Unless your hypothetical somehow involves the Horde mass ressing those who died during the fourth war, it’s going to be quite unavoidable.
They are that even without your suggestions. Not in a great situation, I agree, but still there.
Does any good action or any goodwill mean bending the knee to you? Is giving a buquet of flowers bending the knee?
When I mean rewarded, I mean rewarded. Story wise it would look like this. Horde does everything they do in bfa. Horde is abandoned by Sylvanas, and seemingly lets her loyalists just walk, or throw the most ardent ones in the slammer. Horde then does absolutely nothing to make up for the atrocities they have commited in the fourth war, and for whatever reason Nazgrim joins up with the Horde, and the San’layn. The Forsaken flourishes, bolstered by those they have killed over the years. The Trolls work to unite themselves, and the Taunka joins as well. And apparently the Blood elves rebuild Quel’thalas.
I wouldn’t have had any problem with any of this (except the Forsaken parts), if not for bfa. Because after an entity commits the deeds the Horde did during the fourth war, for it to grow stronger afterwards without doing anything to help those they hurt would be unbelievably frustrating from an Alliance pov.
I mean…heaven forbid we want the faction who committed a genocide to be held accountable for their actions. I mean, simply can’t allow that right? Might hurt some poor feelings here
So, Thrall promising to bring Sylvanas’ head to Tyrande is nothing?
Those are suggestions for how to rebuild the Horde. None of those at present are in my hypothetical.
Again, you are conflating the Horde rebuilding itself (because it needs to be rebuilt after what the writers have done to it narratively) with the Horde being rewarded. Getting new characters because the ones you had are getting killed, villain-batted or both isn’t a reward to the faction that is losing racial leaders at a rate of 1 per expansion (I counted, it’s at the beginning of post #4).
Also, none of this is happening in a vacuum. The Alliance isn’t just sitting while all the stuff in my hypothetical is going on. Conversely, the suggestions I made prior to the hypothetical are Horde exclusive because, again, this thread is about rebuilding the Horde and those suggestions take literally nothing away from the Alliance.
Go ahead and make your proposal than. But remember, the Horde players only had the following choices:
No one can agree on what held accountable means. The writers certainly haven’t forgotten what they made the Horde do. The Horde players still hear about it in game and in the forums.
Horde did bad stuff, and the faction needs to experience the repercussions of doing bad stuff in a tangible and meaningful way, and most importantly it needs to learn from the experience.
The Horde’s entire history is either refusing to confront its past or rationalizing it, hence it making the same mistakes over and over. Garrosh followed in the footsteps of his father, Sylvanas turned the Horde into a weapon much like the Burning Legion had wielded it.
Like it or not, this is the story Blizzard has told and unfortunately we aren’t going to convince them to change it. The Horde has to have a new beginning and the only healthy way to do that is acknowledgment of its mistakes and taking the first steps to right the wrongs it has done.
Don’t make it about “punishing Horde players”, that’s a strawman and we all know it. This is the only way to logically get away from another tired, tattered faction war repeat that none of us want.
And alliance players, especially NE and Worgen players are reminded, though not directly, that they never got the chance to properly have their revenge against the horde, because you know, as usual, the BIG MEGA SUPER EVIL made your warchief and peons march willingly to war, or so absurd excuse blizz always uses.
I’m not diminishing that. Like at all. Again, my post takes NOTHING from the Alliance. But it doesn’t focus on the Alliance because that’s not the point of this thread. I also don’t think I, as a Horde player, should make suggestions for a faction I don’t play.
I just don’t want you to think I’m trying to diminish horde players concerns, I’m not, but for far to long I been dimishing the feelings of NE players and being a worgen player, I should know better about what it feels like to get kicked in the gut daily by blizz.
In short, it’s something I’m passionate about since this did affect both sides and should include both sides in the discussion
Nothing concrete, no. When he has delivered that head, sure. But even then, it wasn’t just Sylvanas, and the Horde did these things out of it’s own free will. Just handing over her head, if that even happens, won’t be enough on it’s own. But it would be a great first step.
These still happen after bfa. Unless you mean to say they happen after your hypothetical scenario, in which case i’ll admit i’m curious what it entails, beyond what you have already written.
You could just say yes you know?
Let me create an example so you can understand my viewpoint. Imagine a person falls and loses his arm. Now imagine the same person kills a person, and afterwards he goes and gets a cybernetic arm. This is your Horde, rebuilding itself without making up for what it did. Do you understand why I have a problem with it? Even if it doesn’t take anything from the Alliance, it doesn’t make up for what has already happened.
I agree wholeheartedly that the Warchief position being dissolved is reform in the right direction. However,
We have no evidence that the Horde has any intention of helping clean up the biological weapons it has polluted the Kaldorei lands with. Or the Gilnean ones, at that.
We have no guarantees of non-aggression or agreements to cede Alliance territory occupied during the war. It is implied that this may include a significant portion of Ashenvale forest.
I’m not going to suggest something absurd like a Treaty of Versailles deal, but it’s a bad look for NPCs to be openly discussing how Sylvanas’s troops are being let off without trial so long as they swear fealty to the Horde council. Y’know, so when they unload a magazine into a crowd of screaming refugees, next time it’ll be FOR THE HORDE! LOK’TAR!
Do I think any of this is the Horde player base’s fault? Absolutely not, and I think that doing this would be a great leap back towards the good ol’ days when the Horde were just survivors that were doing their best in a very flawed, human way, but ultimately had an innocent soul.
Forsaken aside, of course, but they’ve always been bad.
Once again, players had no choice in the narrative direction the writers took. Now in this thread as with the last you as an Alliance player are saying the Horde can ONLY MOVE FORWARD AFTER it satisfactorily makes Alliance players feel better. For a narrative decision that wasn’t Horde’s choice.
I’ve made suggestions that take nothing from Alliance. But you (and other Alliance) don’t care because you still feel slighted for the writer’s decision and want Horde players to make it up to you.
This is why you are in a thread about rebuilding the Horde and going off about how “this or that is not good enough because Horde atrocities” or “First placate Alliance THEN build Horde”. You’ve literally only suggested “First Horde need to make up for their atrocities.” Even going so far as to say the Legion is better than the Horde.
Ok? What happens next?
“I haven’t thought that far ahead because I only care about Horde making up to Alliance to the exclusion of all else.”
You have already made up your mind about what is satisfactory to you and I doubt anything anyone suggests will please you. That’s why I’m not writing a hypothetical to try and “make up” to Alliance players. It focuses on the Horde faction and the players who choose to play it and how the faction can still fit into the story despite some Alliance players feeling it shouldn’t exist anymore.
See? Horde needs to take the first steps in a healthy direction. They do that … and it’s not enough.
Of course the story isn’t focusing on Blight ridden territories. The writers are focused on Shadowlands, not Azeroth. They are pushing their story forward regardless of story threads that are left hanging. And how can their be ANY guarantees of non-aggression when the writers seem perfectly happy to use the Horde playable faction as villains? Again, the only way for something like that to happen is to make the Horde subservient to the Alliance or turn the Horde into the Alliance.
It just, I dunno, horde players want the good horde faction that hasn’t been relevant since…well WC 3 and early vanilla wow really. The WC 3 horde is gone. Only one around from that era is Thrall.
Honest question, wouldn’t it be better to try and move on from that nostalgic era than? Because it certainly has only gotten the horde into trouble by looking at their past with rose colored glasses
