They did - and Horde had to pay the price for it. It broke the back. This usually happens with bad game management.
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I remember my first exposure to the Alliance playerbase (which I did not enjoy) was during a Korrakās Revenge, a few years ago. I decided what the heck, Iāll level my long-neglected Alliance Hunter that I never played.
The sheer ignorance about basic game functions, that I was subjected to by playing Alliance in that battleground, was staggering. This was back when Alliance players were gung-ho on the stupid āroot the NPCās and nope that nobody breaks itā strat, which almost never worked, but they were determined to try it anyway.
It failed spectacularly, of course, and I tried warning them that it was a bad idea with a high failure rate, and we were way better off just killing the NPCās (which is what Horde groups did), but I was told I was wrong.
After the entire thing collapsed because the āstrategyā failed, the invective was unbelievable. People started railing about how the game was unfair, about how everything was biased in favor of the Horde, and about how the Horde players they were fighting - the players, mind you! - werenāt just bad players, but bad PEOPLE for playing Horde in the first place.
When, in reality, they were just using a dumb strat from the beginning, and ignoring better advice, to boot.
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Thats why a lot the top alliance guilds (vodka, method, Midwinter, etcā¦) swapped/rerolled to horde right? Im sure that racials had nothing to do with that
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If you go read the Method blog announcing their faction switch, they were quite clear that the strongest racial at the time was (in their opinion) the Pandaren one, which was available to both factions.
They didnāt switch because of racials. They switched because of people.
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You could level in a few hours starting in Wrath.
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Again, it was never the racials, it was the people. Thank you for illustrating.
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We hold hands and do delves together 
I just puked a little.
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This is one of the things I can agree with you on, Erevien.
Iāve long fallen out of love with the Horde, even though it was where I started, and I donāt think I will ever care to be Horde again after all of that. But as much as I love TWW, no reasonable evaluation could say it is anything but an Alliance story at this juncture. I really hope the rumors of 11.1 being goblin focused are true and itās significantly more meaty than just āhere is a raid, kill themā and when we finally get the Dark Trolls in focus they need to lean much more on their Troll side than their Night Elf relations.
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Non evil Orcs is liteally the whole selling point of Warcraft, every other fantasy world has humans, elves and dwarves.
Considering how stupid āfaction prideā is outside of the RTS games, this isnāt a bad thing.
Put differently, the faction conflict is old and busted at this point, because outside of dystopian settings you canāt be fighting a war forever.
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I think itās specifically the selling point of WC3.
At this point, even though no other fantasy brands prominently focus on orcs like WC, I donāt think I personally know a tabletop gamer under 60 whoās on board with āall evil orcsā outside of Warhammer, and I rarely see the opinion expressed in large forums now.
Itās a resoundingly dated 90s 00s fantasy presentation. I donāt think itās unsalvageable but itās not easy. WC movie had to try and respect what is there and make it appealing to a wider audience in a very short time.
Current events show thatās incorrect.
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Thereās the meme answer that weāre living in a dystopia.
Thereās also the very real answer that real conflicts are not āhotā on anywhere near the scale of constant devastation that WC is over so consistent a timeframe, nor so unbreakably politically polarized. No allegiances shift nor do major political realignments occur in the face of new events. We get coups where virtually all power and social structures remain identical.
WoW launched with a ācold warā setting that should have been maintained indefinitely. It was good, it worked, it would have been enduring.
The problem with the faction conflict is not the faction conflict, but rather with how badly Blizzard wrote and mismanaged it.
They took the setting and decided to make the setting the story. Thatās not how narratives work.
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Lol no. Horde have been riding the underdog badboy rep from OG vanilla that they lost almost overnight when TBC came out and most of the alliance bads rerolled belfs.
What an absurd take.
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I actually agree with all those points, but thereās no coming back from it now that theyāve broken it. They used it for story fodder in Wrath, Cata, MoP, Warlords, Legion, and BFA directly or indirectly, and kept pushing for resolutions and insulting an audience that didnāt agree with those breezy resolutions.
At the same time, Iām not convinced that splitting your playerbase is a good long term survival strategy, even if it drives early engagement.
Thereās no turning back the clock at this point to do the cold War tension properly.
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Sure thing.
the horde exists just to be a backdrop for the alliance, accept elf
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Sure there is. Just re-erect the faction barriers.
If Alliance players canāt get a 5-man group together, thatās their problem.
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Yeah that will clearly be great for the playerbase, it did wonders for pre-CRZ servers that were massively lopsided and it hasnāt backfired on SWTOR at all.
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