i don´t remember this, can you pls post the source?
If I remember correctly, they even said that Teldrassil is not told further in SL, but only Tyrand’s story.
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It mostly came from Alpha and Beta testers playing. Hence why I didn’t attribute it to Blizzard.
But I do love that the same people are just looking for one single line to critique my entire post about. Because clearly they can’t critique the main point of it all and reduced themselves to nitpicking.
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Imagine having a healthy enough character roster for this.
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I know how delicate the issue is at the moment, but I would like to say that the statement is technically correct.
In the first 8 chapters of the Ardenwaeld conveant story from 9.0 Tyrande has as much story as the troll story around vol’Jin.
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You could’ve meant any time she got a power-up. After Throne of Thunder, after becoming Lord Admiral, etc.
Why do you assume this? It sounds like you’re projecting onto me what you would do. If the Winter Queen forces her to get rid of her power then she’s still losing it.
Go ahead and list them, I’m interested in hearing from a newbie’s perspective.
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Except clearly I didn’t. Getting a title isn’t a power-up. You’re really trying way too hard here.
Your posting history.
Whisper me in-game and I’ll be more than happy to have it out with you. I’m not interested in another mystery reporter flagging me in the hopes I get banned.
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If Alynsa meaning Tides Of War Jaina was obvious to anyone else please post confirmation. Jaina becoming Lord Admiral allowed for her to control the whole Kul Tiran fleet, that’s a power-up.
I’m not taking this in-game. Mystery reporters can flag any posts you’ve made already. So you’re either a coward or a liar that was trying to insult me in a cheap way.
Except you are presumably not illiterate, saw the context (discussing Tyrande’s Night Warrior power-up, tossing Sylvanas’s recent power-up and not-being-depowered) and can extrapolate from that. I assumed you were capable of doing as much as the average high schooler.
I’m sorry for my faulty assumption.
And they have, and because those are not critiquing a person, the flag gets dropped. You already know this.
Coward.
Coward while someone have no interest to discuss this topic ingame?
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Zah, I’ll be honest. I have no idea what you’re trying to say there.
All this from alpha and beta testers?
Alynsa, I think your analysis was very interesting.
I do have a question.
Your story starts with Cataclysm, but we all know that a lot of the Horde stuff in Cata was intended to make up for the imbalance built into the game right from day one of launch, where the situation was reversed and the devs ran out of time to make the Horde stuff.
So why do you think that isn’t as big a source of grievance as Cata? Why didn’t Horde players have as big a chip on their shoulders over that as Alliance players have over Cata?
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We did. I am to this day angry that the Alliance could mount in Ironforge and we couldn’t in Undercity (OR EVEN IN ITS ABOVE GROUND COURTYARD!), and that every Horde city had a backdoor that led directly to their leader while the only one for the Alliance you needed to go through a main city to use.
Also, longest GY run to this day is still dying in stormwind (or worse, the tram) as Horde.
This isn’t even touching on how Alliance attunement quests were shorter and easier.
Starting with less doesn’t feel as bad as losing stuff that you already had. Even if both sides ended up roughly equal it still didn’t feel that way to the side that lost stuff.
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Again, I’m not suggesting there wasn’t any greivances in Vanilla/BC/Wrath. There absolutely was. A few sticking points (that I remember, which we’re talking 16 years ago, so I’m def forgetting plenty) were of course leveling experience (Barrens, newer 20-30 level zones, unbalanced questing, etc), dungeon and raid proximity (IIRC, it wasn’t until Naxx that there was a raid closer to Horde cities than Ally ones, but again, don’t quote me on that cuz I could be wrong. And Dungeons, there were more closer to Alliance hubs than Horde ones, again IIRC because 16 years). BC tried, in its own way, to alleviate the more mechanical problems, but more story-based ones would take time… And BC wasn’t a good expansion for story anyway.
And really, it was a lot less common back then to level up a character on the other faction. Leveling back then wasn’t just a grind. It was its own special lovely hell (that truly was lovely), and seeing people with alts, let alone alts on different factions, wasn’t as common. It happened, but it wasn’t really until late Wrath, with not just heirlooms but also Dungeon Queuing, that people started building an alt army and giving the other faction a try too.
Again, complaints about the other factions didn’t not exist. But they definitely became more prevalent when it became more common to actually see what the other faction had. And Cata gave people a whole new motivation to see it first hand, with the changes to every zone.
I chose to not really go into the Horde-side gripes from earlier days, mostly because I was aiming my post to focus on why certain Alliance players might be wearing a blue-colored lens when viewing forum topics, but the bias is absolutely both sided, and the issues are also present on both factions. Cataclysm saw the Barrens literally split down the middle, which didn’t sit so well with a lot of people. Losing Thrall for no good god damn reason is still a sting. The physical changes to Orgrimmar are… Better left unsaid IMO. Having to share half the Barrens which used to be just Horde terrain isn’t too tasty either. And so on and so forth.
But back to my point.
So you combine quicker leveling from heirlooms, XP nerfs (which again, now ten years ago, IIRC Cata saw a big nerf to lowbie XP rates), the possibility to skip awkward leveling spots like the 60-70 range through dungeon queues, with a breadth of new content… And Cataclysm’s relative lack of 85 solo content compared to Wrath (which wasn’t as bad as people thought it was back then. Wait until WoD!!), more people were experiencing the other side, which gave them more reasons to feel “less than” the other side and by that, more reasons to vocalize their issues.
Another point to address is while previous issues were more limited to “Horde has more X than Alliance” or “Alliance can do Y easier than Horde”, Cataclysm had a heavy focus on actually pitting the Horde against the Alliance compared to the previous cold war. We’d see some small Vanilla to BC to Wrath moments where the factions clashed, but it never took over an entire zone. Like it did with at least half a dozen zones in Cata. It made the issues less about utility and amount of content, and more about the actual nature of the content itself. It took it in a more visceral direction, allowing aggrieved Alliance players to feel even more aggrieved when we bomb a druid school, or blight Gilneas.
Alliance players weren’t just losing zones. They were losing in those zones. And when the Horde was getting booted from a zone, it’s 50/50 whether or not that zone can be inhabited ever again. So, from an Ally perspective, even when they feel like they’re winning, they lose. But they’re mostly losing.
Of course the counter-point to all of that? Since the end of Wrath, all Horde story content has either been “we’re getting aggressive again!!!” or “we’re the villains now, time to rebel soon!!!” or “we’re killing our own heroes now!!!” or “we’re hiding in the background now and aren’t even there!!!” And that’s… It, really.
Cata, we got aggressive. MoP, we were the villains, then rebelled. WoD we killed the old Horde heroes. Legion we were in the background, though in places you could see the aggression starting back up (even if we didn’t know that’s what it was at the time). BfA we were villains, and so far Shadowlands has us hiding in the background (to be fair, both factions are so far).
And that’s why we yearn for things like a more rounded storyline with Bwonsamdi and Vol’jin, because it’s a storyline for us that isn’t “sharpen your blades, we’re fighting the Alliance for control of the McGuffin”. We don’t get a long-form arc of Anduin growing into his role as king (mixed blessing there). We don’t get a reunion between mother and daughter, watching Jaina’s mom learn to forgive her daughter. We don’t get Velen bro-ing it up with Illidan, and giving Illidan a low-key pass for his past. We don’t get Yrel growing from a prisoner into an Exarch (though in reality, neither did the Alliance, it just sorta happens at the end).
We get new warchiefs. We get new token reasons to fight the Alliance. Then we get to wait for the next round. And we get yelled at by team Blue for even talking about how we’d like something not about killing them, because the things they do get that don’t revolve around our war, they just would rather brush aside to…
Not the place for that rant.
I hope this latest mini-essay answered the question, and answered some others that I’m sure someone was thinking of asking (IE holding back from calling me out on).
EDIT: Seeing how long these posts are after I hit send, I’m’a make a TL;DR answer.
Because with the changes from Cata, you didn’t just hear about the differences; you could experience them. You could feel them personally, and the zones made those changes feel personal.
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Yeah, to back up several other people: it wasn’t really until Cata that I played the endgame seriously and could focus on fast leveling enough to see the discrepancies as things to be measured rather than simply it being how it was. Those who DID I am sure had their gripes, but to this day, I fondly remember my leveling experiences as unique on both sides and with most difficulties owed simply to me being new and exploring the unknown, not to any faction imbalance. With no achievements until Wrath and the scattershot crap that was Thottbot, it wasn’t easy to compare or even to think to compare this stuff.
When I walked into Ironforge for the first time on a dwarf alt, it didn’t occur to me to be mad it was more convenient than UC or better defended than Org; i simply took in the majesty of a place i had only heard about and seen as a level 30 future corpse. I thought it was weird Alliance has to corpse run to get to and from Darnassus at a low level but like… weird. Not bad. The naked corpse run was part of the experience.
Endgame was a really small portion of the playerbase in Vanilla and not huge in BC.
Throw in that I would argue that Wrath was really the first time we started to see faction stuff truly encouraged in WoW, Blizzard practically primed its base to be mad at each other when Cata hit
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I’ve always held the belief that from the moment Wrath went into development, they knew the next expansion would start focusing on Horde vs Alliance. Because few exapansions that don’t have an open conflict between the two factions have as much faction fighting occurring in it as Wrath did.
You have the fallout of the Wrathgate in Dragonblight, leading to the first ever in-game, canonical, playable assault on an enemy city in the Undercity, with that spilling over to Icecrown (zone). You have the shenanigans in Howling Fjords and Grizzly Hills. WTF Wintergrasp is supposed to be interpreted as. Five out of the ten zones (ten and a half technically, because the little island way to the north is, apparently, it’s own zone) in Northrend, assuming I’m not forgetting something in Borean Tundra other than Garrosh wanting to fight the Alliance right then and there.
If this wasn’t a primer for a coming faction war, I don’t know what could be.
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Me in Wrath: This is so stupid, this dumb road rage human King is stupid, I can’t wait for Garrosh to finish growing up and we can get rid of Sylvanas who’s an obvious villain and then we will get back to focusing on the real threat to Azeroth, not each other
All Subsequent Expansions: We’re about to ruin this woman’s whole career
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About the Night Warrior powerup and it killing Tyrande.
Ysera mentions how her dreams indicate that the Night Warrior is key to saving Ardenweald from the anima drought.
The plot also leads to the night warrior power being split between the spirit of fallen night warriors if i heard correctly.
Along with 900ish night elf souls conveniently dropped into the zone this week, probably for that very purpose.
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