I have to admit that I’m somewhat skeptical of this argument - because if I were to open a thread today about how the Night Elves should torch Orgrimmar, I know that I wouldn’t receive a wave of Horde posters saying “fine by me”. That instead tends to emerge as a straw-man attack against proposals for the Alliance to more meaningfully hit back, which reveals a fear of that and an impression that such wouldn’t be acceptable.
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Ehh, there’s a difference between “This is fine” and “I deserve this.” Horde posters might not be happy with the idea of the Night Elves burning Orgrimmar, but it would be hard to argue that Orgrimmar doesn’t on some level deserve it at this point in the story. The writers really went out of their way to give us no leg to stand on in BfA.
There’s also the point that some of us have gameplay attachment to the Orgrimmar orphanage specifically because we’ve visited there during Children’s Week. I’m still not convinced that you can generate that level of attachment to brand-new NPCs.
As I said in the other thread, I think your proposal would have worked just fine in MoP, or even Legion. (Which makes some sense, since isn’t that about the last time you were an active player?) I’m just not convinced that it works now.
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This is where I concede that it does get tricky. I disagree that it would be impossible, because attachments to characters like Zehkan were generated almost literally overnight - and were done far closer to us learning about the Burning of Teldrassil, and who was responsible for it.
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In the case of Zekhan, though, the attachment took the form of “Hey, that troll shaman looks really cool!” What you’re looking to generate is “I will ride forth and fight Night Elves to defend that troll shaman,” which requires different techniques and faces different barriers.
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I guess I don’t completely agree. The way I see it, people have to like the character, and the attack on the character has to be viewed as something outrageous and unsympathetic. Again, it’s a difficult problem - but I do want to note again that I really didn’t get meaningful feedback towards my approach to doing it. The closest I got was that it simply wouldn’t do it - at which point I need to probe to figure out why and what would.
I do believe that there is a line somewhere. Mapping it out is the difficult part.
Made the thread
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Keep the barbarian then, just ditch the edgelord. Or at the very least, ditch the “conquer azeroth because make my ancestors proud” ideals. They’re outdated and little by little I think even orcs are beginning to realize this.
I don’t really give a crap what they do as long as the next big villain who starts the next faction war isn’t from the Horde.
This is assuming Blizzard even does a faction war ever again, which they shouldn’t, because they’re really terrible at it.
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This thread is pretty great. Lopsided proposals to fix something in a satisfying way, and the end result is the Horde posters actually vacating in a fit of weak emotional distress to create an echo chamber.
Isn’t the reaction ‘weird’? Isn’t it funny how it’s always the same moving of goal posts, and crying? The mentality of ‘only I matter’.
Like it or not Gantrithor, your faction, but not it’s players, will be part of the solution to fix the Alliance’s woes, since it was the one that created them. One way or another. Not it’s players, but the faction.
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Their topic in the other thread I’m sure will be ‘how satisfying could we ask for the Alliance to be villain batter, without actually touching the Horde’. As if they even want growth for their faction. It’s weird. When I play Horde characters, I don’t feel as hopeless and useless as other people.
It is at least funny to read.
Topic 1:
How can I make the Alliance racist
Consequence:
They would whine about how imperalistically racist the alliance is.
That would be the result of it 
It’s hard to read, and a lot less funny when you’ve wasted your time trying to be reasonable with almost all of them individually. But, they do seem to not have a good grasp on who is the problem, which is funny. Somebody que up the trombone.
Last I checked, they were crowing about hypothetical “holier than thou” alliance players and trivializing Night Elf concerns - I think the last time that anyone with a blue background had even posted was around 30 posts prior, they weren’t even quoting anyone, this just spun out of the ether.
So we have demonstration again that for them, this tiny cabal of forum regulars, the primary goal isn’t fixing the Horde. It’s about hating on the Alliance and its players. That’s perfectly understandable, we have a faction rivalry after all, but it’s not a good game design mindset.
Regarding the desire to make the Alliance racist, there’s a hint of a point there. The situation that Warcraft 3 left us with did allow for a sort of anticolonialist critique to form up the core of the Horde, and it made the Alliance more interesting. Human moral superiority HAS made the game worse, and they’re not wrong to want a villainous trait in people who the game tells them to oppose. It just, again, for these people isn’t about making a satisfying experience for everyone - it’s about dunking on Alliance players.
It wasn’t racism, it was hatred, racism is a hatred because of strangeness, the Alliance hated the orcs because of what they did.
Garithos was the only real racist in the game, Daelin was not a racist, he was someone who hated all orcs, you can say rightly, wrongly, but it was not simply because they were orcs, it was because they did what they did.
I have nothing against hatred, even nothing against racism per se in a game, but if you want the other faction to be racist, only to be able to point at them of their “Racism”, than this will lead to more frustration on both sides.
I mean, because of the way the factions are set up, there isn’t a dividing line between hatred and racism in this case. We’re dealing with wars between ethnostates at the end of the day.
I think the racism trope came as a way for the toxic element in the Horde playerbase to accuse the actual Alliance players of. The Orcs weren’t taken to sword, because of their appearance. This fits more along the Forsaken’s issues with the world at large, but they quickly lost their claim to a reasonable response with gross over reaction.
If they want the Horde to enjoy isolation, and stories about building huts, knock more power to them. But, I don’t see why any Alliance character should be sacrificed, when the characters are robbed of being able to ever respond, even to fail, as long as it grows into something else. Instead, it’s a gross overreaction every time that they’re mainly upset about, because the character they’re made to reason with has unrealistic designs for an unrealistic outcome.
It always seemed to me that when you started playing World of Warcraft it didn’t take long for the differences between the factions to be obvious. Even aesthetically they were obvious, and questing to level 20 pretty much anywhere would solidify what both factions are about in terms of moral conduct.
So it’s weird that the Horde’s playerbase has, in my opinion, continued to grapple with what they were presented when they initially picked red team, the faction of uglies, zombies, and barbarians. I initially picked red team, decided it wasn’t for me, and switched to blue team instead of embarking on a Sisyphean task spanning decades to convince everyone that the screaming barbarian faction I picked should behave less like screaming barbarians. If you had told me in TBC that the Horde would end up being the antagonistic belligerent in a faction war a few expansions down the line, my response would be “Duh?”
(I of course picked a different Sisyphean task. Horde out of Lordaeron now, give it back to the Alliance.)
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From what little I remember of my early leveling experience, the things that stuck out the most to me were the quests where Thrall wanted my character to help root out lingering Burning Legion influence with the Neeru Fireblade quest, some basic fetch quest stuff meant to help keep the Crossroads supplied as a frontier settlement, one quest in the Badlands where you have to kill a couple of evil black dragons in a small redemptive effort from the old horde allying with them, and that BRD quest to save Magni’s daughter in an attempt to help broker peace with the alliance. Obviously that was never going to happen, but I liked the idea behind it.
I suppose it didn’t hurt that I started the game during the Lunar Festival so I was also getting those recycled “respect your elder” talk-to-me-and-you’re-done quests.
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Crossroads, centaur, the wailing caverns. Scratching out something to be proud of, and dignity that there were people out there of the same like, and situation.
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