Its hilarious that until now you have been pointing out that in the end the Alliance ultimately won it so doesn’t matter what sort of defense or effort the Horde was able to deploy.
When I point out that ultimately the Alliance could not win on their own.
You backtrack the first battles and skirmishes.
I have seen the moving of goal posts but never seen them deployed in a circle.
Bravo.
so you didnt play 8.1. OK then thats all you needed to say cause thats the patch where after the alliance crushed the zanda navy and got the Kul’trians on there side the war was won for them both horde and alliance leaders side this, then azshara stalled and its always better to have other people die for you than your own, hence a rebellion
Have you ever heard the saying “winning the battle but losing the war.”?
Alliance had to outsmart the Horde (zandalar) by sacrificing their own troops and only succeeded in a raid.
They failed to accomplish anything in their attack other than the initial sabotage which we did in our quests rather military superiority.
But the alliance won the war, which the devs even agreed too
Which wouldn’t have happened if they actually pushed their advantage instead of retreating because the enemy was mourning the king they killed. But as usual King Peacedouche ruins everything and as a result the Alliance lost the war. Seriously what a balls up that was. The Horde went from weeks away from defeat to outnumbering the Alliance with their force split in half. Way to go High King.
How do you lose a war when the devs said you side won 
Blizzard can’t write a war story.
Logistics, strategy, troop numbers or quality and whatever else have you are not relevant.
Its not supposed to make sense.
Just look at Katiera, all it takes is the Devs tell you won and its enough.
Regardless of context or what happened before or after its enough.
You just have to have the memory of a gold fish and only remember the last piece of information through whatever medium you received and take that as gospel.
If I had complete control and the only thing I couldn’t change was the burning?
I would’ve preferred the Fourth War and the Kul Tiras/Zandalari story to have been separate stories. Maybe in the same expansion but self contained with one setting up the next.
As an example. Say the War of Thorns doesn’t happen right off the bat. Let’s say the war already kicked off in Silithus in a battle over the azerite but some third party, possibly what is left of the Aspects or some watchers, basically tell us to back the Hell off from Azeroth’s bleeding wound and fight our war elsewhere.
Then we find out there’s a BUTT LOAD of azerite in Zandalar. Why? Because Zandalar is a holy place similar to Mount Hyjal. Wild gods, avatars of life and nature, congregate there. Therefore there’s something special about those mountains.
Horde goes there to try and sweet talk Zandalar into mining azerite from their sacred mountains. Something that King Rastakhan is NOT on board with.
Alliance go to Zandalar’s closest neighbor, Kul Tiras, and convince them to go to war with their long time enemies the Zandalari and use their nation as a spring board to fight the Horde over a war for Zandalar’s azerite.
The two powers fight a proxy war through the two nations. it escalates. Somewhere along the way the War of Thorns and Battle for Lordaeron happen. Suddenly what started as a small, local war between the two premiere naval powers with the backing of the global superpowers turns into an all out world war.
So we’d level in Kul Tiras and Zandalar and do that whole song and dance. Afterwards we lead into the Fourth War and it opens up with large, cata-style revamp of Darkshore, Ashenvale, Tirisfal, and maybe Gilneas as we fight over those areas.
Then as the patches roll out they introduce new regions like Arathi or the Barrens.
That is how I’d do a pure faction war story that doesn’t leave a chunk of the playerbase going “Okay but what is my motivation?”
Maybe the one time I will agree with you.
Blizzard has no grasp of even the basic outlines of how wars are fought, and doesn’t even seem to communicate basic plot points to all of its teams. Or maybe I was the only one who was amused at how the Horde randomly spawned Iron Carriers for the incursions, or the Alliance suddenly had three extra airships to destroy.
When what they say and what they show contradict each other? An armistice is not a victory.
If you get rid of your Horde bias I am sure you and I would agree on more issues.
What if you couldn’t move the placement of the War of the Thorns?
Because that’s what I agree with you about, than 8.0 was not where I wanted to be after that.
That is where it becomes much harder. I actually have some sympathy for Blizzard’s writers on this point. The Burning was most likely an order that came from corporate. They had to try and make a story where we go from THAT to Kul Tiras and try to make it seem organic.
I don’t know if it is possible to get players interested in Kul Tiras after the Burning, though. At least not night elf fans who don’t care about visiting another human kingdom.
So if I had to start the expansion off with the War of Thorns I’d probably cut Kul Tiras and Zandalar from the story entirely and let it just be a Fourth War story that begins with the War of Thorns and rapidly spreads to the rest of Azeroth. It would be a full scale Cata-style revamp expansion that doesn’t introduce a new continent, just changes the continents we know.
thats the problem tho, alliance characters arent just nelves, they are humans, nelves gnomes, ect ect. Not only that they play the PC which has to do the most important things to win, which in the wars case was getting the new navy
Your cut would have the same issues but in a different way
No it wouldn’t. Non-elves would still feel compelled to defend their allies and try to help them regain their homeland. If nothing else they’d be motivated to fight the Horde.
The “same issues in a different way” problem would only surface if my version had Stormwind be burned down only to tell the human players we’re going to go liberate Teldrassil instead.
its a global war, which zones are getting updated for content, is the whole xpac in kalimdor, are you gonna have the war stalemate the whole time if not, what towns and land are each faction gonna do. What are you gonna do for raids? the way warfronts work they would effect the zones you have to use
I guess what i mean is there is much bigger problems to tackle
These are all mostly gameplay level problems, not story level.
Also I already noted that in the event of a full Fourth War style expansion it would be a Cata-style revamp. It wouldn’t be in Kalimdor only, it would just begin mostly in Kalimdor and spread out to other zones as the war escalates into a global conflict.
The big issue with Kul Tiras and Zandalar in the scope of the narrative as-is is that they feel like vacations from the actual war story. This was great as a Horde player as I needed some time away from that trainwreck. But it is horrible as a night elf fan because it is basically telling me to take a vacation from defending the night elven homeland.
Good read Aviala 
I think this will be a sore subject on the forums for the foreseeable future, and I do not think an mmo was the appropriate format for even a game to handle this type of scenario. RTS would have been fine since it removes the personal element of faction loyalty and character choice (still would be odd)
Since we cannot change what happened, especially now. I just hope moving forward the Night elves can be shown to live up to their nature. Strength, wisdom, resolve, even perhaps a bit of righteous anger. We won darkshore (ashenvale is in question) so I hope that too is portrayed at some point in wows future as well.
But the wound to the player base hasn’t been fully mended, despite the “victory.” Starting off with Teldrassil and Lordaeron and immediately dumping those stories probably burnt a lot of night elf and forsaken fans. If those zones had been apart of the original war campaign it may have been more satisfying… still though, we cannot change what has happened.
I’m not sure it’s even possible to mend this now. Assuming you’re referring to the faction divide it’s an impassable chasm now. They did too good of a job making us hate each other and now there’s no reason any sane player would work with the opposite faction again.
That and the feelings of betrayal towards the Night Elf and Forsaken playerbase, being used as just a part of a plot hole to kick off a story/ expac is the least rewarding and incoherent way.