I’ll preface this by saying I hate quote-slicing. I’d rather the entirety of each reason be dealt with as a whole than line-by-line. So maybe that’s my fault.
But what I got out of your replies to each reason was “The Alliance has it worse” or “The Alliance didn’t do that”. It misses the point - no one ever said it had to be “Alliance-inflicted losses”. That’s where the disconnect is happening, because it seems to me that many Alliance players discount Horde loss because it didn’t happen as a direct action from them? It doesn’t make things things that were lost come back, especially characters.
You keep trying to tell me “Your losses don’t matter” because in your view they don’t equal the losses the Alliance felt. Fine, you’re entitled to your opinion, but trying to tell me that my losses didn’t happen is extraordinarily irritating. I think that’s what leads you to your conclusion that you don’t think the Horde’s situation is very bad, but I am trying to explain to you why it is worse than you think.
I’m also curious as to where the Alliance are reminded that they are mean to the Zandalari in-game. That’s something that Horde players have brought up (because we have precious little justification otherwise), unlike the reminders in-game that the Horde gets about being “bad people”. I didn’t even go into the more minor details of how each side is presented to the other - how the Alliance soldiers are always presented as thinking, feeling beings to sympathize with to the Horder, whereas the Horde are presented as out-of-control berserkers to the Alliance, thankful to be cut down by the player - because that is minor quibbling over nuance.
The overall portrayal of BfA to the Horde player is, in other words, extremely negative.
Serious question: did you play the Horde war campaign at all? It was a useless muddle and for the first half of it you don’t even engage with the Alliance, you crept around robbing graves. I didn’t actually even bring up that the Horde also lost a promising new character in Zelling. But, having played a good chunk of the Alliance campaign and all of the Horde campaign… the Alliance campaign makes you feel like you’re trying to fight a war effort, and the Horde campaign is… there? It’s an extremely frustrating set of quests, and by the end of 8.1, almost everything you tried to accomplish in the Horde war campaign is undone or taken away. You literally end the quests worse than you started. I think the only actual positive accomplishments in the Horde war campaign are carried out by Gallywix of all people, and even then he still loses badly to Mekkatorque before escaping.
i think that is when saurfang shows up and said something like
“or a sovereign king, slain in his own home”
Saurfang, the literal genocidal monster gives us moral lessons.
and daring to compare teldrassil with dazarlazor.
like is not even close how far they are, the alliance tried to avoid civilians (most of them)
The horde, did not.
if anything i don’t even understand why the alliance is respecting their civillians is not like the horde had the same courtesy.
I understand that. It’s a valid point.
The thing is though both factions suffer from outside influences where characters or lands are ravaged by NPC factions.
The core issue right now is that Alliance players are sick and tired of being on the losing side and any idea they propose is shoot down because it makes you feel bad from all those unrelated losses.
By your own words the best “wins” alliance seems to manage is recovering what they already had. Alliance is constantly operating at a net loss here.
My point is rather simple.
Horde took something away from the Alliance.
Alliance should take something of equal value away.
Some posters here have commented that this mirror tit for tat story telling is very boring and I agree. The problem is Alliance has been losing crap to Horde and Baddies since Cataclysm relentlessly.
BFA was a drum of oil on an already large smouldering bone fire.
Thats why some of them most commonly suggested ideas is a counter attack that has the Horde running on their home ground.
The Horde player could have their own NPCs shame the Alliance on their way to Durotar and similar experience. I am sorry you feel down due to the writer’s decisions but its no defense against what other players are justifiably asking for.
Perhaps you should be asking Blizzard for some of those unrelated to Alliance Horde losses with some unrelated Alliance Horde wins.
Key word to that bolded section is I do not think the Alliance is to blame for that situation and it should not be Alliance that is penalized to redress their own problems.
The Horde’s situation is mostly internal issues as you mentioned. The situation for the Horde player, especially Forsaken players, may be horrifically bad but its not Alliance’s fault.
Alliance’s problems are directly caused by the Horde and its the Horde that has to pay to fix them.
Will that make you feel worse? Without a doubt. But then you need blizzard to give you some internal wins to fix the issue which by the way I think they tried to do with the rebellion questline and its conclusion in Orgrimmar with all the unique dialogue and interactions the Horde player got.
The Alliance player got absolutely NOTHING. The scale of unique features the Horde player and the variety of unique options they got is unprecedented in wow’s history. Clearly Blizzard is trying things but it isn’t sticking. But at least they are trying.
You had cinematic saurfang cinematics, unique dialogues, unique events, unique branching storylines. All for Horde players only.
Alliance players got none of that despite being brutalized the worse when this expansion started and since then they have still had to put with some things as well (See loyal undead NEs)
Anyway to recap.
Horde’s situation is bad true but its mostly internal. To remedy that you need internal features which Blizzard seems to have attempted to deliver.
Alliance’s situation is bad but its mostly external. And they can’t remedy that because the Horde is feeling down. I don’t understand how this mentality does not apply to Alliance players but it is what it is.
Before BOD Alliance is reminded to minimize troll civilian casualties.
After BOD Alliance is feeling incredibly depressed over all the sacrifices, failure to stop the Zandalari, not pressing our advantage because the Troll king is dead and etc.
A very depressing affair with no net positive.
Not negative enough. Not nearly enough I am afraid.
I got around to it last month.
Honestly I did not at all see what Horde players are talking about being villains.
If you missed out on Teldrassil event then Horde’s problems seem like a minor disagreement in governance.
Most characters ignore why this war began in the first place and what the Horde did. Its like they are in a vacuum and cannot express they are wrong in anyway unless you look REALLY hard.
The quests feel disconnected or goofy. Motivations are all over the place, “Guess we got a war to fight, so we are going to fight it and this is how”
The strategy and ideas seemed idiotic but thats warcraft for you.
If I play the Horde I wanted to be monsterous if I can’t be moral… so raid villages, blight towns, mayham, brutality and warcrimes none-stop.
I got none of that.
The war was just… there. Like distraction and nothing more.
I didn’t get the reluctant soldier in a war they don’t want to be in experience nor did I get the merciless bloodthirsty monsters experience.
The Alliance war campaign was better but not that great either. No memorable moments, just walking to here and there and killing people or achieving objectives I don’t remotely care about.
It is always weird that line being there. Makes me wonder if there wasn’t a swapping of characters that were supposed to be involved there cause that line doesn’t fit with neither Saurfang nor Thrall and the dialogue never got updated to reflect the change of characters.
Saurfang was taken captive before the Zandalari were ever involved in a positive fashion with the Horde and Thrall was in Nagrand the whole time. Neither one of them was around the the Horde aiding the Zandalari or having meaningful enough interactions with Rastakhan to merit egging the Alliance on in that situation where both sides are infiltrating Org on a rescue.
Are we back to the chat Katiera with the reactionary puddle deep responses?
If so we are done.
What you said above cannot even be described as a rational thought. What are you even talking about?
When you encounter Thrall and Saurfang, and you’re with Matthias and…I don’t remember if it was Flynn or Jaina at that point. They say something about working together, and Shaw says “Isn’t the first time we’ve had to take down a corrupt warchief”. And the Saurfang says “or a sovereign king, slain in his own home”.
Like, seriously? Are you serious? Garrosh Hellscream was waging war with the world. The rest of the Horde had also decided he needed to be taken down. This wasn’t just a case of Stormwind deciding “Let’s assassinate him”. This was Horde, the Alliance, the people of Pandaria, all of that realizing that maybe - maybe - it wasn’t a good idea to let “mountains of skulls and rivers of blood and I…WILL…HAVE…MY…WOOOOOORLLLLDD!” run around with fragments of an Old God.
But, by all means, Saurfang. Lecture us about that. Because you totally weren’t one of the people there for the destruction of Stormwind. But that’s okay, because you had been drinking demon blood.
I mean are you gonna just take lore out of context like the fact that we know forces refused to show up so the alliance is missing forces and not at full strength when anduin said that
Did you not see the Night Elves along side with the other Alliance races at orgrimmar? They were led by Shandris… like… what are you even saying right now?
One one level, I kinda like some of that ribbing - I don’t think Saurfang or Thrall are the best people to bring up Rastakhan since they weren’t even on the same planet when the siege happened, but that’s probably how the Horde would have seen the event and I like a bit of that IC-knowlege-different-than-OOC-knowledge flavor that makes the story feel that much more like a world.
But, when that extra bit of aggravation is added on top of waves hands at everything else in BfA, it’s not enjoyable.
And yet the Night Elves were there.
They did not abandon the Alliance.
Merely a portion of them were fighting a Horde force in Darkshore.
You realize in war you don’t abandon all fronts right?
There were probably Alliance forces still fighting in Stromgarde and other fronts too. They weren’t abandoned for this one assault otherwise all those commanders and their forces would have been at orgrimmar too but they weren’t.
You are head canoning your own ideas as actual lore.
Clearly all Alliance races spared what they could for this assault.