You’ve developed time travel? Interesting.
Well my solution was to prove this isn’t about consistency, it is about getting the Night Elves where you want them. Consistency is second fiddle to that.
Sorry, you are mistaken on this rather simple fact. I understand how bias can delude your opinion. Considering the poor building metaphor botching things up.
This isn’t something we know the full extent off, and we have no reason to think that Nelf lands and casualties were any higher than anyone else.
It’s not about time travel, it’s about demanding more integrity from those who’s content we consume. And not being a contrarian because you are, for whatever reason, bitter towards nelf fans.
It’s about the Night Elves being portrayed appropriately and consistent to how they were introduced.
If you consider that a botch, then you really aren’t any kind of authority on story telling or world building.
So, again, I am correct.
Perhaps, but they were pretty high, and included natural population centers like Felwood, which is pretty much to the Night Elves what the Dead Scar is to the Blood Elves, and when you get things like the vanilla intro introducing you as “one of the few Night Elves left in the world”, we do have a hint at some pretty serious losses.
This isn’t to say that the Night Elves were falling apart at the time. They did keep their territory, which is more than Lordaeron could say, but so did the Blood Elves, and no one would accuse them of being in a great state at the time. Maybe you could justify it in a “best-looking horse in the glue factory” sort of way, but that doesn’t support the idea of them being innately superior at the time.
Nor do I think we need to have that argument to object to the story’s more recent moves for reasons that I’ve discussed previously.
Not really. They reclaimed it, but Arthas obliterated them all the way down to most of their royal family.
It’s not really related to that. I make this argument because people will say “You just want the Night Elves to be able to solo the Alliance and Horde combined!” as a means of dismissing the criticisms from nelf players.
My response to that is… Yes. I have reason to believe, that at the time of Vanilla Wow, the Night Elves alone was a world power to rival the rest of the Alliance and the Horde. I think we have plenty of evidence to say that.
At which point they’re going to come back at you and say that such proves that the Night Elves needed to be taken down a peg because they don’t feel that it’s fair - and that’s not a completely unjustifiable concern unless we’re comfortable saying that some playable races should be inferior to others, which I’m not. That aside, it’s a Catch 22 if you’re looking for a silver-bullet argument against some of these people because many of them are literally looking for any reason they can to dismiss your concerns.
That’s why I tend to lead with things like the factors that induce people to play video games in the first place and concerns over what obliterating fan favorite races is going to do to the franchise - but so long as we are in the weeds like this - the Night Elves’ ability to stand as a regional power comes from their ability to leverage their environment - and that’s perfectly defensible on its own.
So you can’t change the past, like I said.
I consider myself somewhat of a Night Elf fan.
You’ve indicated consistency is secondary, that’s all I was raising.
It was a botch, it didn’t follow the discussion or comparison. You’re lying to yourself and know it saying otherwise. Doubling down on wrong.
I don’t care what they feel its fair, it’s the lore. It was the lore in WC3 and it should be the lore now. Like, why should I care if some Troll player is crying because the Darkspear aren’t a super power… You are player the race who’s entire civilization was swallowed by the sea in WC3, what did you expect?
It’s not about me wanted to better than other players. I play many races. I play and orc and a Goblin on Horde side. I play a Worgen, and I don’t expect Worgen to be the powerhouse of the Alliance at all. It’s about the balance of power in the world, and Blizzard saying “Well, Night Elves were near obliterated by the Burning Legion, so they are on an even playing field as the other races” is really lazy to me.
Like, you expect me to believe some escaped orc slaves who fled accross the ocean (Shipwrecking on Kalimdor’s coast, mind you), and had a civil war before they could establish a settlement, is, 5 years later, a major geopolitical world power? Are you kidding me?
No it wasn’t. Literally no one here agrees with you.
Oh, it was. Try to reexamine yourself before saying so again. Just isn’t genuine.
Argument ad populum. How cute.
It is. I literally gave you an example as to why it is. You just saying “No” doesn’t make you correct. You’re just embarrassing yourself now.
This is a double-edged sword though. People can easily put that on us, and they do. It’s an is/ought fallacy besides - just because Blizzard did do something doesn’t mean they should have. What basis do we have for “should have”? That would be objectives of the game itself.
People fundamentally play video games to achieve psychological needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy per the work of Scott Rigby. The mimesis effect means that in an RPG, we identify with our characters, and the element of choice and customization brought about by an MMORPG makes a player’s identity important in that. The game is also competitive in nature, and those identities are presented to the rest of the game world. All of that means that fairness is a HUGE concern.
I object to recent lore because it didn’t even try to be fair to us, not because of a belief that the Night Elves should be a superior option - they shouldn’t. They should be AN option, and we owe it not just to ourselves but our fellow players to advocate for a general framework that emphasizes fairness. Because a fair playing field is one that’s more fun for everyone.
I specifically countered your example. You’ve just been repeating ‘I’m right’, now you are lying about what happened.
You can have a fair playing field mechanically, and still have consistent lore.
You didn’t though. You utterly failed to recognize the different process of worldbuilding and story telling, and you openly admitted that the solution you were forwarding was a bad and unsatisfying solution. And literally everyone involved in this conversation disagreed with you. Now you are trying to backtrack and salvage what little bit of your pride remains.
No. You were wrong. Now, act like a big boy, take the L and move on.
The lore, the story, the marketing, and yes - the mechanics are linked. These are all elements of the game, and they have to be viewed from a game design perspective. Concerns like ludonarrative dissonance and just plain dissatisfaction do not get to be cleanly subdivided from the hard “mechanics”, which themselves often have to be changed to fit the story.
These elements cannot be siloed, they affect each other.
The distinction is pedantic here because neither makes the botched metaphor relevant.
And you’ve repeatedly failed to understand I’ve said there’s no perfect solution here. Some people inherently risk being unsatisfied.
Repeated argument ad populum, there it is, folks.
Pride? I couldn’t care less what you think of me. I’m bothered by these delusions you have.
That might be cool to say on Reddit, I guy. But take five minutes to assess your honesty. You were wrong and it was botched.
Which is where you have to reduce that amount. Making the Night Elves suck isn’t what I would say is a good route to do that.
I think Blizzard approaching the lore from a game design perspective is the main reason why they have made some of the most horrid decisions they have made.
You can’t approach world building and story from the perspective of game mechanics. Again, culture and society develops by the constraints of the setting, when you blowout those constraints for the sake of some superficial sense of “fairness” that doesn’t impact game mechanics what-so-ever, you end up with a world that is less immersive, and a story that requires a suspension of disbelief that is beyond reasonable.
Good, because I think very little of you.
I disagree entirely. They didn’t approach this from a game-design perspective, otherwise they wouldn’t have made moves badly at odds with the objectives of the game. It’s more than evident that the marketing team and the writers room went hog wild in an attempt to “return the franchise to its roots”, and started making big moves because these are the sorts of people who think that GOT Season 8 is a masterwork.
Edit - put another way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkDO1lDNpCk
More mechanically-driven narratives would concentrate on portraying the world as a world. They’d concentrate more on emphasis on player identity. They’d worry more about emergent gameplay, with lining up their story with the game mode, and with exploration, not just in the sense of finding new territories, but new cultures. These are elements that the quest teams tend to absolutely nail, but the larger franchise writers do things that are completely at odds with these imperatives - like blowing up two fan favorite playable races for shock value and an expansion villain, respectively.
Sure. Though I think there’s a difference between reducing their historic strength and making them suck.
That’s a compliment coming from someone like you.
As I just got done explaining, there was little there to reduce. They were balanced previously. Blizzard just chose to use them as a pity battery because they needed to motivate the humans, and found the Night Elves a convenient way to do that.
They did this after making the Night Elves suck beginning in Cataclysm - this was doubling down on that. And that, well, sucks.
GOT season 8 was written from a game design perspective as well, that was the problem. They moved away from the source material (Granted how littler of it there was) and starting writing the show not for the sake of the story, but for the sake of sensationalism and shallow shock moments.
GOT season 8 and BFA was written around a small number of large cinematic moments, and everything in-between was filler. In the case of GOT, it as trash, rehashed dialogue hoping nostalgia would make up for the lack of George’s source material. And in the case of BFA, it was luke-warm gameplay and… well, also rehashed dialogue hoping nostalgia would make up for their lack of lore knowledge and effort.
I reject this idea greatly. Mechanically driven narratives wouldn’t force them focus on player identity. The constraints of their world building would be game mechanics. The narrative would be based on world quests, cheap/easy content would take precedent over the new and exciting. If you don’t think that’s the case, you’re wrong because that’s already happened. in 15 years, Blizzard hasn’t really gone far beyond the hack and slash fetch quests of yore. We are doing the same thing we did in Vanilla WoW only with better graphics and flashier combat animations. And you want that to be the driving force of the narrative?
In-universe world building the dictates the direction of story and mechanics is the way to go. But it has to be from the ground up, and not build around a few cinematic moment.