Opening post.
“I feel sorry for you” a statement to show empathy.
“I don’t think about you at all” quite a reverse of that.
Your OP set the tone of how you view other opinions not of your tribe.
Can’t say I agree. If you do one good thing, it doesn’t absolve you of past crimes.
Bruh for someone who allegedly dismisses this whole thread you sure can’t stop posting on it.
Either you do secretly care or this is an incredibly sad interpretation of a hobby.
I think the thread has merit if it was more constructive and I would love to have a conversation that achieved that.
Problem is some of the posters here seem to fetishize how they can screw the other side while a racist strokes his own ego every 5 posts or so. Fascinating to see but cringy as well.
Okay Spock. Feel free to report back to the Captain on the results of this anthropomorphical study you’re pretending reading a forum thread is.
The issue I see with the Horde is they lack any individualism. They are basically whoever is in charge at the time. When Garrosh was in charge they were all violent and warmongers, When thrall/voljin is in charge the are all shamanistic all of a sudden and Sylvanas in charge they are homicidal maniacs.
Blizzard have done a poor job of showing what the shamanistic portion of the Horde were doing while Sylvanas was in charge. I think that golden even had them fanning the flames of the fire at Teldrassil. That doesn’t seem like the peaceful Shamanistic side of the Horde. All the Leaders of the Horde just going along with the actions of their leaders without seeming to have their own voice or actions has really hurt them.
The council might be a good step however It also has fundamentally changed the Horde from what it was. What they need is some serious development and a fresh start, something that distances them from their old crimes and gives them room to grow again. A new atonement for new crimes basically, so have them move their home to a new city. abandon Orgrimmar and its dark past of Garrosh and Sylvanas and build a new city state with the council.
Have new stories of the Hardships the Horde overcomes to build this new home. Develop new and old characters to flesh out the Horde that would actually standup against warchiefs like Sylvanas or Garrosh and not just tag along like these old leaders/ heros did. Make it evident that they aren’t going to repeat the past mistakes again.
It also allows them to develop away from the Alliance as their characters simply interact with other Horde characters and learn from them, not being moralised by the alliance… Oh and Flesh out the Shamnism/Loa and ancestors part of the Horde so that it is actually a good way if keeping away from corruption. Show that that it isn’t just a tool for them to be manipulated by big bad.
Anywho new minor retcon: Bwonsamdi brought Rasta’khan’s coffin from Dazar’alor to Atal’dazar like this:
Pretty obvious, I think the captain gets it too. The guy makes parrallels from real life to WoW and somehow equates them with the same moral conundrums when they have virtually nothing in common besides 1 similarity viewed in isolation.
It makes him feel smart but I guess that’s why he does it.
As for why you think Orcs helping out others for everyone’s self-interest (including their own) and as Badmaa mentioned with plenty of stumbling along the way like Horde soldiers attacking alliance in Icecrown.
From an Alliance perspective both in lore and out the Orcs are still the same criminals that did all those atrocious things. There was no justice, forgiveness or redemption for that matter. There was no self-sacrifice on their part for others rather than themselves.
For example Grom getting “redeemed” for the Orcs is much more different than getting redeemed for the Draenei, Humans, Dwarves and Elves he slaughtered.
I would dare say in their eyes he was never redeemed.
When you categorically say “These guys helped out so they are absolved of all past crimes” it invalidates what the “victims” of these injustices feel.
So you create a conflict which invites debates of why or why not X or Y is objectively redeemed when the conversation is much more complicated than that.
Narratively from a single person perspective was Grom redeemed? Sure. From a multi-perspective view? Heck no.
But most of the Orcs in game were born after or during the 2nd War at this point. Even Thrall’s starting to get a little long in the tooth. Given WoW’s wonky timeline idk if he’s supposed to be like 35 or 50, but he’s old enough to feel like he earned retirement.
Most of Orgrimmar would be born on Azeroth who had nothing to do with the Dark Portal Horde.
(Edit: I swear to God if it turns out Thrall’s somehow like 29 I’m going to scream)…
I mean, I appreciate that. I try not to block people I disagree with as a matter of fair play, but I respect that not everyone is willing to put up with that.
The biggest thing that I’ve noticed since this thread’s creation is the insistence of making the Alliance racist again - which on the surface isn’t something I wholly disagree with, but the idea seems to be made less in the sense of writing an interesting set of conflicts and more in the sense of depreciating the other faction.
Taking a step back though, a good part of my feeling on that may be driven by the feeling that this entire thread was started as a protest towards my own ideas, which I don’t feel were fairly addressed in favor of knocking down straw men instead. So perhaps I am being a bit unfair myself.
That being said, I’m going to take some time away from this thread. Go back to the drawing board for a bit and see what can be done to tweak things. I’m still going to advocate for certain points of course, but I didn’t make that first thread out of an attempt at self-indulgence. As I said before - our solutions must consider how to make the game better for each other.
Every apocalypse tier threat from WC3 to Shadowlands lmao
Maybe true but the OGs are still there.
And the new generation is seen to follow in their fathers footsteps, its always two steps forwards but always a step back.
Was Daelin right? Perhaps, Teldrassil, Theramore, Gilneas and many other places like it are a testament to it. War between the Alliance and the Horde in the story has always been the Horde making the first move and then crying about the fallout and ‘prejudice’ after.
That is a failure of story telling from Blizzard’s part if they wanted to make the Horde sympathetic to an outsider. Any objective viewer looking at the Horde and their history without any bias would rightly judge the Horde a failed experiment.
Thrall and his like unfortunately are the exception and not the rule and no way representative of Orc and Horde society. Again, this is Blizzard’s failing and why the Horde is in such a terrible place now.
He was a newborn raised in the camp after the First War, so he should be in his late 20s/early 30s actually.
My one hard rule is “Daelin/Garithos were not racist” get an immediate block on the spot period full stop.
Because that’s literally the one painfully direct lesson in both BFA with the Jaina questline and wayback in Warcraft.
If you scroll up to before the thread was attepted to be derailed twice over, you’ll notice a number of posts on the development of Genn as going back to being Anti-Forsaken/Anti-Orc due to Teldrassil (recall his BTS change of heart came before that event where he lost his second home and his wife almost died), but to also make Tess accept the Worgen curse (walking back the Heritage Armor questline) but make her aggressively Not Racist/Anti-Racist against her father but equally as Pro-Worgen as her father.
Admittedly I’m basically Full Doomer about the subject but this feels like an impossibly tall order, because what you describe as a fresh start is how the horde started out in the beginning of WoW already. And Blizzard’s follow-up on the concept was Cataclysm. There’s also the fact that WoW can’t really timeskip their way out of this one; the horde player character was involved this time around, and unless you’re okay with the actions the main storyline dictated that you do, then the player can’t really follow along with the recycled story of “we’re better than our predecessors” because you ARE the predecessor tagging along.
It feels like if there’s one “good” thing to the alliance being the reactive faction, it’s that their main characters only seem to be passively bad, rather than actively detrimental to their own stories. When the horde’s doing bad things, there’s more onus on the “good” alignment characters to show why they should be against whatever Garrosh or Sylvanas is doing, as you pointed out with the other leaders being harmed by their lack of / delayed dissent. But Blizzard’s attempt at showing something turned out to be Saurfang, who they made actively bad and seemingly ticked off everyone by providing story focus on his suicidal desires instead of focusing on his victims.
On a side note.
I am tired of suicidal Horde characters.
One was enough, and it was one too much, even before the villain bat.
But two suicidal Horde characters of repute? Arguably three if you count Rastakhan.
The best solution from the Horde and Alliance is a clean break.
So cooperative factions like Cenarion Circle and Kirin Tor have to be split between both factions. No more cooperation unless necessary and they make it a big deal that the gang is getting back together again.
The factions and leaders stay away from each other.
Make each side the hero of their own stories and justified in their actions.
Then maybe open up dungeons and raiding for cross faction play to allow players (individuals) get away from the huge badblood between both sides.
I think one of the larger things that we agree on is that there has to be some sort of conflict that the Alliance starts - so I can work with this. It was kind of at the heart of my suggestion in the first place. I do want to note though that the distinction between my proposal and yours was that I focused on Night Elves (in the specific part that was being discussed) - who have reasons to hate and display darker tendencies towards the Horde. While yours focuses in on Genn and the Worgen - who also have reasons to hate and display darker tendencies towards the Horde - and both of them for similar reasons. Both of them were on the receiving end of Horde invasions that caused large portions of their populations to be displaced or killed, and both of them were at one time or another completely chased from their country.
So I have to wonder at the difference here, and whether it’s reasonable to have such a difference.
So is telling people to leave your thread.
It may be disappointing to you. I’m making very little mention of the Alliance in my proposal.
They’ve actually have plans to do that. The PvE thing I mean.
And really I think SL is trying to move away from the factions. They’ll always have to have some friction, because people like me love WPvP and it’s going to be hard to feel like that conflicts non canon when I’m killing you as you step into the portal room.
I’d advocate for just shrugging and saying everything’s fine now, back to Cold War status. And when WM is off you can just walk into enemy cities if you want as there’s not an actual war going on.
But there’s still some flashpoints and Horde and Alliance citizens taking some initiative about it.
Eh, Ion has pushed back against the idea of moving away from the factions, notwithstanding the idea of finding some way of making cross-faction raiding work. They’re also still doing marketing tie-ins to this day that trade off of the rivalry.
The rivalry I think is always going to be with us, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
My personal issue with the “separate them forever” suggestion is that thanks to BFA, I don’t really want the character I play to associate with the horde either. Which sucks for me because I still prefer their aesthetic on the whole.
Open up cross faction play and guilding and I’m jumping to the other side, because the only race that really has that “monster on the outside, not on the inside” feel anymore that I originally liked about the horde is the worgen of all things. And that wasn’t even meant to be their reason for being playable.