I don’t know about Garrosh in that example, though. I remember people loathing him and that he only “turned around” in some people’s eyes because he became a villain everybody was given the narrative go-ahead to hate. If anything, I imagine it would have been easier for alliance players to like-hate him as a villain over horde players, because they weren’t being expected to waffle back and forth on treating him as a representative hero too.
As for if the faction war should be killed off, while I’d definitely prefer that, I just don’t see it happening. The ending of BFA feels custom-designed to be as unsatisfactory as possible, to the point where I would have thought it was written specifically to try to dampen people’s support of cross-faction play. And if it was, I think it worked; look at any GD thread about the topic and you can see a lot of push back from players who don’t want to group with opposite players because of what their respective factions have done.
It also allows characters to actually be morally grey without issue, since no one cares about players committing endless war crimes against murlocs and other designated enemies.
I don’t think the Faction War should be pruned completely. As mentioned, there’s just too much baggage for that to be a satisfying conclusion. But something does need to change, because Blizz just straight up aren’t good at writing it.
Even when they try to write a good conflict, they can’t help but choose one side as the “Good Guys”.
Personally, I would have liked to see a return to a more Vanilla-era Faction War. Where there was very little in terms of open conflict aside from skirmishes, yet both factions were clearly working against each other.
When BfA was announced, that’s how I wanted things to end. I had hoped that both sides would use Azerite to escalate the stakes until we hit a breaking point and realize that War on this scale was akin to nuclear annihilation. It would force the factions into a Cold War-style conflict.
I think it might be too late for that. It might have worked after Legion, but post-BfA, people are pretty entrenched, and just being told “X is on your side now” isn’t going to make longtime players embrace them.
As much as I’d love to get rid of it, there’s no way I can see the faction war ending and the reasoning not being laughably ridiculous, let alone satisfying. Not after the Horde as a whole was complicit in a genocide again.
Of course with the lore how it is now, being completely terrible and ridiculous would fit right in, so oh well.
“Absorbed into the Horde.” “We’re only genocidal when the war chief is genocidal.” “Of course we slaughtered countless civilians and burned thousands alive, gotta do what the warchief says.” “It’ll be fiiiine, you’ll just be slaves. No problem!”
I just cannot even with this tripe. Please take it to fanfiction.net where it belongs.
The faction war story is fine, but only when its a back burner B plot. Every single time, and i mean that, EVERY, SINGLE, TIME, blizzard tries to force the faction war as an A plot, it results in some of the most horrible writing, and pisses off the most fans.
This is simply because a player faction conflict story, has no positive ending to it that will leave the majority of the player base satisfied. There are only 3 possible outcomes to a A plot faction war story.
Clear Winning Side
This ending results in one faction clearly winning over the other faction, this can result in a half decent story plot and development of characters, but can not really be driven anywhere meaningful with out one half of the player base getting their faction dumped on, thus pissing them off, as no one likes to be on the loosening side/getting kicked. At best you have half the population happy with this, and progressing the story.
Pyrrhic Victory
This ending results in one siding winning, but sufferings horrible losses and or defeats in the process, resulting really in no one clearly winning or loosing. This results in a majority of the player base getting pissed off, and the story while progressing in character development, ultimately will just lead to characters loosing and or dying and really gaining nothing. So this benefits no one, and does not really progress the story and pretty much puts you back to the start.
External threat/stalemate
The third and most common outcome we get, is the faction war either not going anywhere, characters randomly dying for no story plot progression or character development, but simply killing them to kill them. Or worse yet, some external force or threat preventing the war from actually finishing, or ButtPull story plots that make no sense in order to end it on a note where no one really wins or looses (See jaina telling varian not to kill the horde at the end of SoO a total 180 of her character at the time) This is hands down the worst outcome possible when its an A story plot. It results in most of the player base upset, improper built up to the external force that stopped everything, characters getting no real progression in development or story beats progressing.
Long and short, The faction war never works as an A plot, see WoD, BFA, second half of MoP. It does however work nicely as a B plot line, see first half of MoP, Wrath, and Legion.
I’m going to acknowledge the elephant in the room first - this is evidently being proposed to advocate that the burning of Teldrassil should continue to go unresolved, and that the narrative pain that Blizzard had the Horde dealing to the Alliance should not be dealt with. Given the OP - this is clearly being advanced for entirely selfish reasons, not out of concern for a good story.
With that being said, the problem with WoW’s rivalry is that it’s been made needlessly toxic, and there was a point in time where I wanted to make a larger point on rivalries for which I did a deep dive into football hooliganism.
My conclusion ended up being that most of the time it had nothing to do with the sport or the teams at all. English football hooligans just want to fight. The Celtics/Rangers rivalry is built on ethnic tensions - same with violence in Serbia. German and Polish fans are still fighting over World War 2 - the game doesn’t actually matter in most of those cases, it’s just a vector for existing problems and animosity.
Except in one rather interesting case:
If you don’t want to watch the whole thing - ABC news fingers widespread corruption and accusations of match-fixing as the root cause behind the fans’ anger and propensity for violence.
Well… what is deciding who wins and loses faction war contests but match fixing? What is determining who is the good guy and who is the bad guy? The people in the stands are angry because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the contest is unfairly stacked against our team. What do we rage about here?
I think this sort of thing is unfortunately, further, inevitable when you decide that the faction conflict is not to be decided through fair gameplay, but at the whims of writers who write to their preferences and biases. If you want to fix the rivalry, you have to do something about that.
