"I Feel Lied To," Post-BfA Version

Lore Story Forum
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Well the first time in MoP was Chris Metzen shoving his self-insert Varian into the spotlight at the detriment of literally everyone else. Just like he did with Thrall in the expansion prior.

The second time with BfA it has become very obvious there was a lot of malice and infighting going on behind the scenes. If pay attention there’s a lot in BfA that feels rewritten at the last minute. It was like watching a 4kidz localization dub and seeing all the things that were obviously changed from the original.

What I’m saying is both were tainted by meta shenanigans and they have the potential to write a more compelling narrative and possibly already did with BfA but were undermined.

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The thread I’m in where the majority seemed to dislike the faction conflict?

No, I don’t think it does disprove my point. Otherwise you wouldn’t be arguing with other people at all.

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I think they were going for “Alliance gets the simple, noblebright story of being the good guys who stop a bad guy. Horde gets a complex, bittersweet story of rooting out backsliders in their midst, emerging as even more heroic than they were before.”

But boy oh boy, did they not pull it off. Partly because they didn’t originally set up that storyline—they started out, Hordeside, with “Unpromising warchief learns hard lessons and slowly grows into the role” and tried to pivot to the other thing midway through, which really didn’t work.

Of course, it looks brilliant now when contrasted with BfA. But turning a faction leader into the expansion’s Big Bad is one of the worst story decisions the writers have ever made, IMHO.

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And? Like I said, the story can be good, but we’ve had two showings of how badly it can happen and now the universe is tainted by those choices. So unless they fully retcon the events of BOTH the Cata-MoP and Legion-BfA eras of the Horde so they flat out didn’t happen, it will prevent them from being able to do the story justice. It’s just like Civil War in Marvel’s comics. The basis is a good idea, but the execution was so horrible that any attempt to do it again will be tainted by what came before.

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The way I see it, those writing choices are going to haunt the franchise forever no matter how hard we try to forget them. But if they go back in and do it right this time it could retroactively validate the previous failures.
Right now going for peace and pretending like everything is water under the bridge is like ignoring an infected wound because it all just feels pointless and hollow. Especially because of the absurd amount mental gymnastics they have to do to explain why no one is losing their minds over this peace and all the unresolved issues that brought them to blows in the first place.
But if we decided “Actually no, not all is forgiven and we’re not going to just pretend all these conflicts of interest don’t exist anymore.” We can make those past conflicts feel like they actually meant something and weren’t just a meaningless string of character derailments and unresolved plot threads because now they are contributing factors to this new conflict instead of being a stillborn siamese twin hanging off the narrative.

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Did… Did you just not read what I said and skip to that last part? Or are you being disingenuous on purpose? Because I never contested that everyone hated this narrative, my point is that of course people hated it, not because it was the faction conflict but because not a single person was expecting or wanted it to be written like this.

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The problem is, that in order to do the faction conflict well, they need to make it so neither side can be said to be wrong or villains. You really can’t do that in the current universe anymore, because the writers took the Horde to such extremes that it’s impossible to do that anymore. The choices made in the previous conflicts are going to hang over whatever conflict happens, so it’s best to just take the entire storyline out back and pull an Old Yeller on it. Is it jarring? Yes. But the alternative is risking this story tumor being made worse and we have no reason to trust Blizzard can handle it after everything that’s happened.

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No, I read your whole response. Clearly you didn’t read the post you responded to, because my premise wasn’t that faction wars must suck. It was that if there are two attempts to write that story and both fail, maybe a fundamental problem with said story is that it guarantees dissatisfaction with a substantial number of players by virtue of pitting them against one another. You’re literally trapping the players into a situation where either:

A) You lose, the other side wins, but nobody is defeated because gameplay.
B) You win, the other side loses, but nobody is defeated because gameplay.
Or C) What we goth both times the attempt was tried; One side teams up with rebels from the other side, to defeat that second side’s leader.

You seem to think this premise is inherently flawed, that no, people will be fine with a meaningless victory or a meaningless defeat.

The majority here seem to disagree.

Present your argument where it can be written better without falling into this obvious pit.

Because you clearly ignored that argument previously in favor of effectively saying “lol no ur wrong, everyone agrees with me” and not addressing the argument.

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Shelf the faction war. It’s tired, sloppy, and boring.

Bring in political tension instead. Build it up over 3-4 expansions and then ~maybe~ a faction war can make sense but only if they can actually do it justice and not just villain bat the Horde and make the Alliance look like the Fooliance.

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I feel that faction conflict instead of faction war is the best way to make this work. Have belligerent groups on both sides who refuse to stop the fighting, but those groups are not sanctioned by their respective governmental bodies.

Basically an expansion of the old BG factions into the world environment.

The Defilers fighting the Arathi Highland guys works. They’re both aligned with their respective factions, fighting over control over land, but the Horde and Alliance at large wash their hands over the mess and disavow the participants publicly (while financing and arming them privately) because there are too many bigger conflicts going on for actual war with their respective counterparts.

Because the big problem the faction wars have never been able to surmount is that these groups are going to war, throwing bodies at one another, all while knowing Cthulhu’s coming and they need everything they have to face Cthulhu.

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All I’m saying is I’m never going to be able to take this franchise seriously if they just keep pretending everything’s fine and we shouldn’t be holding knives at each other’s throats.
Like for crying out loud, the Alliance canonically rebuilt Tiragarde Keep into a functioning garrison on Durotar during the Fourth War THAT’S STILL THERE! They’re effectively pointing a gun at the heads of the Orcs and Darkspear. That alone should be enough to spark a new conflict. But instead we’re pretending it’s totally fine that the Alliance army is hanging out in Horde territory and that Orcs and Trolls should just roll over and let it stay that way which is the opposite of the race fantasy for both races.

Why does someone have to win or lose? We can’t have an ongoing stalemate? Stormwind has been trying to remove the Gnolls from Elwynn for generations but has barely made any meaningful progress. Is it really so hard to believe that the Alliance and Horde could be locked in an ongoing stalemate with slight gains and setbacks for both as a background plot of the main story?

Well that’s reductive. And I never said everyone agrees with me, there have been people against the faction conflict from the start. What I am trying to fight is this lie that the majority of people hated the premise of BfA and never wanted it in the first place which is obviously false.

I will but it’s kind of disheartening. Since there’s nowhere good to put it.

A) I post it on reddit and get downvoted to oblivion since I presented an opinion that contradicts their little echo chamber.
B) I post it here in the Story Forum where only a minority of people will ever see it and will probably just lead to a bunch toxicity being thrown around as everyone is fairly dug into their positions at this point.
C) I post it on General Discussion where everyone has the attention span of a gnat and will be angry that I posted something longer than three sentences.

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Again, Blizzard has shown they can’t handle this conflict in a way that doesn’t piss off the majority of the people who care about the story. They’ve shown twice that they can’t handle the story, and quite frankly they don’t deserve a third attempt at it. They didn’t even really deserve the second. The faction war stories have done nothing but harm to the universe and it’s time to cut our losses on it and toss it in the dumpster for good. We don’t need it, it’s done more harm than good for the universe.

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We canonically defeated all of the Old Gods.

There’s literally nothing similar between the faction war and this.

Why did you ever take this franchise seriously?

It isn’t meant to be taken seriously.

It’s a goofy fantasy land.
Nothing about WoW is meant to be ‘realistic’ or even serious.

Hell, it’s more realistic that the faction war ended ages ago.

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We’re kind of just talking in circles so I’ll just say one more time. That “harm” the faction conflict has done, is never going to go away and it will eat away at the story like a cancer and eventually kill the franchise if we keep refusing to address it.

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It goes away by not getting worse and hitting everyone with more boring crap writing.

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“Just don’t ever be invested in the story man.”

“That infected wound will go away if you just ignore it”

Why are you even here?

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Not at all, but that isn’t a war between the factions. That’s just more of the conflict-style antagonism from Vanilla which I don’t think anyone is complaining about. In fact, right before your post here, I advocated for exactly that sort of situation.

A neverending state of actual war doesn’t fit the WoW style of basic superhero storytelling drama. An enemy you can never defeat is the antithesis of how WoW’s story is told. Imagine if instead of defeating Arthas at the end of Wrath, we instead left him at Icecrown, went back home, and from Cata to now, we just still fought against him. While also fighting the other threats.

It sounds cool at first, but then you really start thinking about it. “Great, the X.2 patch is coming. Wonder how we’ll beat back the Scourge this time? Can we just go back to ICC and kill Arthas this time?!”

WoW, again, is a basic superhero story. The hero (IE the player character) must defeat the villain and end the conflict for the conflict to have any meaning at all. A constant narrative of “sorry hero, your Garrosh is in another castle, try again next expansion” breaks that narrative, makes the hero into an incompetent fool and accomplishes nothing. It destroys the very story it is trying to tell.

Well yeah, it’s reductive. You literally responded to me with “this thread proves you wrong” when it certainly does nothing of the sort. Don’t be disingenuous and I won’t be reductive.

:grinning:

Thus is the nature of the beast, sadly.

Reddit sucks for most discussions. Period, it really just does. Unless you’re coming in from an entrenched position everyone else has already dug themselves into, you’re just digging yourself a very lonely hole. The WoW official forums are not too different; around here we’re a bit more willing to listen than, say, GD, but it comes at the inevitable cost of smaller exposure and the fact we’ve all already had these discussions and hold pretty well-established views.

Around here, I’d say we’re mostly willing to listen, but because of our hyper-focus on the story, there are just certain topics we refuse to budge on (even though we have a variety of views among us) and quickly lead to just plain arguments.

Faction War.
Night Elves.
Horde representation.

Everyone is pretty entrenched in their views on these topics (and that list isn’t meant to be all-enclusive; there’s other topics less talked about too) because we’ve done them to death for years.

So yeah, I feel your pain.

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Saying not to take WoW serious is different than saying you shouldn’t get invested in the story.

That infected wound will get worse if you continually pick at it.

To point out that you’re an idiot, I guess.

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I feel like that’s where we are now anyways now that we’re chasing Xal’atath and doing this Aqir/Old God stuff AGAIN. I feel like we’ve been here way more times than the faction war since Vanilla.

I still hate the fact that Metzen took us in this direction, but that’s a whole separate rant for another time.

I do genuinely appreciate that you understand and share my pain. The internet sucks.

Awwww, I didn’t know you cared. <3

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You’re welcome.

There’s more story that you can build from the factions than just red vs. blue.

That being said, the faction system makes every aspect of this game worse and forcing a bad system like it into the story has only proven to be continually disastrous.

Working off the framework of ‘The Alliance’ and ‘the Horde’ has destroyed any kind of nuance that people pretend exists in this game’s story.

Retreading the same faction red vs. blue story brings nothing different and all it does is retread the same uninteresting plot threads over and over and over.

Maybe, just maybe, Blizzard wants to move away from that and start experimenting with something new.

Like, idk man, the faction system removes any kind of intrigue surrounding the actual nations that build up these factions.
I’d rather focus on them than red vs. blue for the sake of marketing for the 100th time.

Not only that, but the faction system as it currently stands makes this game inaccessible to new players and isn’t fun.