There’s no official timeline, but Wowpedia has a rough timeline based on what information does exist.
Current estimation is that we’re 13-14 years out from the beginning of Warcraft III. Most WoW expansions only took up a year of time in story.
I mean, so much of the problem is that this has been going on forever—the Alliance has victimized the Horde just as much as the Horde has victimized the Alliance.
But as many posts have also pointed out, the Alliance’s misdeeds more often than not get handwaved away (see: Greymane attacking Sylvanas in Stormheim, the Battle for Dazar’alor, Turalyon and Alleria torturing people for information, etc.).
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Honesty see it as rule of cool forced retcons. After WC3 everyone involved with Mt. Hyjal didn’t want to have any war against one another at all. Like you said Drek’thar even went as far as to keep that human lumber mill standing to avoid war. Jaina chose to stand against her father to avoid war. Night Elves helped Blood Elves against the common foe of the Scourge despite their historical hatred.
People see WC3 as a temporary tedious truce, that was the forced faction war retcon. One of the plot points of WC3 was to be an anti-war story while having the word War in the title. Make peace with each other, work together or burn together against the Burning Legion.
As stated the only reason NEs joined the Alliance was to prevent Red Kalimdor and Blue Eastern Kingdoms. Which well became the main goal of BfA ironically. It also didn’t matter that much, most of the world pvp was held in STV and Barrens, not even Ashenvale and Southshore didn’t have as big warzones as those two.
After WC3 everyone should have still been good with each other. You can’t just go “Welp it’s only been four years after the mother of all apocalypses, let’s kill each other!” Vanilla did away with most of WC3 messages and did a lot of forced retcons.
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It’s still recent enough that Jaina’s approximately middle-aged (30-ish years old or so?), whereas she was said to be around 16 years old during Reign of Chaos.
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I mean, the Alliance Night Elves option didn’t require burning World Trees - Blizzard just decided that they preferred that over a balanced conflict, evidently because they think player investment doesn’t matter. Other than that though, I don’t have an issue with Alliance Night Elves. Their geopolitical interests, and the Orcs’ geopolitical interests conflict - and large land powers that share a border tend to be adversaries more often than they are friends. I also think that “Red Kalimdor” and “Blue EK” would make for a really boring game, at least from a faction conflict perspective.
That stated of course, it has to be balanced.
I would argue the scale of the victim olympics is in Alliance’s favor.
The one thing that is problematic with the Horde and Alliance in this laughable cycle of violence.
Is Alliance seems to have a motivation to do what they do.
“Jaina why are you trying to make orgrimmar into an aquarium?”
“Because they destroyed my city and took the survivors to be tortured later.”
“Ok well carry on then.”
" And you Sylvanas…? Why did you burn tree?
“EVI- I mean gender reveal”
“…”
What Jaina is doing is not morally correct but at least it makes sense on a human level.
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Pretty much this, in a nutshell.
If you really want to know where the forced faction conflict came from, look at Vanilla. There’s even a long, “behind the scenes” comment from Chris Metzen abut how the other devs hadn’t even finished playing The Frozen Throne at the time, meaning they didn’t even know that the Forsaken and Scourge were separate factions.
And yet even then, Vanilla at least had far less moral posturing than what we’ve recently seen with the whole “Alliance = Good, Horde = Bad” nonsense.
…which is ironic considering that was literally the mindset of the original Alliance of Lordaeron (which was about racist and corrupt as fantasy humans can get).
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Is Jaina’s age stated to be 16 in Reign of Chaos? Arthas: Rise of the Lich King puts her as older than that, as she and Arthas had their relationship, broke up, and then at least three years passed before they met up again to start investigating the Plague.
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Neither would Horde Night Elves, necessarily—it would actually have given the Kaldorei additional protection from that, though there would still have been the threat of blight from the (Alliance-aligned) Forsaken under Sylvanas
Yes, but see, this still automatically assumes that all of the continent would be either “Team Red” or “Team Blue.”
Which, as demonstrated by Neutral/Conflicted zones, isn’t something that is set in stone, and in fact has been used to make the game more interesting even with the factions that we got.
They didn’t even know that the Forsaken and Scourge were separate? Swear those rumors of having the Forsaken part of the Horde so that the Horde would become evil is true.
My solution for all this is to have Turalyon do what he did before he went MIA.
Make an Alliance coalition army again and start punishing the Horde to right the war crime scales.
Introduce new characters that are hateful and take out later.
On the Horde side show them in a valiant underdog level. Allow new names and characters to rise.
Though this time cool it with the mass genocides. Maybe a town or a camp or some POWs.
Restrict the war just to territorial gains and occupation.
Not everyone’s cup of tea but it should be good enough.
And we can throw in some evil Light elements in there with Yrel coming for us.
I’m not a ‘Horde Player’, I just have a Horde Avatar, and could easily switch it to one of Alliance ones if I so chose. And even if I only played Horde I could still never speak for however many thousands-millions who exclusively play Horde, but…
TO NOT BE THE VILLIAN OF MY OWN ####### STORYLINE.
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“Forsaken: Trivia,” WoWpedia:
The Forsaken almost didn’t make the cut as a playable race in World of Warcraft due to the designers’ animation workload and limited resources.
…
At the time, Warcraft III’s storyline hadn’t yet solidified, and Chris Metzen wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the undead. According to Johnathan Staats, a lot of the designers simply wanted to be able to play as an evil, “badass monster”, rather than simply a misunderstood plagued human, but in the end the Forsaken ended up around the center of the spectrum. At the time, the team also referred to the undead as Scourge; since they hadn’t yet played through Warcraft III, they didn’t quite understand that the Scourge and Forsaken were separate factions.
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According to Blizzard Sylvanas is the Villain.
Not the Horde.
And let the old leaders finally respond to the horde’s atrocities with consistent feelings and not keep whitewashing everything, such as MOp-Jaina now turned back into Pre-Mop-Jaina.
A continued vengeful Jaina would have been a better fit, for example.
Horde needs new characters.
Best way to do that is introduce new ones that can duke it out with Alliance big names.
Maybe Calia, and have her do something that really solidifies her as a forsaken.
Like idk maybe she takes on Jaina and needs to be raised again as a forsaken.
This in itself is a contradictory argument.
Yes, it needs it, but you want to create new alliance characters because you talked about Turalyon before, or did I misunderstand the context?
Regarding your statement about the Kaldorei being given additional protection. I’m going to just remind you that Blizzard chose to show one playable faction that should be balanced with the other playable faction in a competitive environment where everyone is motivated to play completely bowling over the other - an event that required the first faction to rampage across the northern third of the continent in a patch, which was regarded as possible because the Alliance somehow believed that said faction would march south through the other two thirds of the continent over a route that requires them to - among other things - lower an obscene number of siege weapons one at a time with the elevator connecting the barrens and thousand needles - then use them as boats I guess to get through the thousand needles into Tanaris so that they could roll them down into a humid, road-free primordial jungle filled with giant hostile dinosaurs. This scenario also required those catapults to outrange shipborne cannons, and frankly, modern artillery pieces.
There is no set of prior events, prior lore, or “protection” that can account for the negative-plot-armor that the Night Elves seem to have. They wanted to burn that tree - they cleared everything away to make that happen. So let’s set aside the idea that other developments would have prevented this. Nothing can protect you from a biased, irresponsible writer.
Your second point is fine though.
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Well these new characters would take on new Alliance Garothos’ and as Horde players watch their growth eventually they face the big names.
You cant just throw a nobody against Tyrande or Jaina.
Neither side of the audiences would like something so fast paced.