issues, you don´t put first solving the Horde ones. Like your scenario correctly demostrated, the Horde component is just an accesory IN reaching the goal a.k.a. solving the Alliance player perception on the Nelf race. And this is perfectly ok when the goal is indeed to solve the issues players have with the Nelf narrative and portrayal in the game.
Also, question yourself, are the actual issues with the Nelf portrayal the absolute consequence of their narrative interaction with the Horde or maybe there are other issues that are present thanks to the way their interaction with the Alliance is portrayed?
Cause the way I see it, the Horde component on the “Nelf problem” is just a mere part of it… and believing that “solving the Horde component”= “solving the Nelf problem” IS a naive false premise, Kyalin. You guys have way worse issues narratively wise as far as the Nelf/Alliance proper interaction is concerned (that´s the actual thing hurting your identity).
Wrong, I´m telling you that if you can´t put your interest on rebuilding the Horde first and foremost in a “rebuild the Horde” thread, then maybe the way you are participating is not the most adequate not the most constructive one to reach the goal of the thread, no more and no less.
Ok Kyalin, so why bother with “us” if we are selfish hypocrites and apparently it´s a waste of effort trying to discuss with us? No seriously, explain why are you insisiting on participating on a thread with people you despise and whose opinion you despise, cause the way I see it, that is NOT the convenient attitude to have when trying to reach constructive dialogue.
You happy blame us of “acting on bad faith” when you are the one that has come here with prejudices attached to us. So WHO is the actual poster acting on bad faith, hmm?
Reality says otherwise… cause last time I saw I don´t have to complete ANY of the story Warsong Gulch objectives to either join the Battleground nor join an arena nor join a dungeon nor rading nor leveling nor anything else.
You shared ONE study of it. And I don´t know which kind of academic parameters you have been subjected irl, but in my country (which as a third world one isn´t particularly strict nor advanced btw), people don´t get to issue deffinitive conclussion using ONE study on their favor. They have to post SEVERAL UNBIASED ones to reach a CORRECT conclussion, regardless if the conclusion they reach work either IN favor OR against their hypothesis.
When you post either more than one study and vague remarks about the opinion of a bunch of nobodies on social media (are you aware that statistically speaking there the probability of people re-tweeting misinformation or incorrect information is bigger than the probability of them re-tweeting the correction on the bad information, for example?), then you can come here to say we are “denying your participation”. Cause sorry but pointing the faults on your arguments is NOT denying your participation, quite the contrary is directly interacting with them.
Literally addressed in post No. 4. Gan at least try to mention which characters the story would focus on.
I think the issue here was that you were trying to use Baine in a military fashion. He just… isn’t. There are two characters you will get push-back on that front, Baine and Calia.
Baine’s issues are deep, so deep that simply trotting him out to go to bat with the Alliance would feel strange, wrong, and completely out of character (It already did during SoL). This is a character who verbally justified the slaughter of his people for the sake of preventing further conflict (Yeah, I mentioned Camp T.). No other character other then perhaps Anduin has an issue like this. Calia needs no introduction. This is why I recommended characters like Rokhan or Gazowe instead, as they are much more believable in that capacity.
Baine is fine as a diplomat character, but in a fun twist of fate the Tauren do find themselves in need of a more hardline character. There are a few names you could pull and build up, including Jevan Grimtotem to serve that purpose. However, I do want to mention that it isn’t impossible to paint the picture of Baine that you proposed, but it would require work to make it believable. A LOT of work.
On the topic of Orcs, you’d find no Horde poster here who doesn’t disagree with you on that front. Other than Thrall, Rexxar and Eitrigg are really the only ones left, even if Rexxar is a Mok’nathal. Other than remembering Nazgrel exists, there are a few that could be developed, like Jorin or Thura but they’ve been AWOL for awhile now.
The Forsaken are the most in need of immediate character development. Any of the characters Baal listed are viable candidates and that should illustrate just how borked they currently are. That’s one of our biggest areas of concern as even we don’t know what to do with them. You’ll get a lot of different opinions and disagreements here because it’s just impossible to know what direction they are going, only that it unfortunately will include Calia.
This is the reason we hyper-fixate on our main characters. Droite’s point of this being a hero-centric game is absolutely true. If you have the flashy superpowers, you get more screen-time because you are more enjoyable for the masses to watch. We DO have Talanji and Thally, but why use them when you could just use Anduin when you need a priest and Jaina when you need a mage? Thrall is getting him mojo back, so we’ll see what happens there. Characters like Rokhan, Gazlowe, and Lor’themar are already playing at a disadvantage here.
This gets worse when you realize that Blizz is aiming to explore their cosmology. Death was our thing and we just got shafted HARD. No Forsaken, minimal Trolls, and no Pandaren/Orc/Tauren ancestral zone. Light? Alliance heavy. Void? Alleria and Co. Order? Titanforged (Gnomes, Dwarves, Humans, MAYBE Orcs). Disorder? Illidan probably. Life? Tyrande and Malfurion. We’re going to be side-characters if not completely sidelined at the rate things are going.
I stated that this was a bad premise before, and here you’ve repeated it. I’m glad that we agree that it works as an upgrade to Warsong Gulch. It was, as I’ve stated, never intended to be panacea - just one part of a larger proposal.
The rest of your post seems to unjustifiably either rely on this premise, or sidestep what you were responding to anyway. I’ve read it, but I’m not going to respond to it.
The real question would be if you could find Zelling after this long. Sylvanas actively disliked him for questioning her, so that would I’d suppose mean he might of been put on the short list to be melted down into Mawsworn shoes.
The other issue is Zelling was not a heretic, he kept to legit Tidesage philosophy instead of the bastardized version Azshara inspired.
That said, it is perfectly possible to steal a soul from the maw. That’s how the last generation of DKs were made. It is actually a sort of interesting flaw in the design of the Maw’s intended inescapable nature; if a mortal is raised by necromancy, their soul can be torn out of the Maw and back to the mortal plane.
As an aside I suspect the Tide Mother is likely an aspect of Elune too, yes, given the links we got during BFA. The voice they heard as the Tide Mother was always very quiet it seems like, and Azshara just drowned the legit Tide Mother out.
Cause yes, the development Kyaling suggested for Baine wasn´t entirely coherent with his current portrayal (and frankly it comes as unbelievable precisely thanks to HOW Taurajo damaged his image in the eyes of the Horde playerbase. Him jumping to defend Orcs when he STILL did nothing but roll over when Tauren civilians got murdered doesn´t erase the fact he´s still putting OTHER races´ right to live above his own. This is literally what the devs tried with his Derek scenario and the reason it blew up so spectacularly: cause him protesting until one “Forsaken as of 5 min ago” with suspicious Jaina ties got hurt translated more as him playing some hypocritical convenient agenda than him legitimately caring over the free will of the Forsaken nor much less the lives of the Tauren or the Horde. It was a mess.).
THAT´S the issue with Baine, at least for me: I perceive him as an individual who always ends up fighting for the lives of everybody (Quillboar, Alliance, etc.) BEFORE the lives of the Tauren nor much less of the Horde. The way to start fixing this is showing him DEFENDING FIRST AND FOREMOST THE MULGORE TAUREN!!.. cause if we take confidence in him as a character that DO defend his people (the lowest requisite) then it´s more believable to perceive him as someone who will genuinely invest in defending other Horde races. It is a more coherent portrayal for a racial leader.
Then pray tell, why wasn´t this bolded IN the OP of that thread, hmm? If your scenario works only to fix THAT part of the Horde narrative in a particular PvP scenario, then things change and it does become less extenuating and the potential damaging is much less (indeed, we don´t use racial leaders as leading characters for Battleground scenarios, we use B-C listers for those cause thos stories are CONTAINED to the Battleground per se and aren´t the main focus of the narrative FOR THE WHOLE FACTION -the narrative for a Battleground is waay less influential in regards to the whole portrayal of the faction, is not the main goal and just an aspect of it).
Next time post something among these lines: “this proposal only addresses the update of X Battleground and it´s narrative development post 4th war” and I´m sure a lot of us wouldn´t have hated it so much. We hated it because we interpreted it as the MAIN narrative the Horde would take onwards after the disaster that the 4th War was for the faction identity and themes.
This isn’t true. You would have refused to read that disclaimer and pressed ahead with the worst possible interpretation of what was being proposed. I’m confident in saying this because it happened. I explained countless times that it was one part of a larger scenario, one that was also discussed countless times, and one that was stated countless times to be separate from anything PVE related.
Fair! Given your points, I retract that to a degree then, for sure. Though, I still find it unlikely he would go full Void. The only way I see that happening is if his time in the maw profoundly changed his outlook, and not for the better.
I actually also see a huge possible population boom if they can free even part of the remaining Scourge. That’s a lot of people.
Though I have been wondering. Shadow Ascendants are not quite part of the modern lore anymore. How do you imagine them to be? The shadowy death spirit thing seems like it got taken over by the Maw lore.
Well we sorta do have them in Gameplay: Shadowform and Voidform. We also have it with Natalie Seline, who was “one with the Void” and is in permanent Shadowform (and the only NPC to be so).
It’s basically that, permanently in Shadow, “one with the Shadow”. The added bonus is in theory, Natalie Seline did die: her soul was separated from her body and put back together with Shadow.
If we’re going to go this far, why don’t we just bring in Nazgrel? The guy is also a WC3 legacy like Rokhan and Gazlowe, but he’s been locked away in Outlands since BC. Thus, if Kya in genuine in her stance on a nuanced approach with such a scenario (where the NEs slaughtering civilians aren’t whitewashed) … he should fit the bill. He’s a C Ranker who’s long overdue for development, but hasn’t been contaminated by ANY of the post WotLK Plot-Devicing of the Horde. Granted, I hate the idea that the only time Horde characters can get use and development is within the confines of a Faction Conflict narrative… but that’s a different issue.
