(Just pretend I’m posting on my Druid ok? ![:deciduous_tree:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/deciduous_tree.png?v=6" ":deciduous_tree:")
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“I propose we use the Undead as compost to grow another tree. If we use them as life food then they can return to the Life cycle and be forever part of this earth in a useful way. Yes that would do for me.”
I don’t see why not. Night Elves are also playable, and yet…
gestures around at all the bad
It’s kind of a different thing, hence me adding the qualifier “within WoW”. Watching randos die in a top-down, on the rails rts isn’t quite the same as personally creating a character to inhabit a world, and interacting with its people and places, in some cases for well over a decade.
Ontop of that, what happened to the Legion? Beaten and disbanded. The Scourge? Beaten. The Twilight’s Hammer? Beaten (yeah, they keep coming back, but that’s a cult for you). Random murloc tribe #394, who killed a couple guards and civilians? Utterly beaten. The Horde, who accomplished much worse after we were given playable characters and interactive settingsto invest ourselves in?.. Completely forgiven, as we all bask in the rainbows, sunshine, and unicorn farts emanating from Anduin’s gold-plated hindquaters (and now Jaina’s as well).
That sounds like a good way to get it too full of Death magic, and end up summoning Gorak Tul, or something.
Fresh Orc. It’s the compost your Shan’do uses and trusts. overly enthusiastic advertiser smile
Retcon all of WoW.
If we can’t go back that far, then stop at Wrath, before the jingoistic “FaCtIoN cOnFlIcT” crowd took over development and the subs started to tank.
Either or both. It was more so a general question. I read someone in another thread last night mention something about equal compensation. It made me wonder what the Night Elven RPers (or who associate with their culture) would find equivalent.
I’m quite suprised at how little value is actually being placed on their victory over a fully fledge Horde army on it’s home field and destroying Tirisfal including the Under City.
True but her defeat lead to it. Had she not suffered such a catastrophic defeat, all the undead players with fond memories of Tirisfal (myself included even though I don’t play undead now) wouldn’t have lost their version of Teldrasil. They still would have lost their free will and the post cata undead their Lordaeron, however. Sylvannas as writen by Golden would have ruined their lore and what that zone used to mean to people, never the less.
i feel like the faction conflict garbage is the cause of all of this, characters ruined or with not a clear direction.
just like in mop, blizzard wanted players screaming at each other.
it was already bad enough that they didn’t let us even get the damn killing blow on garrosh and we got kill stealed by thrall and gaining… nothing in return. meanwhile horde players mocked alliance players and continued to do so.
is honestly pretty exhausting.
You shouldn’t be. People who exclusively RP Alliance had no vested interest in the UnderCity.
What is surprising is the vehemmence over the loss of Darnassus even though I’m fully aware that the bulk of the RP community I knew gave the place very little traffic before it’s impending death sentence came down.
As another thought: I think the idea of revenge for Teldrassil is difficult because of different overall priorities and mindsets between the factions.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I tend to lean Alliance because, especially for players, they are largely the defensive faction. While questing for both factions is primarily to defend already-settled lands, the Alliance has more zones where their land is considered ancestral; where they lived relatively peacefully for a long time, and have deep roots and connections with the territory.
The story for the Horde races is rather different: some Forsaken show deep ties to Lordaeron soil and their history with it, but others don’t. The tauren were nomadic, the trolls lost their island and haven’t been written with a strong drive to retake it (or even mention it much), and the orcs are forging their place in a new world. While they’re not devoid of a personal connection to their territories, more focus is put on expansion rather than reclamation. (The blood elves are a big exception, but past their introduction, the lore hole has kept there from being much worry about losing Quel’thalas.)
And, of course, the initial zone imbalance made this divide worse, since balancing it made the Horde more expansionist and the Alliance suffer defeats (or just get defeated and never hear about it). While this rebalancing was sorely needed, for many Alliance players, this made them even pricklier about losing more territory, especially to the Horde - because now that things were balanced, there definitely wasn’t going to be any good way for the Alliance to get what they see as recompense.
So this sets up a situation where the Horde has a tiny amount of locations with as much impact to the average Horde player as places like Teldrassil have to the average Alliance player.
And as a side note, because this is even more unscientific than my other conclusions: I think that, based on the not-really-representative forum posters and people in chat that I’ve seen, more Horde players than Alliance players seem to prefer sounding tough - so even if something happens to them that’s as emotionally cutting as Teldrassil, they’d probably show less of a reaction, leading many Alliance players to think that an equal blow hasn’t been struck.
So, in conclusion, I don’t think anything can be done to really ‘equal out’ the Burning of Teldrassil.
Anything equal numbers-wise won’t effect the same reaction the Alliance had, and anything equal in emotional response is probably impossible, or would be horribly imbalanced.
In raw numbers, the Alliance has sacked one Horde city (though without punching through an equal amount of territory and civilian towns to get there, while looking stupid against the blight, and having Sylvanas still make the final move) and successfully struck a second city and killed Rastakhan. They’re told that they’re winning on all fronts and close to victory. But it doesn’t have the same emotional punch.
In terms of emotion, what valued things does the Horde have left? Orgrimmar? It’s been sacked once - twice would be an insult, but it wouldn’t be shattering a pillar of the Horde’s identity. Kill the warchief? They’ve been playing warchief roulette already - depriving them of another wouldn’t be impactful. At this point, anything removed from the Horde would reduce them to the state where they need to seize something to build back up, which negates the revenge aspect and leaves the Alliance howling for more that the Horde doesn’t have. Wag their finger and tell the Horde not to do it again, for realsies? We did that already, and it’s already been trampled over and forgotten.
For a largely defensive-minded group like the Alliance, what makes up for losing -again- on the defense? For having so many civilians die on your watch, with a quest made to reinforce how hopeless is to save them all?
I don’t think any offensive action can make up for that. And the players have retaken and fortified their lands several times only for the next plot to come along and wreak havoc again, so it’ll require a lot of hard work and good writing to make any defensive action feel like it means anything more than creating a shiny for the Horde to knock over the next time they go a-rampaging.
Sorry for the ridiculously long rant. Just… ugh. This plot was a terrible idea, and there’s no way to wrap it up without insulting one or both factions.
The thing is, Blizzard needs to stop messing the Story with it’s B-Magic Wand. Even Magic has to have it’s limits.
Otherwise, any character, any moment can pull the Deus Ex Machina to leverage the Story. Removing this thinking would help making more realistic stories.
IRL. Sieging Undercity was the most stupid tactic as it was. UC is said to be a full Labyrinth extending throughout Tirisfal, and inhabited by Undead, who don’t eat, drink or breath. And have plague. How do you siege catacombs that are buried way beneath earth, full of undead people…Certainly not by demolishing the ruins above.
Edit. Also I picture Teldrassil burning as; a bunch of children toys trying to burn a Weeping willow it would take a LOT of time even if loaded with hot pitch, enough time to evacuate most of the city, but that’s not what quests tell.
I agree. I’m fairly certain that, while they stated this isn’t SoO 2.0, this expansion serves the same purpose as MoP. After dealing with a cataclysmic (heh get it?) event we have a “cool down” expansion where the threat is more local and on par with our own strength. This equal opponent unfortunately ends up being our very allies from the previous year.
We slam into each other again to become weakened and the “foolish” catalysts for the next big-bad that we have to sensably team up to defeat.
If an empty Darnassus had burned, I think there’d be less outrage.
If the Alliance had set an empty Darnassus on fire to deny it to the Horde, I think there’d be a -lot- less outrage.
But as it is, it’s not just the destruction of Darnassus. It’s the invasion of Ashenvale, where lines were designed for the killing of civilians whether it was canon or not (probably not, but those lines still sting).
It was charging to the defense only to find yourself in a town already full of civilian corpses, which you have to read the short story to understand. It was performing last rites over those bodies and watching their very souls join in one last final doomed defense of their lands and their kin.
It was frantically running through the burning streets, telling the surviving civilians to run to safety, and knowing that most of them would die. And that was just in Darnassus - what of Dolanaar, of Shadowglen? The furbolg tribes? Teldrassil itself?
It was, from reading the books, knowing that those who were killed in Darnassus were not just civilians - these were the ones who could not or chose not to fight in Ashenvale, the ones who retreated and retreated, who were ready to surrender to the Horde. And were horribly murdered instead.
It was seeing that the Horde had done something far worse, far more effective than any other villain the Alliance had faced in this game. And knowing that we’d just have to sit back and take it, because we would never be allowed to get revenge for it.
It was knowing that we’d already been through MoP, storming Orgrimmar and making a toothless promise that they should uphold the honor that should have ruled out this atrocity. Should we raid the city again, make an equally inspid threat, then give them back the city and wait until the next time the Horde attacks us because the writers/developers/whoever can’t think of a better plot for them? How many times do we need to walk through the same story, failing and failing so the Horde can have another soul-searching experience that its own playerbase doesn’t want to suffer through?
The Horde shouldn’t have to suffer the same level of sorrow and despair for their faction - and neither should the Alliance, but we did. And now we’re stuck, railing on the forums because what else can we do?
That’s pretty much what did happen. Darnassus pretty much WAS an empty city as far as player presence was concerned, even among the RP community. Not even Alliance PVP players would bother to defend it.
Well, for me personally, my guild had plenty of events there. Whenever I wandered the city, there were always some people there, even if it was just a few. It’s not representative of the whole player base, but there were many people who liked it. And an unknown amount of people who still liked the city, even if they didn’t hang out there due to convenience or liking another city more.
And the story went out of its way to show how many innocent people died there. I don’t know about you, but I play Alliance and I play healers because I want to defend and save people - the Burning was about the cruelest thing they could write for people like me.
If you don’t have an emotional connection with the fictional location or the bunch of people-shaped pixels who died there, that’s fine. They aren’t real. But a lot of people did have that connection, and had a strong response when those fictional people were killed horribly.
And that’s what roleplaying is about…having meaningful events, frequently horrific ones happen that have an impact, that are futures you didn’t choose.
The War of Thorns and it’s aftermath were cathartic springboards for roleplaying. Instead of making use of this material for background most so-called roleplayer chose to complain instead.
War IS horriffic and sometimes that needs to be brought home right to the player’s doorstep.
The only thing that I felt as a player is that Horde got shortchanged in it’s dramatic opportunties for the Battle of Lordaeron.
And if I thought that something interesting and meaningful would come from it, then it’d be fine. The blood elves had an interesting transformation after the fall of Quel’thalas, after all. But after having the story mangled one too many times, many players - and night elves in particular - have lost hope that this disaster will lead to any growth.
We got a cool Battle For Darkshore - the intro cinematic to the warfront is neat and some of the armor is great (as you seem to be well aware ![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
), but apparently Tyrande and the night elves ‘had their vengeance’, so all they’ll do for the rest of the expansion is fight in the plagued ruins of their home while wearing some black contacts. Woo! Societal growth… I guess?
Obviously, we’re not getting revenge against the Horde. So that’s out. I guess we can hope to be slightly scarier fodder for the Horde to keep steamrolling? Maybe some more sad books about how even more elves die? I guess the line about ‘eyes other than our own’ seeing justice includes the player, because we certainly aren’t seeing anything.
Maybe the Night Warrior arc will go somewhere. Maybe the night elves will get interesting story development. I hope so. But that’s what many of us hoped after the last multiple stompings the night elves received.
Doorstep? It was marched into the player’s house, rubbed all over the floor and walls, and then crammed down their throats! I’m still coughing up melancholy almost a year later!
I agree. I feel really bad for that one Forsaken trooper who keeps getting teased for getting nostalgic over his garden. I wonder if this dearth of Undercity reminiscing is due to that ‘no history books allowed / no holding onto the past’ idea from BtS.
No alliance bothers to respond when I solo Anduin in Stormwind every other week on my DK.
Funny how the population of cities are determined by Blizzard.
Okay. I’ll bite. Why not? If it was done to the NE and NE players, why is unthinkable to do to the Horde and Horde players?
Blizzard had no literary or ethical reservations over putting the boots to the NE.
If Blizzard gave the Kaldorei some real payback, it would hurt their bottom line. Horde players would quit–not a small number.
But Blizzard didn’t seem to care about losing NE players–not a small number.
They already have it. But it’s called SoO 2.0.
I wish I could post links. I was going to link Mabel screaming “death!”
Edit: huh, apparently I can now.
Hmm … this is never a productive topic.
Some of the NE fans on this sub seem totally incapable of separating the STORY reasons the Horde NEEDS to be punished; and the META reasons that Blizz needs to be careful HOW that approach those punishments (as they themselves forced the Horde to commit to this nonsense). After all, despite the mass of hyperbole on this thread … it really was only a small, edgy faction of the Horde player-base that revelled in Teldrassil (and MANY Horde players seem to be siding with Sylvie exclusively due to spite due to their contempt of being forced into this situation again).
Its a very bizarre and emotion fueled situation by very devout players…