If they are never shown to be in ruins, will they still be in ruins?
I think if new players never have to know or think about this stuff, that’s the only hope for the game to ever be fun again.
because they are in the lore, and since the writers decided to ignore and forget about it - it means that they will forever be in ruins.
An actual good retcon would be saying something like most Night Elves survived Teldrassil. Or that the majority of the Horde didn’t participate
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I wouldn’t mind that either.
But anyway, to be clear, the specific thing that I said would be awesome is the idea of the majority of players not being obsessed with this tragedy. I’ve been through a year and a half of players being obsessed with Teldrassil, and it’s been hellish. The thought of a WoW where the majority of players aren’t thinking and posting and being miserable about it all the time, to the point that they don’t even know or care that it was in the game, sounds AMAZING, and I am 100% in favor of that happening.
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Retconned? Sure.
Forgotten? That I disagree with, and that’s what this looks like so far.
If they came out and said “Sorry, Nozdormu sneezed, and this was just a ripple in from an alternate universe - the Horde didn’t actually invade, the tree never burned, everyone in Ashenvale and Darkshore and Teldrassil are perfectly fine and are wondering what it is your’re raving about, and sorry it took us this long to shuffle all those AU murderers back out but they’re all gone now”, then sure.
But the repercussions of Teldrassil are still in the story - those souls are still in the Maw, Tyrande is still the Night Warrior for now, Sylvanas is billed as a primary antagonist. So it hasn’t been retconned, Blizzard just lowered a curtain in front of the Horde’s involvement in it.
So when a raving Alliance fan yells at the Horde for burning civilians, it’ll still be true… the Horde player just won’t have seen it. And that is going to cause havoc on these forums, which are vicious enough to begin with.
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I don’t disagree, but how? How would you fix it? We’ve been having that conversation for two years, and we’re no closer to a satisfactory solution.
I know what I’d want: I want the narrative team purged, or to hear a satisfactory explanation of why it’s not their fault. Everyone responsible for the terrible faction storyline of this awful expansion should be out on their butts. Everyone higher than the interns writing the quest text, gone. I want an interview, a real honest accounting where a human being explains why this happened and what went wrong and just admits it. But that’s not gonna happen. I’ve always said that this sort of soft retcon was the best we were gonna get, and I stand by it.
Also - the sky’s not falling yet. 9.1 could still be ‘the great night elf rescue’ where we save all the Teldrassil souls from the maw and there’s a lovely ceremony and a new tree gets planted and everything you’d want to happen happens. This is just them not having the new player experience happen in the shadow of the worst lore decision that they ever made.
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I don’t mean in the sense that people who played through it can or should forget that it happened. Obviously that’s not going to happen. I mean allowing the whole thing to fade in a more general sense, rather than going out of their way to craft storylines that keep the wound raw and making sure each new player experiences it to the full.
In the situation that was being foreseen as so very terrible, that won’t happen, because “less and less people will know or care.”
It just means that they want new players to not know about Teldrassil so that more and more people will eventually forget about it. The reason why they’re doing this is because they have no conclusion planned and don’t want to do anything to make it less bad than it is, that’s why they’re trying to sweep it under the rug further.
The whole thing has started with 8.1 which was the entire revenge plot.
Now the Horde and Sylvanas are being praised as heroes for burning the entire Night Elf civilian population alive and sending them to hell.
What kind of message is that supposed to be?! That genocide against innocents makes you a hero just because it’s against a specific race?
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In perhaps better words:
I think this change isn’t going to help because:
- The big problem of the Burning was the emotional buildup that didn’t get eased back down with the conclusion.
- Covering up the event is not going to bring down that anger they stoked up
So the anger is still there. So I see a few ways this will go.
- New player joins Horde, wonders why Alliance players are so angry at them and their faction on the forums. Gets defensive. Polarization gets worse.
- Horde players, even knowing this stuff exists, have a free check from Blizzard to put their fingers in their ears and say “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” during Teldrassil arguments. That strategy is not known for its calming effects on the other side. Again, polarization worsens.
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Correct!
An assumption!
Wrong! They’re praising the Horde for all the cool things the Horde has done, like, you know, help kill the lich king and the old gods and the burning legion and all that good stuff. They’re deliberately not talking about the genocide, because Horde players hated the genocide, everyone hated the genocide, and we don’t deserve to be hearing about it forever.
Also, Sylvanas isn’t mentioned! Sylvanas, last I checked, has still been retconned to be the evil intelligence behind, like, everything that’s ever gone wrong! You’re assuming again!
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I agree.
I want the narrative to spend some time dealing with the issue and the anger it caused so that it can be laid to rest and forgotten. That is not what they seem to be doing.
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I mean, the Horde players chose the evil faction. It was clearly the evil faction. It’s always been the evil faction, and even blizzards “thinly veiled” not evil just different argument has been largely ignored.
Horde players never want to hear about the horrible stuff they actively take part in, but sure do love the quests and being the tough guy war in Warcraft faction.
The thing is, at this point Alliance players have lost more ingame stuff to the Horde faction than Old Gods or Lich King or Legion. And the Horde players always complain about “It’s totally not our fault” >.>
But then Blizzard comes out and says (paraphrasing) “Oh yeah when we do optional quest objectives, the Horde players pick the worst ones. Like going out and spraying plague spreaders at Alliance forces in the Battle of Lordearon. Wasn’t even close”
It could be step 1. You know, in a perfect world (well, a slightly imperfect world - see above for my perfect world scenario), the Alliance would get content dealing with the fallout of Teldrassil and putting it all to rest, and the Horde player would just never have to hear about it.
I can picture it, 9.1 scenario: The Grave of the Night. Or something. Epic story, all the night elves save their dead from the maw, send them off to rest, every night elf is involved, they look cool, they’re awesome, they defeat the undead night elves or turn them back or free them or whatever, there’s a lovely ceremony, maybe a musical number, a new tree begins growing!
Meanwhile, the Horde player stands outside the doorway on the street, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette, watching the cars go past. After what could be a few minutes, or a hundred years, the Alliance player emerges, shutting the door gently behind them.
“Was it good?” The Horde player asks, eyeing the sign above the door: 9.1 Night Elf Patch content.
“Yeah,” the Alliance player says, taking a deep breath, burying their hands in their pockets to ward off the cold. “Yeah, it was pretty good.”
“I’m glad.” The Horde player takes another drag on the cigarette, and their gaze goes down to the floor. “I’m sorry about everything that happened, to you. I shouldn’t have let Blizzard…”
“It’s not your fault,” the Alliance player says slowly. “I’m… sorry too.”
The Horde player nods. They drop the cigarette to the ground, where it smolders for a moment before they put it out with their heel. Without a word, they depart together, and for some time, neither feels the need to speak.
…
What were we talking about, again?
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Pretty much just a community of gloom and doom 'cause the momen you have a NElf fan that doesn’t see entirely eye to eye with you folks, this comes down to a No True Scotmans fallacy.
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Speaking for myself, this would give me more catharsis than anything they could possibly do to “fix” the story.
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To give them time to settle in the world be you throw massive war crimes at them
To be fair, in Warcraft racial identities are political ones, like the Eredar and Draenei and the High Elves and Blood Elves.
Is the standard Horde poster stance here “you’re advocating for things to be worse for other players”? Because what you’re asking for is for no resolution to ever happen.
You might as well go back and like every post Elesana has ever made prophesying that nothing good would be coming for Night Elf players.
I didn’t ASK for anything. I said that a WoW where most players don’t care about Teldrassil sounded great. Not the same thing. And frankly, I don’t apologize for wishing for that.
Demand. Wish. Ask. However you want to preface your statement of allowing the whole thing to fade.
I frankly don’t care what you would or would not apologize for.
I am pointing out that for you to get what you want no resolution can be allowed, as obviously any resolution would just make new players look up what had happened in the first place.
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As long as it happened, it’s horrible. And trying to sweep it under the rug and making people forget about it will make it worse instead of better.
Either retcon it completely or give us a conclusion. Either would be fine, but instead they chose to do nothing and leave it to rot with countless of innocents still in the maw and the Night Elves near extinct with no land to settle.
That’s an entire playable race ruined.
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A speed leveler leveled up as a new player in shadowlands and you in fact have to do the war campaign to get to 50 so a new player will know what happened whenever they take part in that journey