Stormwind, the worst economy of all?

I didn’t know about the wife part. I thought it was riot and not an assassination.

After he offered to pay the original agreed upon amount and they refused and then demanded an exorbitant amount Varian advised he couldn’t pay it. They Rioted and one of them killed his wife with a Stone.

Ever since then they have been bandits preying of the people of westfall and preventing him from sending help and supplies.

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How broke could they be? First off the Forsaken don’t need to eat strictly speaking and can just make due with dead enemy humanoids. So no farming crop going our way.

Likewise in regards to Sin’Dorei dead we can either eat or raise them - completely negating the need for graveyards to take up fertile land. Likewise boy we don’t even sleep, amongst other bodily functions.

You call this a deficit but boy with the displaced Forsaken population? I’m seeing a construction and housing boom in Quel’Thalas. No need for bathrooms, bedrooms or even windows.

… Slyvanas is in the pocket of the Elven housing industry. That’s why she blew up the Undercity.

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The thing is, well before the time Onyxia was exposed the Defias seemed to have become less a true and proper rebellion and increasingly morphed into a front for the operations of the criminal underworld contacts Edwin VanCleef had tapped to finance and organize his plans. So it’s hard to say just how consolidated their efforts were toward discrediting the government, and how much of it was just the scum of Azeroth capitalizing on the group and exacerbating the Defias acts of sabotage and intimidation to obfuscate what was really going on down in the Deadmines.

Just looking at the bosses and half of the mobs down in the Deadmines, the place is crawling with Venture Co. goons, pirates, professional killers and thieves, while the only actual legitimately Defias Stonemason boss is VanCleef himself. He may have still been pursuing his plan to bombard Stormwind, but the top echelons of the Defias as an organization came across less like a citizen revolt and more like it had been commandeered as a profiteering operation for the seedy underbelly of the Eastern Kingdoms.

Kinda makes me wonder if VanCleef’s plans for the Juggernaut would have even come to fruition had we not intervened, or if his own shady associates would have eventually moved to eliminate him once he geared up to actually attack Stormwind and expose their convenient little base of operations to the whole world.

Even the kidnapping of Varian kind of suggests just how little control VanCleef likely had over the Defias once it was in full swing. One would expect that if he’d been privy to the kidnapping of the King of Stormwind, he’d have used it as part of his plan to attack the city. Instead Varian was just shipped off to some tiny island off the coast of Theramore per Onyxia’s orders. Consequently, rather than playing into Edwin’s schemes the whole kidnapping of the King of Stormwind thing came across like it was a bunch of enterprising Defias agents who were by that point just engaging in their own criminal activities independently from the Brotherhood’s stated goals, and doing so through the use of the organization’s resources and connections.

So honestly any effort at reconciliation once Onyxia’s deception was unveiled would have probably been severely hindered by the fact that the Defias was barely even operating as a revolt of disenfranchised Stonemasons any more. It was more of a gathering of professional lawbreakers and shady go-betweens operating behind the front of said revolt in order to keep terrorizing Westfall’s locals and running the place like their own criminal fiefdom.

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This analysis is epic and Legendary!

If only the writers visited the forums more!!

Ty Raselle.

All this is true, not denying certain advantages the Forsaken have. The Sin’dorei however do have earthly needs, I assume. Most of Quel’thalas is destroyed, occupied by scourge remnants, defiled land, or what trolls remain. Really only a few outposts exist, and why I call them a client state is because the Forsaken are the ones who seem to really provide alot of the muscle and protection and aid for all of the reconstruction that has had happened. In exchange, Silvermoon does practically anything Sylvanas wants them to. Of course, Lorthremar now is seeing that Sylvanas is on a quickly sinking ship so has found a little bit of courage and decided to side with who he thinks will be the winners (as he always always does)

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Well, if you want to get brass tacks about it;

Not really. A lot of peasants in the ye olden days lived in squalor. Some walls with a less than stellar roof. If you were a trained, upper class craftsman, you could live in a jettied house! But beyond that, their living conditions were less than stellar.

But just because there’s a lot of homeless vagrants doesn’t mean the kingdom’s doomed to poverty. More people means more farmers. More farmers means more food, more means for people to thrive and fulfill purposes in a kingdom- doubly so, given that the scars of the Cataclysm have left some long lasting damage that needs repairs. Living like bums is nothing new for the lower branch folk.

Now, this may be extremely simplified, as it is, and doesn’t apply so well to the way our current economy runs, but in ye olde history, everyone was broke as (profanity) except for trained and higher class craftsmen and there was always a need for the physically healthy enough to work fields and acquire raw material. That’s the status quo for most.

Aren’t these two things in contradiction though? If they are vagrants, that means they are not really farmers, other wise they’d be on their farm. This is also the problem with Westfall, it seems to be in some sort of drought or famine, so the farmers can’t work the land. Stormwind seems to be doing nothing about it. Shouldn’t the Wrynns be seeking help from the druids or something to fix it? Or finding work for these people? They aren’t doing, or aren’t shown to be doing, any of that.

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Why are there homeless at all there is a war that needs people despratly there is work.

One there is no drought in Westfall, only real issue has been the Defias.

Two if shaman, druids and mages could just use magic to fix everything there wouldn’t even be a need for farmers you could just have mages make food and water for everyone.

“Westfall is a region of rolling pastures and farms that were once beautiful and green, but now have become barren with drought due to maltreatment at the hands of bandits”

That’s from wowpedia, not sure if that counts as a source. Though a lot of it is due to the bandits it says.

I didn’t really mean they could just use magic to fix everything, more like they may know more about the land and how to heal it. Also, we see night elves growing pumpkins with druid magic in Stormwind right now. They might be of better use in Westfall.

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Lind of makes you wonder why druids snd shamen never try to solve the hordes never ending need for reasources.

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Ah, well as it says its still due to the Bandits, likely they prevent the farmers properly irrigating the land. Unlike horde lands its does have a perfectly healthy river running along side it.

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Eventually they have to earn. As long as there is a need, there is a means to earn, and during the middle ages, when physical work was constant, care for health was poor and people croaking from old age as young as 40 years (disease, physical conditions, what have you), there was no shortage of people needed with strong backs for things like working the field, or mining, or collecting lumber.

What I suppose what I really should have said was; living like bums was pretty standard for peasants, so being without property isn’t as bad as it seems in the early ages. You were in pretty good if you had a jettied house, even better if you didn’t have to share things and even had a floor to begin with. Most people couldn’t afford more than one bed, yet alone most of the common utensils and tools we use today. As a fun fact, so many people shared beds because of how expensive they were, birthing the term ‘bedfellows’.

Naturally, royalty did not give a flying (profanity) about these living conditions. They even assigned people days where they’d come and work for their local Lord for basically free, so most of them would just make up excuses to not actually do it. Things have consistently been bad for the little people in history. Vagrants in a fantasy story that’s based on small parallel snippets of our history isn’t that big of a deal, because that’d be the norm.

I think I know about this. It was kind of the basis of feudalism. You had more or less people who owned the land, and those who worked it. It was the source of a lot of class struggles in the middle ages, such as even little things like people intentionally not working or even sabotaging the crops which belonged to the lord.

It depends. In the Westfall story it really kinda does make it a big deal. The Defias have sabotaged the lands but the lack of a response from Stormwind seems to kind of fuel the dissent. I mean this seems to be one of the best farmlands for the kingdom and the Wrynns are letting it just lay in waste. I liked Vanessa VanCleefs speech in Moonbrook even if overall I thought the classic version of the zone was better.

Stormwind appears to be fairly underdeveloped compared to other nations of the Alliance, but it is still in better shape than… say… Darnassus or Gnomeregan. Most of their farmland is not being used and they seem to rely completely on Ironforge for much of their heavy industry.

Ironforge, probably has strongest industrial capacity of anyone in the Alliance - though arguably not a strong agricultural sector. This probably doesn’t matter as it seems the Dwarves eat a lot more meat than folks down in Elwynn Forest, and their agriculture seems to focus on ingredients for making beer.

Kul Tiras seems to have one of the strongest standalone economies, with robust agricultural and industrial capability. I remember the RPG described it as the most prosperous of the Human Kingdoms. It’s reeling from the civil war at the moment, but I can see them returning to full force once they get the widespread corruption in Drustvar and the Quillboar problem in Stormsong under control.

In any case, when compared to the Horde, the Alliance still appears to have the upper hand as far as natural resources, agricultural output and industrial capacity.

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That’s an odd description. How does “maltreatment at the hands of bandits” cause a drought? If WoWpedia got that from some official source, Blizzard needs to learn what words mean; if not, the person who wrote it needs to learn what words mean.

Shipping the pumpkin druids off to Westfall does seem like a reasonable solution. Or maybe import some seed and soil from Pandaria, grow some giant carrots.

No one has answered why there are homeless when everyone is needed to fill the alliance ranks not like they arent desprate right now.

That struck me as odd, too.

I thought at first that Westfall may have been one of the areas affected by the magical explosion of Medivh dying, but all Chronicle mentions is Brightwood being twisted into Duskwood.

The best I can find is that Westfall had been left fallow in the wake of the Second War, and it eventually stopped producing crops. I suppose Defias exacerbated the situation by moving in, and making Westfall too dangerous to live in, until those impoverished by the War in Northrend became desperate enough to try.

Though, even the beginning of that explanation makes no sense. Leaving farmland fallow improves its fertility, not diminishes it.

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