At this point in WoWs life, it’s unrealistic to believe that the addition of High Elves would impact Horde Blood Elf players, immensely.
If they had added High Elves right after Burning Crusade, then yes, we would have things to discuss.
They’ve built guilds, friends, memories, in the Horde. If you’re telling me the only reason someone would play the Horde would be to be able to play as JUST, a Blood Elf, that is so incredibly sad for the Horde’s image as a whole and those players never cared for the Horde in the first place.
At this point, yeah, there’s going to be a few people who would play an Alliance High Elf.
But, overall, I think a lot of folks are going to keep a few characters on the Horde as that’s where their guilds and friends are. Frankly, supposing very many would race switch at all is also presumptuous. A lot of them likely already have Alliance alts with which they could do the unlock questline. From there, more likely they’d level a fresh level one high elf character or use a level boost on said fresh character.
I don’t foresee some mass exodus of Horde players to the Alliance as a direct consequence of adding High Elves.
If there were ever a mass exodus from Horde to Alliance it would be from some gameplay mechanism that is far larger and more impactful than a playable race.
On a side note, from an RPG perspective…quite frankly, the Quel’dorei are far closer to the archetypal High Elf than the Sin’dorei in my opinion. Yes, same species, I get it…I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about philosophy and choices. What they do and what they have done. The Sin’dorei are much more of rugged survivors. Sure their aesthetic, matches what you’d think of a High Elf…but their mentality is different. They aren’t the majestic archetypal high elves they present themselves to be. My opinion.
Why do you find it necessary to sound so condescending? Calm down please.
Anyways,
I’m sorry, your speculations have no merit IN REGARDS to people supporting high elves based on evidence shown in game. You basically just sound like a paranoid person, and I’m showing you that I can be the polar opposite and it’s all just the same.
I think that it’ll provide more grounds for the high elf and void elf relationship to develop within the alliance. You’ll have Alleria and Vereesa leading the two groups side by side. Perhaps conflict will arise. Many players will race change from whichever race they’re playing to high elf. Players will continue playing void elves because they love the void theme.
Your pessimistic views are just as valid as my optimistic views. You see it as if it would “take away” from void elves even though no one is asking for this to happen. It’s not a competition, no one is asking to remove void elves or switch the void elf heritage armor onto high elves, give high elves void elf skin, etc.
And I don’t think your pessimistic views should be used against someone playing the race they love! Especially since you’ll continue playing whichever race you love whether or not high elves are played by randos.
Well, that’s a relief to hear that nothing possibly could go wrong. I mean, what chance is there that people who really really want something would ever downplay or deny the possibility of that thing having negative repercussions.
More options is a net positive in an MMO, as far as avatar customization goes. This includes player race. While the positive gain is vastly different depending on the option at hand, I’ve yet to see a race added to an MMO that drove players away.
Too many races dilute the impact of each race on the story. So you will most likely end up with even worse story than we have now where some races get neglected in the story. Plus there’s all the various balance issues with racials that crop up when you start going nuts with races.
Less is more. A smaller number of well done races with broader customization options is better than a bunch more races dividing up any development time into smaller and smaller chunks per race, and with less customization per race.
And really if we’re going to label a near identical copy of a race as more options, that just lies down the road towards a bunch of visually boring mmos that have lots of “different” races or options that are all just variations of traditionally attractive humans with fantasy features like pointy ears, or cute horns or whatever.
I agree that every decision needs to be made carefully when it comes to gameplay affecting mechanics like flying, quests, dungeons, classes so on so forth. Since they directly impact our characters.
However, it’s hard to go along with folks who act like a purely cosmetic option (that’s already been part of the alliance for years) will do any wrong.
It just seems unrealistic, at the end of the day seeing a high elf walking around will not give you a -10% damage debuff haha
Less is more from a balancing and one particular view on gameplay perspective, but when it comes to catching customers, you want more customization options to reach as many people as possible. Now, you do not always have to add a new race for this. The key word here is “customization”.
And as bizarre as it is, customization is just as important as gameplay in the initial pull for customers. If you don’t have many options, you’re simply not competitive anymore. People are going to compare your MMO to others on a variety of things, and in the fantasy demographic, “playable LotR elves” is a major demographic, especially since LotR came out in the cinemas.
I don’t see why we shouldn’t have them. Fan requests being fulfilled does not contradict new options and worthwhile new content. If it does, the company is…doing something very wrong and very, very strange with business practices that could be called Lovecraftian.
because silvermoon, quel’thalas and the vast majority of the high elf population are a part of the horde. this gives our faction the far superior claim to their architecture, fashion assets and ofc themes and aesthetics of a high elf. just like the alliance is home to majority of the human population despite its many outlier factions
That doesn’t really fly with me, because I think the healthiest thing to do would be to abolish factions entirely and keep it as simple as “if it’s red it’s dead” anywhere hostile players matter.
Well aside from the fact that that has never been a cosmetic option for the alliance ever. It still can dilute the story, taking away an antagonist from a core race and turning it into a playable race removes options that are there for NPCs, and has a good chance of introducing negative story elements for the horde.
Some issues boil down to things other than gameplay numbers, and the story and such can very easily be hurt by pandering to every vocal complaint that comes up.
So do something that actually ADDS customization instead of shuffling it around to accomodate people who seemingly can’t deal with the fact that the pretty race they want isn’t with the other pretty races.
Correction: There are suggestions on how to make other models look nearly identical to blood elves and pretend that that is in any way a meaningful change.
But did you see, they’re adding some new Night elf skin tones that could be high elf-ish. Those are good with me.
Not really. They’re big on priests all over and these priests are now becoming increasingly martial. I see no reason for there not to be paladins of Elune in that changing cultural context.
That’s the major reason it happened in the first place, Horde racials are just outright better than Alliance racials for endgame content.
That’s good to hear from you, considering i spent the better part of an argument explaining to you that your unfounded doomsaying is nothing but personal fears.
