How can we redeem/rebuild the Horde?

[Droité-black-dragonflight]

And as a note, and sorry OP, but looking at the Horde responses here … the number one emotion is … Apathy. None of us actually believe it is possible to “redeem” our “rebuild” or Faction. Even if there were a path towards it, a decade of miserable neglect by Blizz all but proves they’d never invest in such a story. And in the 1 in a million chance they did, every single Horde player realizes that so long as the Alliance remains these untouchable pure things … all of that progress will be undone for the Horde the moment Blizz wants to re inflame the faction conflict. Because if the Alliance CAN’T, the Horde HAS TO.

BfA has likely damaged the Horde Faction Identity beyond repair. To turn us into a vehicle and plot-device to settup the story for a future villain and future expansion AGAIN, with little consideration to what happens to us after. Several of our core Racial Fantasies have been left in shambles. And our Rep roster (which we absolutely need to find any relevance in this Hero centric game) have been rendered a delapitated mass of underused, underdeveloped, and frankly underpowered B-Rankers at best. And to make matters worse, Blizz clearly knew enough about what the Horde was supposed to represent to invest a ton of money in those fancy Saurfang cinematics. Its just, absolutely none of those themes were allowed to count until it was convenient for Sylvie’s story for them to count. All the way in 8.2.5.

[Gantrithor-myzrael]

@Merìngue-whisperwind

Why not have the Horde get out of the muck?

The muck (teldrassil, for example) doesn’t go away.

Again

@Gantrithor-myzrael

The Horde can do all the redeeming you can think of involving lost souls, orphans, puppies or whatever. But at the end of the day the Alliance will still maintain the moral superiority because of the actions the Horde has already taken. They will always be beneath the Alliance when it comes to morality.

@Kyalin-cenarion-circle

that shouldn’t stop us from looking for something that will get the situation to improve.

In this thread and others you have Alliance characters vehemently insisting that Horde must bring itself up (redemption, atonement, whatever). Just as readily, they refuse to see the Aliiance’s moral pedestal as a problem. They conflate adding grey to the Alliance as having them commit genocide (bringing the Alliance into the muck with the Horde).

But none of the Alliance posters can suggest something that:

1. Doesn’t make the Horde subservient to Alliance
2. Doesn’t turn the Horde into the Alliance
3. Brings the Horde to the same level of moral standing as the Alliance

All the suggestions are a vacuous “better yourselves” or “show some honor” and none of them address the fact that the Alliance has and will always maintain the moral superiority.

[Zuleika-hyjal (Zuleika)]

An awful lot of the blue-avatar posts in this thread are reading like “How can I still feel superior to the Horde while making its players just happy enough that I don’t have to feel guilty about it?”

[Gantrithor-myzrael]

@Merìngue-whisperwind

Especially in WoD,

You mean the expansion that proved Orcs don’t need Demon blood to go on genocidal rampages? Oh yeah. So much Alliance grey…

@Merìngue-whisperwind

Or how about Taren Zhu who makes. In fact all of Pandaria paints the Alliance as just as bad as the Horde,

That’s why both factions had civil wars and their leaders removed, right?

Oh wait. That only happened to one side and that side required the aid of the morally upright side to succeed.

@Merìngue-whisperwind

And there are legit bad things the Alliance has done.

Things that weren’t retroactively given justification? Go ahead name them.

[Karserd-ragnaros (Karserd)]

@Droité-black-dragonflight

BfA has likely damaged the Horde Faction Identity beyond repair.

Are you feeling that faction pride now droite? remember bfa was an expansion where you could feel pride for your faction.

[Droité-black-dragonflight]

@Karserd-ragnaros

Are you feeling that faction pride now droite? remember bfa was an expansion where you could feel pride for your faction.

Dude, I haven’t been allowed to feel Faction Pride since WotLK. That crap has been a myth for ages.

• Villain batted in Cata and MoP (when Varian’s declairing war on the Horde vanished, and the Horde was allowed no valid reason to attack the Alliance).
• Hard retcons of Orcish history to make them always the baddies in WoD (unless you read Hellscream, then all but Grom himself were baddies by default. He was just the hapless Ner’zhul to Garrosh’s KJ).
• Absolutely irrelevant in Legion. We Horde didn’t even get to enjoy the high of getting to beat the Legin before BfA. Outside of Vol’jin dying by trash mob to force Sylvie into the drivers seat for Villain Batting.
• Then we got into BfA, where we’re villain batted again … but far worse this time … while given even less reason for our actions. All while we are told how horrible we are for what Blizz did with our Faction.
• Then in SLs we have plenty more Blizz shaming us for being Horde.

Its … astonishing.

[Ariël-drakkari (Ariël)]

@Morghel-daggerspine

Since you are so vehemently against this, what would you have instead, in the wake of bfa? What would you have the Horde do to atone for their actions? Or what would you have the Alliance do to make a bit more morally grey? Have the Alliance go on a vengeful rampage against the Horde, and try to portray that as unjustified? Good luck. I’m simply extremely unconvinced that what you want can be achieved in the way you want it to be achieved.

Agree, bolded is literally IMPOSSIBLE to achieve thanks to the fiasco writting for Horde in BfA.

The best chance the Horde has to “improve” is to separate from Alliance and moral comparisons to it for good, period.

Indeed as the poster of the most voted post said.

@Zarrín-zuljin

My point isn’t that the Alliance needs to simply move down to committing genocide. I’ve never said that. I’ve said that the Horde needs to be improved within the narrative, but unless the Alliance is no longer “always right” then the Horde will always be forced into a cycle of atonement to make up for being “less right.”

Please, louder for the people in the back.

@Droité-black-dragonflight

And, as we’ve seen since Cata, Blizz cares less and less about giving reasons for that Horde antagonism; let alone validating them. Because to have valid reasons would require that the Alliance do something antagonistic. And because the Alliance are kept these “Flawless Paragons of every virtue ever conceived by man” … they can’t even do that. Because being “antagonistic” isn’t a virtue. That’s a no-no. They’re pure!

Still too early to get back likes, but rest assured I liked this post.

Also how dare you make me remember that awesome scene with John David Washington screaming “she´s PURE Walter” in the phone while Adam Driver & Co. look with a WTF expression on their faces in BlacKkKlansman.

[Baalsamael-turalyon (Baalsamael)]

@Droité-black-dragonflight

Villain batted in Cata and MoP (when Varian’s declairing war on the Horde vanished, and the Horde was allowed no valid reason to attack the Alliance).

And don’t forget Green Jesus Arc where they tried to Anduin-fy Thrall.

I’m almost inclined to think the post Cata trajectory for the Horde is Metzen & Friends taking revenge for daring to condemn his Green Jesus Arc and The Comic Book Guardian Mary Sue Triracial Character That Shall Not Be Named™.

[Dornheim-wyrmrest-accord]

How about this scenario? Turalyon and Tyrande break the peace after SL. Using the Army of the Light as the backbone of the depleted Alliance armies, they invade and CAPTURE Thunder Bluff and Orgrimmar. The guard NPCs are replaced with Army of the Light crusaders.

More than that, stations are created outside Orgrimmar and TB to convert Horde citizens to the Light. They are told they can either convert now or be shipped to a new system of Alliance internment camps until they find the Light. Some of those camps are in Ashenvale and Gilneas, rebuilding damage. Some are in the Searing Gorge run by Dark Iron slavers.

It is the Horde player’s objective to free their people and liberate their cities. Alliance players have to remove Turalyon and restore Anduin to the throne of Stormwind.

Does this satisfy your criteria?

[Morghel-daggerspine]

@Dornheim-wyrmrest-accord

How about this scenario? Turalyon and Tyrande break the peace after SL. Using the Army of the Light as the backbone of the depleted Alliance armies, they invade and CAPTURE Thunder Bluff and Orgrimmar. The guard NPCs are replaced with Army of the Light crusaders.

More than that, stations are created outside Orgrimmar and TB to convert Horde citizens to the Light. They are told they can either convert now or be shipped to a new system of Alliance internment camps until they find the Light. Some of those camps are in Ashenvale and Gilneas, rebuilding damage. Some are in the Searing Gorge run by Dark Iron slavers.

And now do the hard part of convincing me, and everybody else that the Horde doesn’t deserve it. You basically take the people who did all of these terrible things, or supported it, and make them work for those they hurt.

@Dornheim-wyrmrest-accord

It is the Horde player’s objective to free their people and liberate their cities.

Not very heroic freeing war criminals but whatever.

@Dornheim-wyrmrest-accord

Alliance players have to remove Turalyon and restore Anduin to the throne of Stormwind.

Why? He actually tries to, in this scenario, make the Horde as a whole answer for their crimes, not even through blood but through labor. Why would an Alliance character, who were part of bfa canonically, lift a finger against him?

[Gantrithor-myzrael]

@Dornheim-wyrmrest-accord

Turalyon and Tyrande break the peace after SL.

You mean the peace that Tyrande never signed on to?

@Dornheim-wyrmrest-accord

It is the Horde player’s objective to free their people and liberate their cities

I’m sure Horde will be itching to seige Orgrimmar for 3rd time…

@Dornheim-wyrmrest-accord

restore Anduin to the throne of Stormwind.

Your scenario didn’t indicate that Anduin was removed. Turalyon uses the Army of the Light, not the armies of Stormwind.

@Dornheim-wyrmrest-accord

Does this satisfy your criteria?

How does this bring the Horde up to the same level of morality as the Alliance?

[Droité-black-dragonflight]

I would be more prone to Turalyon breaking the peace DURING SLs. However, as it was explained, the Alliance in their current post-BfA state does not have the power to wipe out the Horde without immense cost. So, I would suggest the introduction of a 3rd party (one the Alliance at least has no reason to be wary of) to shift the balance of power in the Alliance’s favor … and offset those costs preventing continuation of the conflict. Yrel and the Lightbound.

The Lightbound come as friends and give the Alliance the edge they need to act on their aggression. They then have the ability to then overwhelm the Horde and forcibly convert people to the Light. No internment camps needed. By the time we and the Doves get back, the Horde is near the breaking point, but the Alliance’s new Ally is getting really suss. With the Alliance having been used as a tool to simultaneously shepherd in the Light Cosmology invasion, the Crystalization of Azeroth, and the Lightbound bolstering their own ranks considerably with Converts (forced or otherwise) from both factions.

[Gantrithor-myzrael]

For the record, I’m not for throwing the villain bat at Alliance characters in a similar fashion as what Blizzard did to the Horde. That’s just bringing the players down.

[Dornheim-wyrmrest-accord]

Well, you asked for blue posters to come up with expansion situations that marred the Alliance moral high ground. Using known lore, I just spit balled a scenario where the Alliance are hostile, intolerant, and attempt cultural genocide against shamanic belief through conversion and forced labor. It also gives the Horde a chance to be heroic underdogs, to build a resistance and overthrow oppressors. But that’s just my idea to try to villainize the Alliance and make the Horde feel heroic again.

[Ariël-drakkari (Ariël)]

@Gantrithor-myzrael

In this thread and others you have Alliance characters vehemently insisting that Horde must bring itself up (redemption, atonement, whatever). Just as readily, they refuse to see the Aliiance’s moral pedestal as a problem. They conflate adding grey to the Alliance as having them commit genocide (bringing the Alliance into the muck with the Horde).

But none of the Alliance posters can suggest something that:

1. Doesn’t make the Horde subservient to Alliance
2. Doesn’t turn the Horde into the Alliance
3. Brings the Horde to the same level of moral standing as the Alliance

All the suggestions are a vacuous “better yourselves” or “show some honor” and none of them address the fact that the Alliance has and will always maintain the moral superiority.

Worse of all, the people making the suggestions don´t even realize their proposals are nothing but efforts geared (conciously or not) into transforming the Horde in the Alliance clone one way or another; regardless of the desires and expectations of the players actually invested in the Horde, it´s narratives and what the Horde originally standed for / was sold as for the players.

Reason why your first post of the thread is so concise, beautiful and well structured.

@Droité-black-dragonflight

Dude, I haven’t been allowed to feel Faction Pride since WotLK.

Actually, since TBC. The Blood elf narrative post intro is basically them being too stupid to figure out Kael´thas became a willing minion of WoW´s satan until they got literally kicked in the face. Oh, and as usual Alliance “heroes” had to save those poor Belf Hordies from themselves, SO much for “faction/racial” pride.

@Baalsamael-turalyon

And don’t forget Green Jesus Arc where they tried to Anduin-fy Thrall.

I’m almost inclined to think the post Cata trajectory for the Horde is Metzen & Friends taking revenge for daring to condemn his Green Jesus Arc and The Comic Book Guardian Mary Sue Triracial Character That Shall Not Be Named™.

Joke is on them, casue barebones as it is, Horde is STILL more organic and relatable than inhuman unflawed paragon Alliance (A.K.A. Anduin & Friends).

@Dornheim-wyrmrest-accord

Well, you asked for blue posters to come up with expansion situations that marred the Alliance moral high ground. Using known lore, I just spit balled a scenario where the Alliance are hostile, intolerant, and attempt cultural genocide against shamanic belief through conversion and forced labor. It also gives the Horde a chance to be heroic underdogs, to build a resistance and overthrow oppressors. But that’s just my idea to try to villainize the Alliance and make the Horde feel heroic again.

Don´t waste your time, BfA literally made this impossible unless one retconns HUGE portions of it (all of it basically).

Unfortunately for Horde players, we can only regain “faction pride” as long as we stop writting the story based upon moral comparisons -and lecturing- between both factions. Horde HAS TO regain their own independent path from the Alliance and focus in rebuilding ABSOLUTELY divorced from it.

[Pellex-hyjal (Pellex)]

So I’ll take a stab at something the Alliance could do to make it seem more “morally grey.”

As mentioned many times on this thread, anything the Alliance does to the Horde by this point will be cheered on by a significant portion of the Alliance playerbase. So here’s my solution to something that the Alliance players should also be able to agree is bad.

Make the Alliance leadership* do something that hurts innocents in the Alliance.

And make sure the Horde sees it.

There actually was quite a bit of Alliance-on-Alliance nastiness back in the earlier days of WoW. The grievances of the Defias Brotherhood, the dire situation of Westfall, the noble squabbling encouraged by Onyxia, the corruption of Archbishop Benedictus … I’m sure there’s more. But it was all internal to the Alliance, so when facing up against the Horde, they could pretend that it didn’t exist. (Yeah, the Horde was in on the Benedictus thing, but he was a literal “Who?” to us.) By contrast, the Horde has always been completely unable to hide its own problems.

If some Alliance village gets the negative consequences of the actions of some Alliance leader–we can come up with the specifics later–then it’s not a case of bad people getting what they deserve, and it’s not done in response to the past actions of the Horde.

And it’s absolutely imperative that Horde players see this event, or else it won’t stick. Bonus points if the Horde PC can somehow help the victims or even recruit them as a friendly allied group, perhaps creating a Horde-only flight point at whatever refugee camp they set up.

*If necessary, create a new character for this purpose. But if you do that, make sure that character sticks around and isn’t immediately killed off.

[Sarm-malganis (Sarm)]

There’s a game called Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together that actually pulls something like this. The premise of your mission (which you’re not entirely told about) is that you have to go to a slave labor camp of your people and try to convince them to rise up and join your rebellion in order to liberate your homeland. It doesn’t work. The slaves are tired of war and already suffering from the loss of loved ones and would rather have a miserable chattel-like peace than continue to fight when they no longer have any fight left in them.

The back-up plan is that you dress up as enemy soldiers and butcher the entire colony yourself, pinning it on your enemies, galvanizing the rest of your people against the "new low" the occupying country has reached, and demoralizing and fracturing the less-hardline of the enemy forces. The game gives you a choice to go along with this too, and THE CANON ANSWER IS TO DO IT.

This is probably the last thing that WoW needs but it wouldn’t be without precedent.

[Pellex-hyjal (Pellex)]

To be clear, if that’s a response to my post, I’m not suggesting that the Alliance has to go quite that far. Crimes of neglect will do just as well.

[Kyalin-cenarion-circle (Kyalin)]

Hello Droite,

I appreciate apathy as a feeling because I often feel apathetic myself about the prospects of improvement, albeit from a different perspective. I’ve discussed those feelings before, so I need not elaborate. What I will elaborate on is that I understand that it’s easy to react with that kind of apathy. It’s easy, its comfortable, and its somewhat validating when someone says “wow, it really is that bad. There really is no way out of this.”

Let’s just say that I agree with the first part but not the second, not because it’s not really freaking awful, but because I think the second part is unhelpful and probably untrue. We do have to pitch solutions that require that the writers do things that they don’t like to do, and/or are fired. But I wouldn’t use their past proclivities as an invisible wall to declare that things can’t be fixed.

Some of the other objections include the standard workhorse that if the Alliance strikes back in a manner that it can justify, then that means the inherent evil of the action would be missed. To that, I want to point at what Maffu said in post 318.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/how-can-we-redeemrebuild-the-horde/837820/318

Once again, we’re back to showing and not telling. We’re back to shoving things in transmedia narrative. We’re back to Blizzard thinking that if they tell us something, or make it live in a lonely snippet of quest text, or worse - tweet about it - then it means that they have presented it to the audience in a believable way. Clearly that’s not the case.

So let’s take that “justified” Alliance retribution. Let’s presume that a group of sentinels lead a bunch of reprisal raids in the Barrens, killing lots of civilians. On paper, I can see some people saying “that’s justified”, but I would also humbly submit what questing can look like on the other side of that - something to personalize and make-relatable the characters who we would ask to put a stop to that. So, I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, and whether the proposal therein does that.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/wanting-to-be-hated/838095/716

There is one last point that I want to consider.

There has been some lamentation that nothing will ever fix the problem in one stroke. This has been mixed with lamentations that there is nothing that will get the Alliance to not feel justified - and to this I do agree, at least in the short term. I also think that’s not a problem we should try to fix. Assuming that you’re going to fix a problem that took ten years to manifest in less than one is setting yourself up for failure, and as several have already pointed out - and this is a point that I agree with them on - it is not required that the Horde is “redeemed” in the eyes of Alliance players.

What matters is whether we can get towards a point where it is redeemed in the eyes of Horde players.

(Also, I’m trying to summarize and pull points as I see them - do let me know if when I do that, you think I’m missing something critical. This is still mostly a listening session for me.)

[Ariël-drakkari (Ariël)]

@Pellex-hyjal

Make the Alliance leadership* do something that hurts innocents in the Alliance.

And make sure the Horde sees it.

Sooo… let´s go back to WC3 writting? Cause this *as some posters -some blue background ones even, and you guys rock for actually figuring it out- already mentioned at the start of the thread is basically what happened in WC3; in which “Horde” (Thrall) got to witness the ugly side (Blackmoore & Croonies) of the “Alliance” and their crimes even against their own defenseless citizens (Taretha -btw the only human character I like and respect from this franchise-). And were even capable “Alliance” (Kael´thas) got kicked down and minstreated by their own leaders (Garithos) to the point they had to aknowledge the political faction was NO pinacle of righteousness -and were ironically so, they ended up leaving the Alliance and becoming allies with the “Horde” (Thrall) thanks to this realization.