How Can We Redeem/Rebuild The Horde (Actual Horde Edition)

And I want it to be fun again.

People are right to say resetting the conflict to a cooler tone would be contrived and bad writing.

But uh, so?

Most of WoW’s already that, and if makes the game more fun again I won’t really complain.

Reminder that the Maw is different from Hell in that you don’t get sent there just for doing bad things; you get sent there for being a danger to the Shadowlands.

I wish they skipped BFA if they planned to do this. You can’t have so much badblood brought to peak eruption, let it collapse without a proper resolution and then break the barriers.

There has to be a break event. Cold war, the status quo, will simply not work.

Sure it will. It’s fiction, remember?

what’s your point?

The question with “jumping to the other side” when they break faction barriers would be why would the Alliance accept a troll mage in the middle of their cities after all that has happened in BFA?

They should probably keep the faction barriers when it comes to cities.

I meant I’d race change to worgen. :stuck_out_tongue:

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No, today they confirmed in the Lost Codex interview (see other thread I made, I transcribed the lore bits) that the Arbiter would send souls that are “irredeemable”, sins beyond Revendreth’s range.

Point is Blizz can say everything’s jake and it’ll be jake.

SL’s a good opportunity to make sure all the war dead get a cushy afterlife where they frolic in fields with family pets or whatever. Every dead shmuck got a good ending, it’s fine.

Back to cold war.

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Well, bringing the idea to conflict, my ideas are largely these.

When we talk about racial representation in PVP - I think what people most want to see is what they represent kicking tail in their own way in the battlefield, bringing cool elements of their toolkit to bear, and feeling like they’re effective. That lends itself to expanding-pie thinking, where we can give people things to make them feel good about what they’re playing.

Blizzard doesn’t do that though. They route their factional conflict stories through a larger narrative intended to tie everything together, and believe that motivation comes from pain and from being forced into it. It’s a mindset that trades on negative emotions - and that’s not fun.

Fun. That’s the big thing everyone needs to remember when we’re talking about faction conflict. Yes, I know that war is a serious topic, and there will be time for that, but we play this game for fun.

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If thats your mentality then why participate in this thread? According to Blizzard problem is solved. Horde is redeemd and Alliance doesn’t trust them but are willing to give peace one last chance.

So well done everyone we can go home now?
Btw I don’t really care if the afterlife is going swimingly, words cannot express how much I don’t care what happenes in shadowlands. Horde still went on a killing spree and they have to answer for it if Blizzard wants both factions to chum up like old buddies infront of the fire.

Fixing the Horde’s narrative doesn’t have to involve the Alliance. Thats been stressed here, many times. So why would the nature of their conflict be relevant?

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I’m not sure that I’d agree with that, and I’m not sure that your contemporaries would agree with that. I recall Baal and others saying that you can’t repair the Horde without making the Alliance look darker, and they’re right. One area that we also appear to agree is that that a way to do this involves the Alliance starting a conflict first, with less than pure motives underlying it.

Horde’s narrative has been history of smashing the Alliance’s narrative and so any growth would impact both sides unless as I explained there is a break that formally makes them independent. Alliance for example to fix their narrative they need to bloody Horde’s nose so now you have problem because Alliance needs to involve the Horde.

That’s only a small part of the solution cuz I’m only expecting 1-2 Alliance Leaders take on the role (Genn, Turalyon).

The other 95% of the solutions outlined literally do not involve this at all lol

I’m confused as to why you wouldn’t include others. This sort of ties back to my previous question as well.

The way I see it, this is NOT about actual “narrative redemption for the Horde in-universe” per se -cause frankly, after BfA it´s but a useless waste of time to dedicate resources to achieve this. Why? Easy: because unless Blizz comes out to say the WHOLE of BfA / SL ARE to be retconned, then we have the premise those events happened. And no amount of begging, humiliation and hand waving in the story will make those events disappear ever. Which means the Horde CAN´T be anything but the genocidal lunatics that will jump to murder, pillage and destroy at the smallest trigger ever, following the most obvious plots for the most comically cartoonish mustache twirling character the devs deign to put in command of the whole faction. BfA was the THIRD time the Horde basically filled the niche of “muahahaha villain” in the story. After a third time it´s impossible to argue they aren´t painted in the story as the opposite of what they are sold as in gameplay.

Imho, OP is trying to find ways to “redeem” the idea of the Horde for the Horde players… cause let´s be honest: nothing but complete obliteration (be literal or figuratively by proxy of making the Horde a welfare copy cat of the Alliance with even less relevance) would “fix” the faction for the Alliance players, period.

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I agree. But the Alliance hasn’t been allowed one iota of darkness in a faction conflict in a long time.

Jania does an ethnic cleansing. But so far I’ve seen one Belf mad about it, and you nearly kill him. There was Taurjo but then that got retroactively cleared up.

Hell Anduin has not done one offensively violent thing that has not been the fault of magic mind meddling. The guy can’t even punch someone who betrayed him without it being Cthulu whispers causing him to have a non friendly emotion.

Suffice to say I don’t think it’ll happen.

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And this is where I have to again object to the placement of artificial limits based on what we think the writers will do in the future. I think that suggestions have to be evaluated on their own terms, otherwise there’s not much of a point to suggesting anything at all.

Here is a solution.

Give both sides a good reason to do ethnic cleansing.
So the same way people argue Arthas had no choice to do what he did they would argue Sylvanas had no choice to do what she did.

Like you said its fiction.
Not as an argument “anything goes, don’t think about it” but as a “let’s construct a story where both sides feel in the right”