And were the diplomat simply existing as a diplomat, killing them would be an act of evil.
Prospector Anvilward was working in tandem with armed insurgents who were killing blood elves.
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A) That’s not what insurgents are
B) They were spying, and maybe conducting sabotage. They were not killing Blood Elves.
C) lol you’re such a hypocrite
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Make a blood elf alt and walk up to one.
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Accelerationism in the narrative, maybe? My guess would be “screw it, just make them unapologetically evil and let me have fun with it instead of remaining morally second-class forever.” Either that or “Screw it, just leave the horde ruined.”
Like, I almost get it but still kinda don’t. I’m more of the doomer type myself.
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Doesn’t matter. That’s the nature of being a diplomat.
If a diplomat commits a violation, responsibility for the consequences if it was sanctioned or doling out any punishment to the diplomat if it wasn’t falls to the diplomat’s own government.
It’s why diplomatic immunity exists. That protection is what allows there to be diplomats at all. Without it, no country would be willing to send or accept them to or from other countries. For that matter, without it no sane person would willingly become a diplomat either.
The underlying agreement between any diplomat and the government he’s visiting is that if they take issue with him, they will pursue the matter with his government, be it by sending him home and withdrawing diplomatic contact (depending upon the offense, up to and including the point of resorting to war), or by sending him home and requesting someone else in his place.
The whole context of killing him was to keep it secret. By doing that, the questgiver effectively sought to break the rules of diplomacy without actually owning the necessary consequences. Had they done it properly they would have sent him home and - in light of the night elf presence - demanded an explanation while threatening to assume an openly hostile stance with the Alliance. But since they were weak and vulnerable at the time, and didn’t want the rest of the blood elves to know they’d allowed it to happen on their watch, they opted instead to break all diplomatic standards by murdering a diplomat in order to outwardly maintain the facade of nothing having happened at all.
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No.
That’s the nature of being a war asset.
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Ignoring 90% of a post to blithely respond with inane quips as if we’re on Twitter does less than nothing to support your argument.
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90% of your post is trying to worm your way out of the fact that he is a war asset sent with night elf assassins with the intent to kill/destabilize the blood elf people.
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“If he isn’t a slimy, murderous snake and a war asset, then why do I keep insisting he is?”
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They were present to observe the results of the Arcane Sanctum’s failure. Nowhere in their captured correspondence does it speak of any intent to “kill/destabilize” the blood elf people. The blood elf overseeing the Sanctum even expected such a disaster to happen before discovering any Alliance presence in the area because her superiors were already over-taxing the Sanctum against her protestations.
So upon discovering the presence of night elves observing a big arcane explosion in the vicinity - the sort of thing one would expect an exploratory mission based out of the nearby still-Scourged Ghostlands to do - the questgivers latched onto that to make a bunch of emotionally charged assumptions about what happened. Assumptions that cast off their own previous, rationally calculated observations while conveniently serving to alleviate their responsibilities, to the point of covering up their efforts to remedy the situation, even from their own people.
You’re insisting upon a simplistic, one-sided view of things to support your own faction partisanship, but that just wasn’t the situation. If it were the questgivers would have had every reason to raise the alarm and detain the dwarf; instead they handled the whole situation as if they had something to hide, covertly assassinating a diplomat while conveniently attributing a disaster to night elf presence that they had only a few quests prior already rationally attributed to their own superiors’ mishandling of the Arcane Sanctum.
It was part and parcel of the TBC-era starting blood elf theme of recklessly doing whatever they had to (see: oftentimes what was most expedient rather than safe) to get by, and flinching at owning the hazards of doing so when it went wrong. It was their racial story arc that led to them learning of Kael’thas taking that same mentality way too far in Outland, causing his own people to turn against him and reassess their previously over-eager approach to exploiting and abusing whatever power they had to without regard for the consequences involved.
Insisting upon your oversimplified interpretation of it chucks part of their whole expansion-wide arc for a childish “nah, this was just an Alliance race being malicious bad guys and a (soon-to-be) Horde race being victimized good guys” factional story beat.
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It’s hard to have a discussion on “How to redeem the Horde” when people can’t even muster the ideological consistency to say “killing diplomats is bad no matter who does it.”
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It’s hard to have a discussion on killing diplomats when Alliance players compare spies sent with assassins to murder/destabilize a region, with diplomats trying to establish peace.
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somehow, someway you don’t seem to understand that you’re exactly the sort of person I’m talking about. You want the horde to be good but you don’t actually want the horde to work to be good. You somehow equate a story about atonement and redemption with suffering to the point that you’d rather go full on villain.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You pick one. That’s it.
I also can’t possibly understand this mentality of “if we atone we’ll be suffering for it.” How and where could you? A quest where you do all you can to save some night elven child only for the parents to attack you but come out knowing you did the right thing would be more engrossing than not. Heck, it might actually make players read the quest text for once when its time to turn it in. On the flip side if you just save a night elf and turn in a quest… that’s it. It’s over, there’s nothing more to it.
Maybe you wouldn’t. But I’d be all over a horde that does the right thing even if it’s the hard thing. I wasn’t around for the quest when it was live, but the idea of Thrall sending the horde player to rescue Moira from blackrock depths just because its the right thing to do sounded like the most thematically enjoyable quest to me and it’s what I’d be aiming for in terms of the horde redeeming itself.
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In fairness to the alliance (and literally everyone else). Because every single undead up to that point anyone came in contact with was irrevocably murderous and evil they really didn’t have much reason to try and reason with them. The first chance the forsaken had to break this line of thought was at Lordaeron but they instead chose to enforce it. And this was AFTER the forsaken appeared as reasonable undead and made a deal wtih Garithos just as forsaken diplomats would have been trying to do with other kingdoms, so why would they trust them or spend any time listening to them when they -as far as they- know are only going to be plotting their doom? Up to that point no one that wasn’t the forsaken had any reason to believe the undead were planning to do anything but kill every living.
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Would you care to enlighten me as to whomst escaped Lordaeron to inform Stormwind as to the Forsaken’s betrayal?
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By your own logic it doesn’t matter, since any Alliance guard or whoever would be justified in killing diplomats as long as they believed they were enemies/spies/hostile.
That’s the low bar you’ve set. You’ve successfully argued in such a way that diplomatic relations follow South Park’s “they’re coming right for us!” rules.
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Nah see friend, I stated that Prospector Anvilwhatever was sent as a war asset. He wasn’t a true diplomat. He intended to hurt the blood elves. He was killed for that, and so were the night elven assassins who also wanted to help him hurt blood elves.
The difference between the two is that Stormwind believes the ambassadors are enemies.
Anvilmar literally was an enemy.
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Those Forsaken emissaries were war assets sent by Sylvanas in an effort to further her geopolitical goals which she had already established would be at the Alliance’s expense. Blow their heads off.
lol so if a Horde faction believes someone is an enemy that justifies them doing whatever they want but you won’t afford Alliance factions the same rights?
I’d respect you more if you weren’t trying to cloak your naked hypocrisy as some kind of reasonable, cogent ethical stance.
Source?
No “I believe” statements.
Cold hard facts, or you’re lying.
Uh. Why are you lying? We have cold hard facts. We’re not dumb npcs guessing. We, as players, have the meta view of quests, etc.
You have a weird desire to burn your own reputation and make yourself a laughingstock.
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I’m not arguing with you anymore, I don’t believe that literally anything will convince you because you can’t bring yourself to admit being incorrect about something on the internet.
You’re just preening yourself for your perceived audience.
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