So the alliance gets a Horde race?

No it wasn’t, that is very very wrong. The blood elves went horde canonically because of their cooperation with sylvanas in the ghostlands. WC3 has literally nothing to do with why they went horde. My response was into your dismissal saying it was a ‘random poster’ it wasn’t, it was a dev in an AMA. You may not like what they said (and honestly I don’t trust it, because it’s not actually authoritative) but dismissing it is wrong. At best it’s an interesting point, but not really valuable.

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Dismissing what? You’ve provided no poll.

I never said I did, I linked to what a Dev said about the issue. How can I link to something that was done by Blizzard Asia internally? You must be trolling.

You have an ex dev on reddit claiming there was a poll. And I provided how far back Blood Elves were planned which makes the idea Blood Elves were decided to go Horde based on this hypothetical poll that you haven’t provided moot.

But devs made a decision on them too, and it does look like they were setting it up back then with how that game’s story went. Plus there’s statements from way back when about how after the success of twisting expectations of wood elve into night elves they felt they needed to mess with the high elf trope too.

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AFAIK they were just setting up Kael’s storyline for the expansion. That’s it.

Eh, having trouble finding it right now, but there was some interviews where they talked about how much they loved making the night elves a new-ish thing and I’m pretty sure the now more skeevy sounding phrase along the lines of “and now we’re going to abuse the high elves next”

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Pretty sure at this point it’s been linked above most likely. For me it’s all just facepalm anymore because the story is just super contrived for awhile. Even replaying WCIII it strikes me just how contrived things are.

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Probably.

I just think it’s a bit silly when people take that one statement on its own to try and make it sound like it was some sort of mistake. Yeah, they said part of it was appearance, but, they also always emphasized all the other reasons they had for putting them on horde.

Dunno if I’d go with contrived, always struck me as a bit more heavy handed with the themes of a not particularly ground breaking story.

Fair, it’s hard to do subtle exposition to an extent in an RTS game.

I think people also don’t realize just how big the faction gulf was in vanilla. IIRC it was 80/20 favoring alliance. Do I think that was the sole reason… no absolutely not, do I think perhaps they got feedback that solidified it: yes. But it’s not like they couldn’t have filled that gap with something else completely made up if they wanted to. Heck they could have even had Jaina break away and support the horde if they wanted to (yes that was plausible at that moment) to solve that issue.

I highly doubt we’ll ever get a definitive reason or, as I think we both agree, a singular reason. Either way I don’t get the zealotry some people have for it.

Personally I consider the existing faction divide an anti-pattern. But that’s just me.

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Horde got an alliance race the day burning crusade launched

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I think it was around 60/40 but your point stands (and there were some servers that were probably more 90/10). Although a huge chunk of that was in part due to the fact that horde was pretty much incomplete until Cata, and beta testers were warning people about that (they patched a few holes like the quest gap in the 40s, but a lot stuck around for years) And the Paladins were really huge for starting to get that gap closed too.

Eeew no nobody wants humans. Give us their Draenei!

I’m pretty sure they will “patch” this out with a glyph or new character creator feature in the future. They backtracked several statements to give the Alliance High Elves and given how popular these topics still are they will certainly get something in the future to satisfy the “demand”.

To be fair, it was badly written. This becomes clear if you listen to the Audio Drama where Alleria clashes painfully with her husband because he is lightbound. The bitter truth is they just needed a quick reason to justify the situation from a writer’s perspective. There is nothing more to it. Alleria should have known from her first experience that she can’t come near such places.

I’m pretty sure they referred to an intern poll, player feedback or a survey. These aren’t accessible to the players.

What’s the appeal to the Draenei in general? They look like humans but have hooves and tails. I never understood what was so great about them. You can’t look as detailed as Velen and it took the developer team over a decade to give them more options.

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Alteraci… For the Horde?

:frowning:

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Hahahaha but Horde got all the world first kills??? Doubt it.

The reality is the alliance was never the popular faction there’s just less right leaning people playing so the faction is even more unpopular.

Back then devs are people that would make very early 2000s man’s show jokes and vibes.

Now the devs and playerbase are alphabet soup they them.

You know there is actual data that showed that? They did release pop numbers back then.

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Wasn’t vanilla in the 6+ million count… this sites number doesn’t even hit close though.

The fact Horde got world first in vanilla> your random website

No, the Alliance gets an Alliance-original race that went through some stuff and got kicked out of the Horde after a relatively short tenure.

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There’s as much an alliance race as the corpses running around Lordaeron.

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