Please, THESE type of exclamations is what me and some other posters have been pointing to when we say “drop the victim complex”. Cause my points about you maybe imrpoving some aspects of your arguments are taken as “you will reject ME and MY points always not because you are a bad person who argues in “bad faith” and are unfairly rejecting MY suggestions”. And sortry Kyalin but if THIS prejudice against me IS the only thing you can focus when we communicate between each other then to continue to entertain this conversation is nothing but a waste of time for BOTH of us. I´m not the one “refusing” to listen, you are.
Indeed it´s a different issue, cause then her scenario is NOT the equivalent to BfA´s Horde faction quest chain but merely a minor local quest chain that focuses ONLY in Warsong Gulch and inmediate surrounding areas… indeed a self contained scenario in which is waaay harder to villain bat the whole freaking Horde.
Blizz does this on Micro levels as well y’know? Hell, they do it behind our backs. Look at Brennadam for goodness sake. Look at the Gorillas of Zandalar. Look at what happened to the refugees from Theramore. It still feels like this scenario is tempting fate.
EDIT: And as you said, this sort of micro-conflict scenario only has a chance of working if the writing team we have … isn’t the writing team we have. Or at least, are willing to commit to that sort of nuanced storytelling; and perhaps even show the NE’s killing Horde civilians in the barrens in a cruel and negative light. With the settup scenario having say, Nazgrel following an ever increasing level of carnage in the Barrens till he finds the source. But if it is this writing team, and they stay true to their non-committal form, then they’re just as likely to shove a WoT sourced NE slave ring in these “innocent towns” behind the Horde PCs back to really hammer home their classic grey. Because “morally grey” in current WoW is Pristine White being smashed against Pitch Void Black.
Well yes, but all of those examples you mention are related to the main PvE narrative (reason why they reatroactively contributed to the Horde villain batting. To put it simple: the story of BfA was a glorified tale in how the stupid Hordies followed their cartoonish villain warchief´s hidden agenda, no more and no less. The cursive part is related to the main focus of the story AND the bolded is basically the goal of BfA: to make Sylvanas the villain so devs could launch SL).
However, if we talk about the especific narrative related to a PvP gameplay feature, things change. Cause then the goal and reach of that narrative is only limited to the PvP gameplay feature itself… heck, devs can even reduce it´s impact to the feature and nothing else (so, the scenario can be a short quest chain that ONLY activates for players that want to access Warsong Gulch; ergo PvErs like me will probably ignore it even exists -indeed it becomes a “update the battleground to match the lore”, but it isn´t the whole freaking focus of the narrative so all and every PvE feature of the game goes back to it over and over and over again).
Indeed, I mean the only way to prevent scenarios like the one proposed by Kyalin from becoming toxic to a more generalized and globalized narrative surrounding the Horde (the main goal and focus of the Horde narrative so to say) IS if the devs decide to actively keep it contained to the battleground only… like it happened in Vanilla with this and every other battleground. The faction conflicts portrayed in those battlegrounds only mentioned friction between the factions, and I´m sure as hell they never degenerated into “THIS Is WHY HURDE/ALLIANCE SUCKS”… because they were related only to an especific place and some especific races and not the factions AS A FREAKING WHOLE.
Sorry gal, but my criticism certainly isn´t supported by any other poster´s actions but yours. The actions and more importantly the arguments of other posters are irrelevant to my personal criticism of your ideas, period.
Maybe start by owning your arguments?
And for the sake of both of us, this will be my last post related to this topic -your ideas and why I rejected them and yes, suck as far as I´m concerned-. Consider any additional reply related to this ignored from my part, cause as I pointed out, we´re just wasting time.
I hope this episode serves as a lesson for why I feel that my positions are unfairly considered. It took us months to clear up this simple misunderstanding, despite my constant attempts to do so.
I’ll just step in and say that the development of a potential new Horde character is one thing I actually like about Kyalin’s proposed PVP scenario. I don’t care if he’s a plot device for a particular narrative; all characters have to start somewhere, and coming into an actual narrative is a better starting place than some other options.
Kinda sounds like the safest route is merely a “keep your chocolate out of my peanut butter” situation? Given our current Dev team at least. Where PvP is sort of treated as its own self-contained little world (which it kind of already is), and PvE is sort of its own thing (which it kind of already is outside of the very optional Warmode). Which I guess works because the Faction Conflict really is a very weak story thread that was developed almost exclusively to support PvP on a story level. And I am very uncertain if that support is still needed anymore.
Well Kyalin, as I mentioned before and I´ll embarrasingly cite myself:
Cause a looot of us basically understood your scenario was not a “let´s update Warsong Gulch” and more a “Let´s continue with the faction conflict as the main focus of the narrative” BS. There´s a HUGE difference in both reach and execution in each case.
Remind me again why did we get the Human Potential Light Princess instead of the actual Human that had a lore relation with the core Forsaken religion?
And I know I´ll sound paranoid, but I´m sure Calia is only here because Golden needed a Horde side self insert to properly “write” the faction, no more and no less (yes, I´m one of the posters that rather had gotten any other nobody playing the “Light infused undead” clown than her… cause her -thanks to the historical background- is waaay easier to use in “controversial” development like neutering the Forsaken and making them regular humans with a minor skin condition. Some rando nobody undead couldn´t ever claim leadership of the Forsaken, Calia can because “muh daddy was king before and suddenly Forsaken remembered they loved Terenas” retconn BS).
The faction conflict in a global scale will ALWAYS be a fail narrative as far as main focus is concerned because irl people is competitive… and in a game that MUST keep the two factions as “equals” there will NEVER be a “winner” nor a “loser”. That´s why the three times the devs tried to play with this narrative the game only caused annoyance and discontent in the playerbase, cause it is a story that will not go ANYWHERE because the very core design of the game prevents so, period.
But, I don’t really see the need to start from scratch. If the desire is to have a character that was generally disassociated with the WoT (or ANY of the Cata onward content) … wouldn’t the reintroduction of Nazgrel work perfectly fine? He’s not contaminated by the mire of Horde plot-device status over the last decade, and he is a WC3 legacy. Plus (and I may be in the minority), with so many of our remaining Orcish/Orcish adjacent characters still needing so much work (yet getting on the years) … if we were going to go “new blood” … we should actually go “new blood”. We need some younger generation folks.
TBH I feel like the factions should formally go to a cold war stance. Then, have third party factions supporting Warmode and the battlegrounds as reoccurring skirmishes. These factions can be publicly disavowed by both sides while quietly being funneled support in a sort of proxy war.
Basically how the USA vs the USSR mostly played out.
If you take off your “night elf fan” hat for a moment and think only about the Horde’s needs, do you truly and honestly believe that more conflict with Night Elves, happening immediately, will make things better for the Horde than an expansion or even a patch where the Horde and Alliance don’t interact?
I know you think that option would be bad for the Alliance in general, and for the Night Elves in particular. But is it bad for the Horde? If so, can you tell me why without mentioning the Alliance?
I ask because I want to see if we can agree on the relative impact of the various options before we start talking about which option is the best one for the game as a whole.
Sigh … it may be a pet peeve of mine, but perpetual cold wars for the sake of supporting PvP on a story level always feel very arbitrary to me. Especially in a setting with so many supposedly near extinct races. Nothing takes me out of the story more than realizing how utterly pointless it is to rely on game mechanics to prevent my PC race from driving itself to extinction in an attempt to just kill the other team. Especially when everyone already treats PvP like a sport anyway.
I´ll say this is a player perception thing man… cause in my particular case this worked the opposite: I hated so much the attention wasted -yes, you read well- on a meme like Zappy-Boy instead of that development getting retroactively invested in Rokhan -who as the actual RACIAL LEADER of the core Troll group is still criminally underdeveloped-.
He really does. It is sorta shocking he lacks one still. I sort of wonder how he and Loa’jin will interact, also.
If not a formal cold war an… uneasy truce, at the least. I mean to this day the US and Russia are hardly buddies, but we can get along in a limited degree for trade and other aligned interests.
But here’s the thing, Zappyboi wasn’t a plot device. He wasn’t created to play a part in any storyline. He was just a cool-looking model in a cinematic that people latched onto, and then the devs started throwing him into everything, hoping they’d found their new Saurfang. I much prefer someone like, say, Lucille Waycrest, who is introduced along with her own story.
That would be because you and others read what you wanted to see as opposed to what was there - like I have been saying from the beginning.
Admittedly, no, the two are too much intertwined - which on the other side led to strident calls to improve the Horde by making the Alliance racist. The relationship is a big part of each faction’s identity, and it’s enough to argue that neither would exist without the other.
However, that being said, the proposal’s intent is to get us started in redefining that relationship from a good vs. evil frame to something more ambiguous and limited, so in that sense, yes, it is something that I believe would leave the Horde in a better state than it was found.
Edit: Otherwise, don’t expect the stain of BFA to go away. We’re well into the next expansion and it’s still an immensely popular topic. Don’t expect that to change, to an extent we’re still relitigating Cataclysm, and that was eleven years ago. If you want people to say “okay, but that was before, things have changed now”, something in that dynamic has to actually change.
PVP is a sport. It works off of the same psychologies and therefore so too must its gameplay. You wouldn’t have the NFL having one team blow up another one’s stadium in a narrative about how the Patriots or something need to find themselves. That would lose them fans. It works because you have teams to root for, and the best games are the ones that are between competent rivals.
Vanilla WoW basically, yes. The faction conflict as the main focus of the narrative is a dead end thanks to the very basis of design of the game, so…
Please say it LOUDEEEERR!!!
(yes the trolls are my sec fav race… heck, I totes concede to them Amani the moral Highground as far as Quel´thalas is concerned).
That moment one realizes Faol should had reappeared as a living human somehow (idk… make it look as if everybody believed he was dead but surprise!!! he wasn´t) in Legion and Natalie as the UNDEAD character in Legion.
It was the “real politiks” game in which you lowkey throw barbs sometimes and lowkey compliment the opposition “with a smile on the face” to get those delicious trade treaties up and working.
I agree with this, however I personally rather move the C tier cast to B and the B tier cast to A tier. Cause increasing the population of C tier characters will not solve the problem of devs resorting to the “superior” Alliance A tier of characters in neutral content thanks to a complete lack of A tier characters in the Horde side of the fence.
Depends on the main focus of the game… and PvP isn´t in the case of WoW. It is in the case of LoL or Overwatch though.
The faction conflict is merely the excuse the devs use in WoW to put different aesthetics and cultural references in two separated groups so, they can “cheat” costumers offering the same content but with a minor “window dressing” and therefore sell it as “two” gameplay experiences. It is but a marketing tool and nothing else… and hilariously, this approach works amazingly well in regular expacs, while it has been rejected THRICE when they decide to put the WHOLE narrative focus on “Alliance vs. Horde”.
I’m not saying that the “stain of BfA” can never be revisited. I’m just asking if you believe that having new conflict right now is better for the Horde than waiting a while and having other storylines happen first.
(Again, I know you think it’s better for the Alliance.)
I’m not convinced that a PvP battleground that won’t be experienced by a lot of players is the best way to do that, though. That seems like a great way to try out some new C-listers and see if they catch on.
I mean, I don’t feel like dipping into the PVE player master race argument here. The strength of an MMO is that it can offer players multiple things to do and can cater to player choice in a way that no other genre can. I consider PVP a valid endgame choice that should be supported, and that includes by making it interesting.
But my point here is that PVP content is best served when it is a background, optional conflict consistent of content that sets up the battlegrounds, but then lets the battlegrounds themselves act as balanced arenas for play. Blizzard’s method of trying to tie a story into it or anoint winners and losers in different parts of the world, often through PVE, character-driven content, is anathema to that because it removes the illusion that your actions in that competitive environment matter.
What does that translate to in my case? I will not help to mend the seriousness gap in PVP because I feel that the narrative is telling me that no matter what I do, my victories are fake and the side I want to play is going to lose anyway. That’s not fun for me, therefore I will play a game that doesn’t do that.
So yes, we agree, the narrative focus should not be on Alliance vs. Horde. Doing that is contradictory to the gameplay mode that said conflict was trying to support in the first place.