Plot Devices are not bad. I mean, the Heart of Azeroth is a plot device.
It’s when you relegate an entire group, with no consideration for their feelings, to plot device, that you have a problem.
Also, in stories, how long do most red vs blue conflicts survive? Not long. Because people start to realize the conflict is being artificially kept alive.
It CAN work, but it requires finesse. It requires both sides be proactive. It requires both sides being reactive. It requires good guys on both sides. It requires bad guys on both sides.
The breakdown seems spot on to me. It’s hard to have a balanced opinion when the rules of the game demand you dedicate most of your time to one faction or another. I play horse and hear people complain the less attention is paid to horde zones. So I guess it goes both ways.
Objectively the coolness factor is already there, I think it’s just a particularly volatile climate for blizzard to be openly supporting a rivalry amongst it’s fan base.
Maybe just summon influencers and sponsor events pitting the factions against each other.
Well yeah you go back to Vanilla, look at Warsong lumber camp. The Orcs needed lumber and food for their people. The Nightelves duty was to protect the forest and the creatures of nature from outsiders.
Whos evil? Theres a conflict but no ones evil! OMG! (Blizzard writers head explodes)
You can write both to have legitimate issues but one is always going to have more. We are humans, we naturally categorize and tally up things. The writers and a lot of the players live in colonial western moral based countries we can easily find one side that fits with our inherit values more than the other.
Additionally, those issues were proving to be less significant with each big bad we cooperatively take down, we actually lead to us having a peace agreement. But WoW in its current form cannot have peace between the two factions and one is going to have to do something immoral like burning down a tree full of civilians.
Yes, and back then when there were legitimate issues, people could identify with both sides and pick one based on their own opinion.
Now some players say they hate the Alliance when it’s their own faction. I personally just can’t empathize with the Alliance because they don’t act like Humans.
The Horde are more Human-like personality wise than the Alliance. The Alliance are like a sloth that will fall asleep on a busy road and get run over by a car.
You can’t get invested in a faction war when not only are there no legitimate gripes, but you also need one side to go crazy to spark something, and you need the other to be suicidally stupid. Who cares? The Alliance should die off if they are that stupid.
As I said there is no other way to write it though. They pushed the two factions close enough that the concept of a feud makes no sense anymore, hard to justify a conflict when you are fighting a world ending threat ever year. The only way to write yourself out of that is to escalate on an absurd level. Unfortunately that means one side needs to be the bad guy. They will never let alliance be the bad guy or to do something extreme like that unprovoked but making them be this righteous badass who not only gets to be effective but also the good guys would make horde players feel bad.
Hence why we just need to move away from the faction conflict entirely. Blizzard can’t write Alliance well because they don’t care past having them do things to make the Horde story more interesting.
On the flip side, they also can’t write Horde well even though they clearly try, because they are bad writers.
Vanilla, though many missed it, had the AhnQiraji invasion - defeated
Burning Crusade had the whole issue with Illidan’s forces - defeated
Wrath of the Lich King had The Scourge and the Lich King - defeated
Cataclysm had Deathwing and foolish groups everywhere obeying him - defeated
Mists of Pandaria had the Sha - defeated
Warlords of Draenor had … let’s pretend this didn’t exist, but it had the Iron Horde - defeated.
Legion had well duh, the Burning Legion - defeated
Every expansion has had an outside threat. And if my lorefu is accurate, I believe they’ve said since Vanilla its been about ten years. So we’ve had an invasion almost every other year.
And we cooperated with each other to defeat these threats.
Well you get my point. It is just hard to have all these conflicts, work side by side, and come up with any sort of slight misunderstanding that somehow justified war again and again. I mean I helped save the Exodar!
The other thing many forget is where did we get the resources to combat this many world ending threats? WW2 (for example) had gas rationing going on.
Think about the natural resources we’ve burned in a decade in WoW. Also think about how many hundreds of thousands of troops have died in these wars.
What, are babies born and age to fully armored warriors in months in WoW? We should have exhausted ourselves in terms of raw manpower (both factions) by the time Wrath was over.
That’s why I thought this entire expansion is a farce. Not only was it marketed as a faction war expansion with stupid unrealistic reasons for being sparked. I think the leaks will be correct and by the end of the expansion she was actually trying to help everyone and we will all be best buds again to take on the big bad.
So basically the entire expansion is a made up lie.
And even if the Alliance and Horde join forces next expac, and are even offered cross faction grouping, I don’t think Blizzards treatment of the Alliance will change at all.
Genn stages a coup and takes over the Alliance, putting Anduin under house arrest.
Genn attacks and destroys Undercity.
Sylvanas flees to Orgrimmar and destroys Teldrassil in response.
Night Elves get no help from Greymane and start grumbling about how the Alliance needs to be restructured.
But they won’t do that, and will never do that, because most of the time when I even suggest it, I’m met with Alliance players saying, “But Genn would never do that, he’s one of the Good Guys.”
And that’s the Alliance’s problem: A huge portion of their playerbase is completely opposed to the idea that anybody in the Alliance would ever do anything that isn’t on the straight-and-narrow.
So instead, every couple expansions, they make the warchief go crazy so that those same Alliance players can feel good about themselves about how morally superior they are.
Well how it treats the alliance faction leaders and the internal story between them is a joke. While I do disagree with many people here that think horde have it so much better(i tend to hate the story treatment we get) I would at least agree that your internal faction story is garbage. No real internal conflicts to speak even when they put a boy king in charge.
I’m not Horde and I’m in agreement. They’ve turned the Horde into little more than saturday morning villains.
The Alliance comes across as Dudley DoRight, but without any of the charm that made you laugh at him at one point.
And it has progressively grown worse.
Really, I’m not even sure what it would take to steer things toward a better course for WoW’s future. But I know the faction war, as it stands, is part of the problem.
There may be that, but they’re also mad that Blizzard sees the Alliance, too often, as nothing more than a tool to drive the Horde story (even if it is a bad story).
That never mattered when it came to Garrosh or Sylvanas, those have pissed people off royally. It’s just that Blizzard doesn’t care enough about the Alliance to write a story for them. It’s not the players, it’s Blizzard.
We forget it because the writers forget it. In fact, they’re not even trying to gloss over the fact that things will be as powerful/weak/smart/dumb/plentiful/scarce as the plot demands anymore, and as a result both the story and worldbuilding have more holes than Swiss cheese.