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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Easiest way to redeem the Horde is simple lets just retcon Night elves out of existence.
Can’t complain about a racial genocide if the race doesn’t exist and night elf players can’t complain if they don’t exist either.
The Horde are complaining about characterization as far back as like Wrath and TBC. Maybe if you retconned Night Elves coming through the Dark Portal instead of the Orcs they might feel redeemed.
Past characterizations don’t go away, and you certainly feel their effects years on. For a case in point on this, consider TBC and the Blood Elves.
Maybe I’m missing what you’re referencing in particular. But, personally I don’t see anything wrong with the characterization. It’s a lot of what makes the Blood Elves themselves, is the initial introduction the problem?
Well, there are a couple of things that I’ve noticed in conversations over the years.
First - consider how Blood Elves were presented at the beginning versus the end. In the beginning, the Blood Elves are presented with a clear problem. Without the sunwell, they have lost a reliable connection to a source of arcane magic, and the questing is quite clear what happens when they don’t have it - they turn into the wretched and eventually die. They come up with a solution - siphon fel magic or arcane magic from whatever sources that are available - but fel magic is what’s available. This establishes a thematic conflict between them and the Alliance, and helps to set up the sort of aristocratic edge that Blood Elves brought to the Horde. It was a pretty cool departure from the standard elf trope, and it put them in opposition to the Alliance’s themes - be it with the Night Elves and their concern over reliance on such power sources, or the draenei and their alabaster-white presentation.
Come the end of the expansion though, Velen is solving their issue by purifying the Sunwell. The core issue, the thing that gave them their initial edge, is gone.
Now, I will say that the Blood Elves appear to have enjoyed a sort of benign neglect, and the benefits of having nowhere to go but up after tragedies that happened before they could be a playable race, but I think that the decision to do this seriously sanded down what they were and could have been - and this is not to say that they couldn’t have portrayed individual blood elves turning to the light or something - it’s that they removed the focus of their central thematic conflict with the Alliance.
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While I do agree with that, doesn’t it seem like it’s so far gone it makes little sense to be treating it like an ‘everyone should be concerned’ type of issue?
It’s motivating, and a fun type of idea for the Blood Elves to be desperate for magic, but as a player I know that they will be perfectly fine one way or the other, I never thought Blizzard would let the playable race not be playable.
But, as you’re saying. When it’s solved by the end of the expac it kind of sucks they’re robbed of the characterization, but there should be other things for presentation instead of the problem that was solved.
While I do agree with that, doesn’t it seem like it’s so far gone it makes little sense to be treating it like an ‘everyone should be concerned’ type of issue?
My problem with this is that it feeds into a negotiation tactic. Blizzard does something completely outrageous and beyond the pale. Then they walk it back slightly to show that “they’re listening to feedback”, but they still moved incrementally in the direction that they wanted to go in. Then a few years later after people have gotten used to it, they do something similarly outrageous along the same lines and repeat the move. They know that their counterparties do not want this move, but they are pushing it anyway. It’s a textbook negotiating tactic - they taught it to me in Business School.
This happened with the Night Elves and the functional loss of their prowess and civilization.
This happened with the High King.
This happened with Horde villainization
and yes, this happened with Blood Elf characterization.
Yesterday’s outrage becomes today’s status quo, and people don’t push back on what’s happening because it’s tiring to keep up the fight for several years. So instead they accept it, thus validating the tactic. I am aware of this tactic, and accordingly, I do not treat those past events as having lapsed some statute of limitations. Nor do I move my goalposts to anchor to the status quo.
If you’re still upset about it, that doesn’t mean I have to be though. It also doesn’t mean that there should be condolences given to make everyone’s share diminished either.
I was replying to someone saying that retconning Elves would solve the Horde’s crying about redemption. It’s pretty ridiculous to think that would actually be happening in an iteration just to see another fit put down.
If it’s already happened, then the story needs to progress, I totally get that not everyone will like everything involved with the story, but if your preference hinges everything with the story beyond the preference too… personally the only thing I could say is a lot of what you’ve said already. There’s no reason to react in a way where you want someone else’s hinging factor be torn down.
It’s not a question of being upset - it’s a question of not accepting bad and damaging moves. If someone in a negotiation is trying to push me in a direction that I don’t want to go, then I won’t let them. That’s the only way to reply to the tactic.
Something doesn’t make sense with that. Just in this conversations context, for me. I agree with what you’re saying, so I couldn’t begin to explain to you why Horde ‘players’ are expecting, and lashing out over the notion Alliance players don’t want a phoney, dialed in conflict for their benefit?