I'm tired of being humiliated

Lore Story Forum
82

Its been rough for both sides.

The Horde have been dragged through the mud again down a story path nobody asked for. To repeat a story that was better conceived the first time.

The Alliance is smacked over the head with one of the most brutal losses shown in game compounded by all the other losses they have incurred. Yet constantly told to have a stiff upper lip and suck it up as we forgive the horde once again.

Blizzard has really failed to deliver a good consistent narrative this expac and I can only hope we get an apology for basically ruining the story for so many players.

22 Likes
83

There’s enough ambiguity in the material to leave holes that Richard Hammond can drive his Marauder through.

84

I don’t see much ambiguity.

85

At a certain point you just gotta pathologize it. If I didn’t like being humiliated I wouldn’t be playing World of Warcraft (this includes Classic, especially Classic) in the year 2019. It’s incredibly obvious I do not have self respect.

2 Likes
86

I just want to point out that before those xpacs, horde pride was so out of control that a woman was punched in the face at blizzcon for wearing a alliance shirt

2 Likes
87

? Did we play the same game?

In cata the Night Elves pretty much only retook. In Stonetalon they got nuked, in Ashenvale they ‘retook’ but the phasing made it look like that never happened and to this day the phasing there is like the Horde are still assaulting the camp near Darkshore with catapults and all while Astranaar is smoldering from the fire.

On top of this they were made to give up Azshara lorewise with the promise that the Horde would withdraw entirely from Ashenvale, except the latter obviously never happened. So the Horde got an entire zone shaped into the Horde symbol while Night Elves got a fake win in Ashenvale while getting nuked in another zone. The Horde questing if I remember right there involves you taking over Ashenvale, which feels a lot better than the Alliance having to put out fires and desperately defend only to never get the phasing to show that they technically ‘win’

See what I mean? Not to mention those expanded lumber operations ruining more of the zone. Ashenvale always having been considered an Alliance zone for the most part due to how Night Elf it is and yet Horde gets the best questing experience there by far, Alliance just get bad phasing and feel-bad quests.

Bonus points if you are lore nerd enough to know that Night Elves won lorewise (books) in Ashenvale only because Varian decided to help. Yep, that’s right. Night Elves getting outplayed in their own forests again.

OH and extra extra bonus points for having Malfurion be neutral when we finally got him back in Cata. The Druids apparently not caring enough suddenly that Ashenvale is being torn apart by Goblins and Orcs, lol.

And of course going back to the current day, we know now that the Horde truly never abandoned Ashenvale lorewise because apparently that entire fortress on the western side of the zone on the beach still exists and was used for the questing leading up to the Burning of Teldrassil, either that or it was in the novel. (memory a little foggy) while Astranaar gets butchered and the Horde get to butcher their way through Ashenvale and Darkshore and finally burn Teldrassil.

MAN, the Night Elves have had it good ever since Cata. This is the sort of stuff that the OP means when he’s talking about humiliation, it was so bad that even the devs at one point admitted they did the Cata questing experience wrong for Alliance. It just feels bad, man. It doesn’t instill any faction pride because you just get beaten up on, constantly. In the Barrens we even lose an entire dwarven fortress, it just goes boom. From what I heard to a single goblin sapper, but I didn’t do the questing Horde side there.

17 Likes
88

I think the Night Elves did great in Cataclysm. Stonetalon was the one big loss, yes, but the Horde fell apart on their own there after said loss, so not sure what the aftermath really was. I agree that the phasing should have reflected the Night Elf victories. However, I don’t care that it didn’t when talking about the story, because narratively we still won. We won Teldrassil, Darkshore, Ashenvale (where our questing came after the Horde’s questing, so we undid all of their questing), and put up a good fight in Stonetalon. We cleared up the Nightmare at the Overgrowth, and we won in Feralas, helped the Tauren in Thousand Needles, and won in Felwood and Winterspring and Mount Hyjal. That’s most of Kalimdor, and this was reflected in A Good War with the Horde having abandoned its outposts in Ashenvale as per their withdrawal after the Siege of Orgrimmar.

We also did not give up Azshara, merely let the Horde use its lumber. As we was in the pre-expansion Invasion events for Legion, the Night Elves were still holding land in Azshara, and the Talrendis Ancient had even grown back by then.

But as Drahliana said:

The only reason the loss of Teldrassil and the War of the Thorns was so impactful - asides from the obvious mass burning of innocent people being terrible - was because those zones meant anything to the players, as Alex Afrasiabi said at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isvjc8AfxHU&t=28m14s :

    In order to appreciate the burning of Teldrassil you kind of have to understand what Teldrassil is first, right? And the way time works in our game it flows by level. So you'll still be able to start in Shadowglen, go to Dolanaar, Darnassus, Darkshore, go through all of that, and then when you hit 120 we'll burn it all down. 110. Pardon me.
90

The fact that the Horde has inner conflict in Stonetalon does not show to the Alliance questing experience, so that doesn’t impact it in a positive way. You’re looking at things from an overall perspective more than I am, i’m more specifically talking about how things look from the Alliance questing experience.

You also mention zones where there is no direct conflict with the Horde like Teldrassil, obviously they ‘win’ their starting zone or things would be very stange indeed. Darkshore didn’t really have Horde either, it had a throwaway proxy in the form of that dancing troll tribe, though I admit that is actually one of the only truly feel-good questing experiences for Alliance in how they go in there and pretty much wipe them out with the full fury of the Night Elves with their ancient trees and all.

91

I will admit that the ending of Stonetalon does not feel satisfying. But not because of the bombing. But rather what comes after it. Riding the glaive thrower through the remains of the Horde’s army feels good. But then you get to Farwatcher’s Glen, you do a few quests, and then… the zone just stops. Doesn’t really end. It just sends you away. There wasn’t even a quest to kill Seldarria. I usually just kill her and pretend that was the end quest for the zone, but, yeah, once again, I will admit the end to Stonetalon was underwhelming.

I definitely do, because the Horde isn’t the Night Elves’ only problem. We have to deal with the Old Gods’ minions and the Legion along the whole way, too, and we defeat them at every turn as well.

92

Almost. They start out in the same boat, sure. But as soon as their boat lands in Orgrimmar, the Goblins get to build Bilgewater Harbor. On terraformed Night Elven land.

The Worgen… just get to shack up in Teldrassil. And we all know how that went.

9 Likes
93

Um, this was also from your earlier post:

Aren’t you also taking an overall perspective? Alliance players don’t see what the Horde players played through in Ashenvale either, as you pointed out for Stonetalon:

Also, one last nitpick:

Astranaar does get phasing to no longer be on fire after we put those out.

94

I just really hope we got a full new phased world new expac after this damn war. Showing that the Alliance isn’t just a bunch of destroyed keeps and towns all over the place.

I want to see either everything destroyed due to the Black empire rising and us questing through the zones restoring them through nicely phased areas as we go.

Or

I want them to show a new world Phased with the Alliance actually presented as Strong and rebuilt.

95

i know that not everyone thinks the same and that they have different opinions,

i am not pretending that the horde side got a superior storyline.
i think that both sides got screwed somehow.

i was just telling from my experience.
i can’t even look at warcraft related groups in facebook or twitter or discords without seeing any of the things i mentioned you know,
teldrassil jokes and things like that while everyone is laughing.

Yes i could just ignore it and move on but we all have a limit.

Strange, to me the alliance got simply used to clean their mess while still had to endure our losses and not getting anything in return.
while the protagonism was all about the horde.
as for why my complain about that they didn’t even let us kill garrosh.
like, is too much to ask some agency?
but i think that i understand what you mean.

when you create a character in your faction the least thing you expect to do is tou fight your own people simply because they got a superior number of… lets say people who like to kill.

but thanks pellex, i know that this hasn’t been easy for you either.
i bet that is hard having to see alliance players so angry that want to delete your faction and kill your fav characters. so for that you have my deepest sympathies.

blizzard shouldn’t have done that. we shouldn’t be wanting to kill the fav character or faction of anyone. and yet here we are.

Anyway yes, i feel like a break is what i need, again, thanks everyone.

96

Well, our story was never really the loss of Kezan … but dealing with the antagonist of our starting areas. Gallywix is still the antagonist of the Bilgewater. He’s still doing the same sort of crap that we were fighting against him for throughout the Goblin starting zones. He’s still racking up a Goblin kill counter that the Alliance has barely scratched the surface on. He’s still provided nothing positive to our racial narrative as our leader. He’s still portrayed as either hated (or at best tolerated) by nearly every other Goblin of note in this game.

Long story short. Yeah, we built Bilgewater harbor (sort of overnight, but I suppose that’s characteristic of Goblins). However, our REAL narrative of these intro questlines (opposing Gallywix) has been on hold for just as long as Gilneas. It truly is frustrating that still if I want a Goblin story that isn’t Goblins getting killed en-mass for Gallywix’s schemes … I have to look to the Steamwheedle (rather than the Bilgewater).

4 Likes
97

Oh yeah, I think I remember hearing about some kind of attack at a Blizzcon, but I never looked into whether or not it was real or just a false rumor. I have heard a couple of instances of people being heckled/bullied.

Obviously the blame should mostly fall on the individuals (i.e. idiots) that take things too far, but I’ve long maintained that Blizzard is/was stupid for allowing, or even encouraging (in a couple of cases), animosity between the two factions that goes beyond normal rivalry. At best, it just causes more unnecessary divisions to appear in the player base. At worst, it encourages the kind of crap that you’re talking about.

12 Likes
98

That’s basically because they simply didn’t put in the design effort on the Darkshore Warfront that they did with Arathi. That effort was spent on the Tyrande Ascension storyline instead. You could have had rotation between Sira and the various Dark Rangers. Instead, Daerlyn is thrown in as side boss you can pretty much ignore on your way to Sira.

99

one could say that alliance have this “victim mentality” and you are probably right.
but there are some things that for some may seem as dumb, other may as well feel offended.
Things like blizzard by example insulting alliance players during the 2011 blizzcon.
it’s one thing that an idiot just say random things, but when it’s blizzard itself the ones who did it you just have to accept it.
or how much we needed horses, or how we should thank them for aidding IA to the battlegrounds showing a complete lack of respect for their customers,

but since all of that are completely separate issues not really related to the story.

blizzard is probably too much out of touch.

i just hope that at least the writters who did this horrible job gets fired for incompetency.

5 Likes
100

You’re not wrong. We even had the datamined voice acting for Malfurion and Nathanos to be generals. But that never made it live.

However, we also had datamined voice acting of Rommath having joined the Twilight’s Hammer and being a boss in the same spot as Benedictus, but that never made live, either, and the lore with Rommath went an entirely different way after.

So whatever effort made it live for Darkshore is the lore we have. And whatever efforts they could have put in but didn’t is not lore.

2 Likes
101

And I can’t even look at anything warcraft-related without seeing people expressing red-hot seething hatred for and desire to eradicate everything on “my side.” To punish me for how hurt they feel. I don’t think either experience is fun.

And that’s why I don’t know if I can explain this to you in a way that will make sense. :frowning:

17 Likes
102

You seem very frustrated and that’s completely understandable. I myself am frustrated how somethings have turned out. Though its for completely different things. I get no joy at being at the throats of other Horde players more so than I have been at Alliance and among other things.

One frustration I share with you is I certainly don’t want the Horde and the Alliance to be friends when all this is done. But it seems that’s just whats going to happen.

5 Likes