The issue with Alliance taking Lordaeron and holding it is you just GAVE the Alliance a Horde city while giving the Horde the middle-finger. You now have a separate problem all together.
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Welcome to being on the otherside of that little feature.
The Alliance have had ample experience with the Horde blowing up a city or taking a city over the years.
When the war is over the Horde gets their city back while NEs literally saw theirs burn to a crisp.
And people say NEs will never be satisfied. 
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The âOther sideâ of that feature should come with villain batting (and eventual death of) your characters and bonking you on the head with shame at every possible turn for being a jerk along with the participation in morally wrong actions you get no say in.
I canât help but notice you left that part intact for the Horde-side as you didnât change Sylvanasâs story nor our War Campaign.
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I hadnât read that thread, but it wouldnât really surprise me if there was some truth to that.
I say that partly because I believe (with no evidence to back this up) that these stories have plans and those plans do change. After the plan has started to take shape, theyâve attested to creating specific NPC/character models, etc. Content is being produced. Some of that content takes a lot of dedicated resources (and putting out that big trailer is very important for generating hype).
Usually theyâll have storyboarded most of the key parts of the story and where there are some moments that are undecided, designers will hedge as best they can so it can adapt or work with whatever changes. Sometimes something that they didnât expect to have to change, ends up changing, and itâs too late/too much to adjust everything.
A lot of this Iâm taking from other types of programming and throwing in some (I hope reasonable) guesses at the process.
//I also noticed someone said something similar to my NâZoth comments earlier. Come on Blizzard, pull the other rip cord. Sargerasâ sword freed NâZoth. The entire expansion was NâZoth messing with our heads. The little Diamond Horror wasnât Magni speaking for Azeroth, it WAS Azeroth, reaching into our minds to help us figure out a way - inside of the warped and twisted world that NâZoth had painted for us - to fight back the corruption.
Azeroth helped us gather her blood to break through into the actual realm of Nyâalotha and then once inside to destroy NâZoth. Azeroth helped us utilize the Titan facilities and reach out to Wrathion to develop a means of fighting against the madness, even if only for moments at a time.
Every skirmish between Horde and Alliance forces was actually between one faction and the forces of NâZoth, but our minds perceived them as the opposition. The Horde never burned Teldrassil, it was NâZothâs forces. NâZoth thought he had corrupted Sylvanas, but Sylvanas was only working with NâZoth to further her goals with the Jailer - so sheâs still evil.
Or let us have an entire next expansion where Chromie takes us back in time each patch to different places in the timeline (only on Azeroth though, for⌠reasons) where our dungeons and raids consist of trying to stop some event that leads to evil and then weâre forced to live through the terrible outcomes from it until the next patch. We could visit try to stop Lady Azshara, stop the creation of the Scourge, stop ⌠pick a disaster, Azeroth historically is one of the worst places to be - both for the inhabitants and any villains who try to mess with the murder hobos living there.
In the final patch, Chromie takes us to the time of ⌠I donât care ⌠and we make a single change that somehow prevents where we ended up, with most of time remaining the same, but with a brighter future. Then there can also be some minor oddities that we didnât expect. Like maybe Neltharion was never corrupted. And it was Velen who joined the Burning Legion instead of Kilâjaeden.
Please? Anything? Something?
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The larping from Alliance players is laughable in this place. Honestly this is another proof how Blizzard is out of touch with their own players. Alliance wants to be like the Dogs of War in warhammer, why not let them have it?
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Oh, Iâm happy to re-quote myself where I literally explained exactly what happened here. People may have forgotten it, considering it was all the way back on Post 31:
I think it speaks for itself, yes?
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Classic blizzard shooting themselves in the foot again. Why is this not surprising?
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Well what I suggested specifically made it so when Sylvanas burns down Teldrassil she would not be villanized.
The poster objected solely on the loss of a city as being a middle finger and so I responded.
What you are doing now is called moving the goal post.
And even if I were to address your point.
Worgens lost their city to Sylvanas and Forsaken and she was very much accepted as âgoodâ until the events of BFA.
Garrosh was really villanized not because of Theramore but because he turned on the Horde and went crazy with old god magic.
Eventually he was killed off by Thrall. The OG of Horde.
The Alliance had very little to do with his death even though they were his primary victims.
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I think itâs fixable. Just make it so the Alliance doesnât actually occupy Lordaeron, for reasons.
You almost had me with your alternate scenario, but a Horde leader being made into the two-faction villain AGAIN is one of my biggest sticking points with BfA, so I canât go along with that.
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Iâm really not. Did Sylvanas burn the tree, yes or no? If yes, she is a villain. Is she still in league with the Jailer, yes or no? If yes, she is a villain. Is the Horde still commiting other atrocities to rack up the death count such as Brennadam and our War Campaign, yes or no? If yes, the Horde is a villain. Does the Horde still fracture and have a civil war, yes or no? If yes, many of the Hordeâs issues still stand.
This post is about rebuilding/redeeming the Horde, yet you just only advocated for something that fixes an Alliance-side issue but left EVERYTHING else as is.
Why not?
The Horde has destroyed many Alliance cities or outright conquered them in various questlines.
So there is precedent.
In my idea Lordaeron is still intact meanwhile Alliance loses 3 entire zones and their entire starting zone becomes a smoking husk.
Except for the mass genocide Alliance very much comes out the loser in this equation. Their sole win is Lordaeron that they would never be able to realistically hold due to game reasons.
Because at the beginning of BfA, the Horde and Alliance had equal numbers of capital cities. If youâre counting non-capital cities, the Alliance had (and still has) many more.
But there wouldnât be any faction-on-faction genocide in this new version.
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Woah easy there fella.
This isnât my only post on this specific thread. Scroll up and you will see what I originally proposed to fix things going forward with everything in BFA remaining unchanged.
Thats what the discussion is about. How to redeem the Horde with everything that has happened.
The current discussion was only about how the beginning of the expansion could have made things a little better.
I would take Sylvanas burning an EMPTY Teldrassil in a fit of rage rather than cartoonish villainy any day.
Also all your protestations can be fixed by better framing.
For example why did Sylvanas join the jailor? Well after losing her home and getting even more disillusioned she made a deal with the jailor to change the afterlife after seeing how useless these petty mortal wars are.
This is just me coming up with ideas right off the top of my head but I still think they are far more better than âlet me kill a lot of people for⌠reasons!â
I mean honestly this whole BFA thing to cause as much as dead possible is so stupid. You got the entire universeâs dead being funnelled into Shadowlands.
The amount of people dead from the war and genocide would be a drop in a bucket.
Imagine there existed in warcraft universe with our level of population. More people probably died from heart disease on earth in one year than Sylvanas managed to cause in Azeroth in the entire 4th war.
It just doesnât make any sense. So donât tell me we canât retcon Sylvanasâ goals and her dealings with the jailer timeframe.
Probably because itâs more like, âClassic corporates packaging (cheap) feces in a shiny (expensive) box and hoping players wonât bother looking (read: analyzing) further.â
As in every other case this has occurred, it turned out about as well as could be expected.
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That you have, I owe an apology for that. This thread has gotten so long its hard to keep tabs on everything! The only change Iâd make you your original suggestion is that while the Horde does need new blood, it should be the blood we have left that rises to the Anime-Power-Level of the Alliance characters. Heck, they donât even need to be shown in opposition to the Alliance while growing, just whatever 3rd party we happen to be at war with at the time. We need some cool cutscenes we can cheer at too after all!
Overall, if we were in the business of trying to âfixâ BFA then yes, framing is one of the bigger issues at play, though Iâd argue the developers are lying through their teeth and were 100% on board the Horde villain train. Quilboar to Horde in Brennadam pretty much tells that story.
Sylvanas and the Jailer is a retcon in itself, so⌠hey youâll never see me argue against retconning that nugget.
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The only reason that makes sense to me why I think they changed it is if the core âleadersâ in the Story Dev department (read: Bottegoni, Danuser, Golden) literally overruled the people (read: Afrasiabi) who were following Metzenâs vision (read: Anduin decides to be imperialist because he follows along what Uncle Genn and Uncle Turalyon want, thus giving Golden Boy a Fatal Flaw) so pivotted after Blizzcon (when Metzen was 100% gone).
It would also explain why Afrasiabi left at the end of BFA/during Shadowlands development because after both Cata-MoP Garrosh (Afrasiabi was the one who did honorable Stonetalon Mountains Garrosh questline) and now the reversal of the battle sequence so Alliance comes out pristine and Horde are evil (again), he just gave up.
The story that is on its way is NOT something Afrasiabi is happy with, and thus something us as Horde Mains⢠will also not be happy with.
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Read: the Grand Old Guard that gave us the early lore ala Warcraft III and Vanilla are either being pushed out or jumping ship because they know theyâll be pushed out.
In essence:
This kind of makes me terrified for where WoWâs story will head next, if this is indeed the case.
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The world building slaps, but I have sub-zero hope for any Horde development in a positive, central direction and any Alliance villainy.
I mean for the love of God, the expansion centered on the AFTERLIVES has zero centering on Shaman.
The Org/SW portals to Oribos are being maintained by DEATH KNIGHT SHADOW MAGES (?!?!?!?!?!?!) instead of Shaman of the respective factions 
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Wouldnât be at all shocked if that were the case.
I have to wonder if, for all their talk, Blizzard really just rounds up the players of each faction into specific quotas. IE Alliance are all Honor all the time, Horde mains are all about fighting and heavy metal, etc. It makes the shift from Alliance aggression from the cinematic to what we got make more sense; Blizzard thinks all Alliance players hate starting wars and want to be squeaky clean. And going off that assumption of before, it would make much more sense for the Horde to start it instead, what with them loving wars and fighting (and heavy metal)
In essence, they didnât want to piss off the faction that they thought would be against starting a war, so they pivoted it to Horde, the faction that should love it.
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No, I donât think this is the case. I think they see themselves more in the Alliance (as Alliance Mains) and thus write stories they want for their main faction.
And they lack the self awareness of the implications and meta-meaning of the story theyâre writing.
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