Just passing this along from Kyalin.
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**** the Alliance! ****ing die you ****ing emo ****. […]
I am pathetic. When it comes to World of Warcraft, I am a pathetic nerd. But I’m not Alliance! I can tell you that much!
- George (Corpsegrinder) Fisher. October 24, 2011
The Faction Rivalry
(https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/3992143/dev-watercooler-faction-favoritism)
On November 25, 2011, Dave “Fargo” Kosak posted an article to the Dev Watercooler. It was called “Faction Favoritism” - and it was intended to respond to accusations of Horde bias. Cataclysm had released one year prior, of course, and the faction war featured heavily in zone revamps that didn’t just give the Horde much-needed questing and zone content, but also gave the appearance of a dominant Horde and an Alliance that was losing ground.
That’s a problem in a competitive multiplayer environment, which in this case is expressed around the faction rivalry, which itself is heavily tied into the playable races. These are the strongest identifying point of our characters, in a game format that fundamentally is about selecting an identity that you like, and using your skills and your own decision making to explore and influence a broad expansive world. An MMO is all about player identity, and the Alliance was being typecast as incapable. That kills motivation, and that’s why at the time, Alliance players were up in arms, particularly after Blizzcon 2011.
Fargo and developers since him have given lip service to this concept. “We want players to be proud of their faction, even at the expense of personal dignity.” Fargo stated. I remember hoping to expect after Fargo said that, that he would acknowledge the problem and announce content that would balance things out.
He didn’t.
"I’m sure glad we didn’t have orc forums back then!"
When WoW first released, it didn’t have much of a story. There were threats, sure, and there were some questlines that took you into the depths of the raids, but for the most part, you were left to explore the world around you and uncover its secrets. This is how I would argue an MMO should be written - instead of writing a narrative for you or making you follow a narrative, it establishes the world as a setting for you to craft your own. This doesn’t require elaborate choice systems or branching storylines, because it relies on emergent gameplay, and experiences that you derive in playing from other people.
That’s a stark departure though from Warcraft’s “roots”, which were based in an RTS. In an RTS, you can and should allow the player to make massive changes to the world. You can trash entire nations in an RTS, especially when the player is doing the trashing. But this doesn’t work in an MMO where playable races are involved. Again, the medium itself encourages and receives far too much investment in those races. A nation’s demolition isn’t happening to characters on the screen, it’s happening to the player , and it ties into their conception of their protagonist’s identity and ability. This is why I don’t find Fargo’s comparison to events that took place in the RTS games or in books to be make sense. In none of the events he mentioned did Blizzard explicitly put the player through those events. Often times they served as prologue, and the player experience begins afterward becoming one of growth. If you tried to pull any of those events in an MMO - I’m confident in saying that yes, you would have an issue in the “orc forums” - that reflects the problem with having these events happen to an established playable race in an MMO, and it gets orders of magnitude worse when faction rivalries with real, live, trashtalking people get involved.
"Suffering is the gasoline that drives our story engine."
Kosak goes on to explain the idea of the “Hero Factory”, elaborating that an unjust and unfair world is one that cries out for heroes.
Now stop - do you realize what he just said?
We were talking about an accusation of faction favoritism, and the piece pivots into how suffering drives their story and creates an unjust world that heroes must rise to mend. So certainly yes, there is favoritism, but it’s favoritism of a different kind.
Let me back up - Warcraft 3 largely established the setting in which World of Warcraft was being built, and the writing team wisely and boldly decided to redefine the Horde. Before this, they were largely stereotypical fantasy bad guys, but Warcraft 3 challenged that narrative and formed the identity of the Horde that attracted many if not most of its players. You could be an Orc and still be heroic - and the sins of the past were blamed on demon blood. But Kosak and his contemporaries undid Warcraft 3’s progress. An uncorrupted Mag’har Orc became a fascist dictator, and then we got introduced to an entire world of uncorrupted Mag’har Orcs who acted just like Warcraft 2 Orcs. Why? Well, it was to create the unjust world that heroes must rise up to confront. The Horde being a villain wasn’t an accident. It was the point.
Nevermind that this was explicitly not what Horde players signed up for. Nevermind that this erased all of the progress that Orcs had made, and subsequently soured a lot of players’ impressions about their own characters. Little of that would matter in an RTS - but again, it DOES matter in an MMO. Coming in from on high and saying “Horde bad”, “Alliance good” is lying to the playerbase, invalidating the choices they made, and bracketing the choices they now can make about their character.
The “Faction Pride” expansion
We know how Kosak’s vision worked out in the arc he was commenting on. Few people were satisfied with the Siege of Orgrimmar. It humiliated and shamed the Horde while cementing the idea that the Alliance was still not competent as a faction rival. It was all they could do when the attempt at shoving an RTS story into an MMO ran up against the limitations of an MMO. The Garrosh bait-and-switch didn’t work either. It failed to resolve concerns that the Horde was being written as evil, and for the Alliance it denied the sense of catharsis that stories following the “Heroes’ Journey” should deliver at this point. The whole concept therefore falls apart.
This isn’t to say that faction war stories are just impossible, but it does highlight the problem with trying to execute one under and RTS philosophy within an MMO. In an MMO, a faction war should live in the setting. That lets a healthy back and forth feed the rivalry, one in which people are motivated and proud to identify how they identified.
As for BFA? It was grown in a lab to make everyone feel awful, and it is a swan song to Kosak’s development philosophy. So has that worked? Well, the rivalry is as toxic and nasty as it’s ever been. Both sides largely agree that the experience was awful. I’ve heard from Horde players that their faction is irredeemable, the Forsaken had a hole blown in their whole identity, and of course Night Elf fans like myself really have no reason to play the game anymore (even if we still care, and would come back if our concerns were addressed). The victories for the rest of the Alliance meanwhile were limited, offscreen, asterisked, and/or unsatisfying - and no, mitigation that lives deep in the text but doesn’t end up onscreen doesn’t count.
“Yes, we know, the faction war failed”. There’s pages of commentary to that point - but the point of this post is to draw a line under the philosophy that stood behind it. I think it’s high time to acknowledge that Kosak was wrong, spectacularly wrong, about how to write the faction rivalry in an MMO - especially as we consider how to emerge from the decade-long train wreck that this very bad idea has left us in.
What now?
Now that we know that Kosak’s philosophy has failed - I’ll add a brief note on where I think we should go. The factions need rebalancing. The Horde needs to rebuild its identity, its roster of characters, and it cannot whipsaw back into villainy. What’s done is done of course, meaning that is going to have to grapple with an Alliance that isn’t going to forget past actions.
As for that Alliance - it needs a bombastic onscreen win (I of course would say in Ashenvale). Period. This doesn’t need to “punish” the Horde, and a good execution of this would seek to build the Horde in terms of characters and moral standing, but given that the “Hero Factory” failed, the Alliance comes out looking wimpy - and that’s death for a good rivalry. As for the “Hero Factory”, the Alliance shouldn’t be the designated series’ heroes. It’s not satisfying and it’s, well, biased.
