I do think Southern Barrens was the best example of “grey faction conflict” Blizzard managed to pull off-in a vacuum. But in terms of the overall story, I think it does leave Horde players feeling a bit bitter that the Alliance is given this much leeway to argue for the morality of it when the Horde almost never is. There’s also the weird inclusion of the never-before-seen pure evil Rageroar clan to make sure there’s just some unambiguously bad dude Horde you can hoo-ra kill.
I do know that’s your point overall, that the Horde SHOULD get more of that leeway. But the big problem with the Purge, I think, is that they put it on a popular important legacy character. The magnitude of what was done was never not going to be softened if Jaina did it. They need characters like Jaina to work as important figures in the overall story beyond the faction conflict, and if they just outright go to the darkest route the only way out is the way of Garrosh or Sylvanas. And we all know how people reacted to those.
That was one of the larger objectives, but destroying Taurajo doesn’t help with that…
But again, there’s absolutely nothing special about Taurajo that means it can’t be replaced as a training area. In fact, it was just a hunters’ camp, so it wasn’t even designed for training soldiers in the first place.
Maybe. I think there was a faction of writers pulling behind the scenes for Jaina to go full faction patriot at one point. That’s probably why they put in that prophecy about “the proud lady, humbled and bitter.”
Given that Taurajo is on the road to Thunder Bluff I’m not entirely sure how they’re supposed to maintain the siege on Thunder Bluff without neutralizing that zone. Were they supposed to ignore it, or?
I think the “training soldiers” bit is just in reference to the fact that Horde players run through there to do quests. It was not the main reason, it was definitely more about cutting off TB from Org.
Silver Covenant was sort of a victim of the recontextualization of the blood elves from edgy dangerous addicts who will do anything for their next mana fix and were willing to outcast (or mind control) anyone disagreeing with them to… slightly dour high elves with green eyes.
With the former a militant reaction for the outcast made sense… for the latter it feels like an overreaction.
I didn’t get the impression the Alliance’s goal was to siege Mulgore, just to create a blockade between it and Orgrimmar. Anyway, Vendetta Point and Hunter’s Hill are not really any better defended than Camp Taurajo, and they actually are military installations (repurposed in the case of Hunter’s Hill)—yet the Alliance doesn’t touch them.
Pretty much all the quests the Horde PC picks up in Taurajo are about hunting various wildlife in the Barrens. Seems like a huge stretch to call that “training soldiers.” And if that somehow does qualify as training soldiers, the Alliance should have wiped out Hunter’s Hill as well.
Depends whose side of the Quel’Delar chain is canon; the SC and SR finagle and kill each other in its early quests.
Although, I will note that the SC provided active war mages and 7th Legion troops to the Valiance Expedition while the SR only appeared as neutral portal mages and advisory projections in the Horde’s towns. It’s not even really clear if the Silver Covenant is beholden to the Kirin Tor in the same way the Sunreavers are; the faction has no real lore beyond its opposition to the Horde.
Either way, while I appreciate that the two are mirrored to a point, I don’t believe the Sunreavers were properly militarized until MoP militarized them into the Sunreaver Onslaught. Before then their purpose was to sponsor blood elves who wanted to resume their dual citizenship between Silvermoon and Dalaran.
A siege is traditionally to post up in an area and block the besieged area from getting supplies. A lot of sieges have historically been conducted without bloodshed. Sieging is a means of starving people out until they surrender.
So the goal wasn’t really to capture TB, or to assault it. It was to cut it off with a military presence at their border.
Alliance withdrew from the area for some reason, I can’t really remember why. I’m assuming because Orgrimmar was able to break the siege and Alliance had to pull troops from the siege to elsewhere, leaving the conscripts to abandon their posts and begin looting Taurajo, which the Alliance arrests them for.
The Alliance doesn’t really have a presence at the gate to Mulgore during questing afaik, this would probably be why they don’t attack the Tauren settlements, they don’t have the troops to spare to do so. And furthermore, the goal wasn’t to attack the encampments, rather to besiege them, although that did not end up working out.
But Mulgore wasn’t the Alliance’s goal here—Orgrimmar was. They were trying to block Mulgore from sending supplies to Orgrimmar, not the other way around. And I still don’t see how burning the structures of Taurajo (but being careful not to kill any of the hunters) helps them with that goal.
There is Alliance presence in-game. Fort Triumph is south of Vendetta Point and Hunter’s Hill, while Honor’s Stand is north of them, and Forward Command is just east of Vendetta Point.
Which encampments are you talking about? What happened at Taurajo did not resemble a siege in any way.
I don’t understand how this changes things. Does getting Thunder Bluff to surrender not weaken Orgrimmar’s position? It’s killing two birds with one stone. Starve out Thunder Bluff and Orgrimmar. When Alliance finally goes to assault or besiege Orgrimmar, Thunder Bluff won’t be able to help. Thunder Bluff is the easier to siege with its geographical area creating only one access point.
They’re not at the gate actively creating a blockade is what I’m saying. At least from what I remember. The Alliance outposts are not near enough to create a zone of control for a siege, it would require the Alliance to have a camp right outside Mulgore.
The encampments you mention, Vengeance Point and Hunter Hill. The reason Alliance doesn’t attack those camps is that they just weren’t able to at the time, and the Alliance isn’t trying to deplete Horde soldiers by killing them in this scenario, they’re trying to stop them from being able to join the war. If they could get the Horde that are at those camps to just stay there, that serves the same purpose.
AFAIK, there’s nothing that states Alliance was trying to assault and capture Thunder Bluff, just blockade them off. Which is a siege.
There it is lol. Yeah, war is ugly. That was the point. Alliance isn’t unique in this, and Horde kill the commander that was responsible. Alliance never got that catharsis.
There probably have been some who have stated that it wasn’t bad at all, because of the noble ends. I think a lot of people make the point that it is not as bad as it could be. Certainly not as bad as what Horde does.
There is a direct analog to Taurajo for Alliance. Silverwind Refuge. The Horde did not allow the Night elves to flee, they just killed them. So the issue becomes not, the Alliance has never done anything bad - it becomes the Horde is always much worse so it looks like the Alliance is always justified in whatever it does.
As I recall, and it has been a while, one of the main goals was to remove Taurajo as a staging ground, so that the Horde would have to fall back to the Great Gate at the Mulgore border and couldn’t so easily flank Alliance forces as they moved north to reinforce the night elves.
(Which I think is itself fairly ridiculous, charging across half the continent like that. And as I also recall, the Barrens conflict is in its own nonsensical time loop, where one of the main Alliance motivations was some event that occurred after the Cataclysm, while it’s stated elsewhere that the Cataclysm occurred during the Barrens conflict.)
Don’t worry, Golden herself, a writer for World of Warcraft regularly described the distances between towns as only a couple-days ride, making the diameter of Azeroth smaller than earth’s moon. She confused the scant number of buildings in Theramore as being the actual structural makeup of the city, so Jaina could run from the docks to the city gates in a single breath, and all the civilians were evacuated in less than an hour.
Also Garrosh was able to have the entire Horde Navy form a blockade around the continent of Kalimdor, which prevented all access to the Alliance.
I want you to think about that for a moment. I want you to imagine having enough ships to block every beach on a continent. Even the parts that were in Night Elf and Draenei territory.
It’s really… really hard to take the War in Warcraft seriously after that.
I vaguely remember someone years ago calculating how big the game-scale Old World was using PCs as a baseline. It was around the size of New York City.
It sticks out because I’m pretty sure it’s the only settlement that Alliance have destroyed.
I really don’t think it was a flimsy justification. Alliance needed something, anything to prove that they were a threat to the Horde. Even if you strip away all the story’s contextual reasons for why it was done, from a metatextual point of view it was to incite Horde to action against the Alliance. To feel that the Alliance were a threat, and that this was a war. And all Alliance were able to destroy was Taurajo. It puts it into perspective.
This was why intentionally nerfing the Alliance or leaning into that ‘good guy’ aesthetic hurt the overall war narrative. It made the Horde look bad because why exactly were they leaning into that underdog vibe when it seemed like they could just destroy, steal, and burn cities whenever they wanted to. And it made the Alliance look like helpless victims that couldn’t defend themselves.
It’s also why it’s really funny whenever these arguments about which faction has done more evil stuff to the other faction that we inevitably get someone mentioning Taurajo and the goblin slave ship.
So I’m really never sure what the point of these arguments are. Is Horde unfairly villainbatted? Then all the evil they’ve done is egregious compared to Alliance. Has what the Alliance in game done equal to what Horde is done? Then why complain about getting villainbatted, it’s a morally gray story.
I mean this generally, not the discussion I’m having with Pellex. Just other similar discussions that tend to happen.
No, I get that they (Blizzard) wanted to have losses on both sides. I just think their justification for choosing Camp Taurajo to be the place the Alliance attacks is really weak. Crossroads would have made much more sense from a strategic standpoint.
The most charitable explanation I have for why they picked Taurajo is that they wanted it to lead to an awesome character arc for Baine when he led the defense of the gates of Mulgore. But then they scrapped that arc anyway, so it just ends up looking weird and irrational.
The Purge was not a mass-casualty event but it should have been so the Alliance could actually be a little more evil for once, thus giving Horde players more will and drive to fight and more importantly so there would be less elves in this elf-flooded setting.
Tbh a lot of Alliance aggression storylines aren’t part of their player experience as well. So things like Daelin Proudmoore, Northwatch, Garithos, Scarlet Crusade, Dwarven mining at the Tauren site etc… so from the player perspective it comes off as like ??? what is going on. You’re rushing to defend various locations from all sorts of atrocities.
While for the Horde, there’s an element of “we need to protect ourselves from the Alliance aggressors,” but that’s all NPC related and not something the Alliance player was part of instigating. Then in a response to that, Horde quests has the player doing/supporting quite a lot of questionable things in return like plague bombing a city, infecting the forest heart with demonic energy, bombing a druid school, burning down an entire city, etc…
This is also why things like the Purge of Dalaran seems insignificant in return because they’re comparing it to wide-scale atrocities like nuking an entire city that was leaning more towards peaceful Horde-Alliance relations across every single timeline it exists in. But when we analyze the Purge of Dalaran specifically, we can see that Jaina and the Silver Covenant dragged unrelated parties into the situation. She could’ve placed the city on lockdown, and get the Council and the Blood Elves/Alliance to conduct a thorough investigation and then get the people involved to trial.
I believe the only time where the Alliance player helped to instigate conflict was during Legion against Sylvanas. But even that was leaning more towards “Sylvanas is up to no good and we need to stop her,” in which they were proven right.