Even if the dwarves knew there were ancient historical titan artifacts buried under a tauren settlement, it still sounds screwed up to wipe out the tribe just to dig it up.
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You’re not being serious so I’m simply going to stop responding to you until you’re willing to engage in good faith again.
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Yeah, settler-colonialism generally has disastrous consequences for the natives. Which is why it’s bad when the Horde does it too.
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I don’t think I’ve ever defended wiping anyone out, though.
Azshara is owned by the night elves, but was leased to the Horde after the Siege of Orgrimmar. Right?
While there is no formal night elf capital, could all the night elf lands be declared their capital?
He’s not being serious, just ignore him for now until he’s willing to engage in good faith again.
Anyways, just remembered this map Kaileath made:
Essentially what we’ve been getting at again, except Tanaris goes Horde, and the western column from western stonetalon and Feralas goes Alliance, and Stranglethorn goes Horde
You haven’t, but others have when it’s the Horde doing the wiping out.
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An interesting notion. But I don’t see it happening unless Blizzard decides to abolish the factions.
I’m not sure how what used to be the city of Lordaeron could be considered humble unless the humans inexplicably leave it as ruins.
Just means Sylvanas was smarter than Jaina and made sure her enemies wouldn’t be resettling her city.
Not that the Horde has resettled Theramore or anything…
I mean…ultimately so was Teldrassil.
Works for me. Conquest through enfranchisement!
The NE capitol will move to the moon during the moon expansion.
Because it’s much smaller than the Undercity. It also already got an update pass in the leadup to BfA (which, incidentally, saw the ruins double down on Alliance heraldry. Lions everywhere) so I’m basically envisioning what’s already in game. Maybe with some healthier vegetation and sealing up some cracks. Capital City has unusually sturdy structures thanks to its old Arathorian architecture which apparently favored refined stone.
I…don’t think that’s true.
Do we have an overlay of the maps?
I can do you one better. I can prove the Alliance human player character isn’t from Lordaeron.
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I’m gonna comment on this as someone who genuinely loves Theramore. I actually have an RP version of this character who isn’t dead, with Theramore as a big part of her backstory. It’s a very interesting location and frankly I find it a tragedy that it was lost. I typically love Christie Golden’s writing, and Tides of War was a very good story, but the fact that Theramore was wiped from all timelines and will never rise again is not a good thing, in my opinion. It’s a crying shame it was lost, and I’d actually love to see it rebuilt by the Alliance.
But I do not believe Undercity and Theramore can be compared.
Tiristfal was literally a starting zone. It’s a place where Forsaken characters learn and understand their race - their strengths and weaknesses, their history, their culture. It’s a place where many people first stepped foot in Azeroth. The Undercity for many (including myself) was their first city. The first place they visited a bank, or found their faction leader… or even got lost in as they wandered the halls, exploring its vast depths. There’s a strong sentimental value to the place for Forsaken players that I think can’t be fully denied.
Theramore, by contrast, was the hub of a mid-range leveling zone where you beat up some deserters and then get sent out into the marshes to check on a crazy swamp man. It had about 5 buildings in total, making it significantly smaller than any city in game. It’s a cool place, don’t get me wrong, but it’s never been a major cultural hub and it certainly isn’t the kind of place you can get lost in.
I know the knee-jerk reaction is to say “yeah but that’s not story” or “Alliance players have a connection to Lordaeron too because of Warcraft 2 or 3”. But a lot of WoW players have built an attachment to this universe through the game itself… and to permanently lose a place that’s central to your race’s identity is a hard thing. I’m not saying it can’t happen, but it needs to happen in a way that doesn’t entirely alienate Forsaken from their own claim upon the Lordaeronian narrative.
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Almost 20 years, I may add.
Much, much longer than the time when all we had was WC1/2/3 to muse upon.
Yup.
Why is identity built in WoW sacrosanct but identity built prior to WoW irrelevant?
Is there a statute of limitations on identity? How long is it? Wouldn’t the logical progression of “important places so don’t change it” ultimately result in a stagnant world? Wouldn’t the solution here be to simply take Lordaeron back from the Horde and leave that as the status quo for a decade or so?
You guys look at Lordaeron and say “but it’s been this way for 10 years” without realizing that once upon a time, the Horde getting a capital in Lordaeron was the giant upset that robbed people of their identity. That upset was fine because it affected other people, but another upset wouldn’t be because it would affect you. That’s the sentiment I’m reading.
Me getting robbed of my identity is okay because it happened 10 years ago, but you guys getting robbed of your identity (not even robbed frankly, merely challenged) is an unthinkable crisis.
And of course, all of this ignores the fact that even in WoW Lordaeron was central to human identity. There’s a reason humans got Paladins and Mages instead of Conjurers and Clerics, Stormwind is modeled after Stratholme, almost all human assets use human Warcraft 3 assets, and the Seal of Lordaeron appears next to every flagged Alliance portrait.
Plenty of people whose first Warcraft game was WoW and ended up playing humans ended up identifying with Lordaeron. Walk through Stormwind on any busy server and you’ll be able to identify like a half dozen guilds easily that reference Lordaeron in the name. Look at people’s MRP profiles on an RP server and you’ll see that Lordaeron is by far the most popular kingdom of origin for human RPers.
They didn’t start to flush that down the toilet until Cataclysm, the expansion that killed the Alliance, and that was all done in the name of the Horde.
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And given the current in-game power disparity between the factions, incidentally, you’ll forgive me for not being particularly sympathetic to Horde complaints about the fact that the abstract sense of identity is the one thing that they don’t overwhelmingly dominate in WoW nowadays.
My guess would be the difference between genres. In an RTS, you’re literally the hand of God piloting units around from an overhead view. In an MMO, you have a ground-level view as your character.
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Sure, but that still doesn’t preclude human identity as established in WoW from being strongly tied to Lordaeron.
Almost everyone remembers the first time they entered the Plaguelands. Even if they never played Warcraft 3 it was obvious just by looking around that not long ago, they were thriving human lands, just like Elwynn Forest or Westfall, that had been forcibly taken and corrupted by undead. That would often lead to people doing a bit more research on human history thanks to how tantalizing a hook the Plaguelands were and insodoing, they would learn about Arthas, and Jaina, and Terenas, and Uther, and all that really rich lore stuff.
In Vanilla, and all the way through Wrath, THAT was what you were supposed to identify with as a human player. Arthas, Lordaeron, and its fall to the Scourge. The Knights of the Silver Hand and the Wizards of Dalaran. Stormwind was a backwater led by a child with no lore that nobody had ever heard of and no amount of Defias drama could captivate people the way that the events in the northern kingdoms could.
To some extent, I suspect Blizzard still recognizes this which is why they were so generous in giving the Alliance canonical raid and dungeon clears in Vanilla Plaguelands and in WotLK via Chronicles. And I think that this is something that would also be more apparent to posters on this forum if more players who strongly identify with humans posted, but alas they don’t. It’s elves all the way down.
To some extent, sure. I could see that. But I had the assumption that the playable human character was born in Stormwind and it wouldn’t be as personal as it’d be to a forsaken player, whose playable premise is being a victim of that same carnage and having those same plaguelands right next door. Enough of them made the mistake of going east first that Welcome Bear became a meme, after all.
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It’s rather strange that an Alliance of several different kingdoms would be almost entirely defined by one of them. Sure, head of a council and face, whatever, but it’s an Alliance, not The Empire. And even empires in other settings do more to make each part have it’s relevant identity.
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That might be the conclusion that one would reach if they rolled a human and never got very far from their starting areas.
As for Forsaken identity, a little known fact about me is that way, way, WAY back in the day, I played Horde. Blood Elves and Forsaken specifically. I had background in the RTS so I had a better idea of what I was getting into, but I always strongly approached the game from the angle of someone for whom the Human and Scourge campaigns resonated the most strongly with.
In late TBC I made the switch to the Alliance, because despite controlling Lordaeron, despite being right next to the Plaguelands as you’ve pointed out, I never felt like my identity was particularly strongly tied to any of that at all.
One of the reasons I have such crystal clear memory of Forsaken questing in Vanilla is I did it a bunch of times. I remember that the sum total of all Forsaken questing ultimately came down to essentially acting as a neo-Scourge, mostly killing Paladins and Peasants and almost treating the Scourge as a de-facto ally so long as they didn’t get in the way.
I switched from playing Horde to playing Alliance precisely because the Forsaken identity did not resonate with me as a big fan of the WC3 Human and Scourge campaigns. My identity was with Lordaeron. Whatever the Forsaken were, they were not it.