Gosh I’m glad someone gets it I was starting to think I was the crazy one.
5 Likes
You are welcome to suggest a different way of disassociating from the evil horde.
Make amends to the victims and have a faction merge. But Horde killing Horde has been cool even before we had faction wars.
Much like Chronicle telling us a number of cases for which faction completed which dungeon or raid, Exploring Azeroth told us a number of answers for which mission table successes were canon when both sides could not be or in which order they happened.
1 Like
My issue with is that some of those instances were given to a single faction when it should’ve been a joint effort. Such as the Sunwell raid.
A raid involving the most important part of Blood Elf culture… did not have blood elf players involved canonically.
20 Likes
The Blood Elves were already indebted to Velen. I guess Blizzard decided to take that up to eleven.
Can I choose the furbolgs and actually do something about it and come to an actual end of a storyline rather than leaving huge swaths of forest corrupted?
9 Likes
whoop there it is
IF ONLY the plot had say
- a magical cosmic reality-shaping engine
- perhaps some magical runic magic that can alter/rewrite fate
- mayhaps an elf that can use said magical runic fate rewriting magic
- perchance a uniquely powerful mage
- maybe this mage has a magical staff that is empowered by the Titan of Time
- perhaps there’s an elf empowered by some magical life-goddess
if only, I moan into the void, we were in such a narrative situation that could quite literally undo and fast forward the narrative
or they were his friend and actually agreed with his takes and they ought to be harrowed for being complicit in what went on within the company and allowing him to play out weirdo pathologies onto the game
He claimed responsibility for Sylvanas’s evil since Cataclysm, which reminder was concurrent to when he was overruled on Good Guy Garrosh.
Dude was petty and held a grudge for a decade.
But more importantly: the other devs went along with him on Sylvanas and the rest
Copeland wrote Exploring Kalimdor of his own accord.
11 Likes
I’m going to preface this by saying I’m biased because of personal experiences.
I don’t like the implication that we need to treat everyone like they were his buddy unless they somehow prove they were a victim.
11 Likes
I cannot believe that Blizzard is prepared to publish that book (republish?) in a few days given the state it is in.
@ the thread, I’m prepared to support any retcon or story decision that throws Afrasiabi under the bus and keeps Sylvanas in the story. The end.
10 Likes
Exactly. We don’t know what exactly went down at Blizzard during those years. So it is not right to assume things based on what limited knowledge we have now.
But even more importantly, we don’t have the exact reasons why each individual dev did so. So we shouldn’t assume that they fully supported what Alex was doing.
Given the kind of culture we know Blizzard was in, maybe and I mean maybe, they didn’t have much of a choice. Considering how vindictive we now know Alex to be.
3 Likes
Alex worked along side Chris for years, years and years. Based on what we know about everything that happened at Blizzard with that cohort of developers I am perfectly content assuming things.
It doesn’t have to mean anything in the end, but I’m happy to assume them. And Afrasiabi is a dirt-bag and everything he touched, especially in his last few years, should be retconned.
15 Likes
Accept that the whole of the Horde had a role in the Burning of Teldrassil instead of witch-hunting loyalists ; retcon the importance of the Kaldorei genocide so they can bounce back more easily ; either retcon or get on with the soul-split BS, close the Sylvanas arc asap and leave it at that ; close the SL storyline asap, leave it behind and never mention it again (or at least never make afterlife stuff the core of the story again). From that point, start afresh and imagine brand new stories based on more healthy foundations. There’s everything to rebuild back on Azeroth, it could make up for exciting developments.
I won’t let anyone tell me that after all the gargantuan retcons, stupid plot twists and out-of-the-blue cosmic reveals SL brought, what I just said is impossible. When you’re a writer and you’ve pushed your story into a narrative dead end, you’ve got 4 options : either pretend it didn’t happen, or accept it happened but do everything you can to soften its impacts on what’s next, or retcon it, or end the story.
I generally hate retcons, but if they concern SL stuff, I’ll gladly take them. Right now, that story is the result of very bad writing + personal vendetta. Something must be done about it.
3 Likes
You watch your mouth!
5 Likes
You know, AA wanted Garrosh to be heroic. He must have been really annoyed when the rest of the team decided to have him bomb Theramore. Maybe writing Jaina that way was his way of making his displeasure at that whole story direction known.
All that does is make it impossible for the two factions to ever be on equal footing again, unless the Alliance does something equally bad, which I would not wish on them.
Also, what about all the druids and shamans who were in Silithus at the time figuring out what to do about the giant sword stuck in the planet? Are you saying they “had a role” too?
So you support retconning that, but not anything about the burning of Teldrassil?
I get your point about starting over, but I don’t think a healthy fresh start can happen with Teldrassil still on the Horde’s “books.”
3 Likes
Doesn’t matter.
We know he was overruled on Garrosh
Why wasn’t he overruled on Sylvanas?
Why are the current in-house writers even defending this development of Sylvanas now that we have confirmation it was Afrasiabi’s malicious imagination?
Who agreed with him? Why didn’t they clock his intent? Why wasn’t he overruled this time?
Cuz from the lawsuit and dev stories, his being a vile person and a vile leader was known to most people on the periphery (women, POC, etc) by whisper networks.
You can be complicit in someone’s malice without being someone’s “buddy”. You can agree with your coworker (who you’ve been told is a Bad Person) without being their buddy.
My question is why would you when it’s self evident as to his intent and what he’s doing to a character the community is attracted to partly because she is a Survivor (both explicit and allegory) in multiple respects?
Was the contempt for the playerbase among the writers truly THAT bad?
19 Likes
A bigger proof is what they are doing to Tyrande with the Renewal vs Vengeance stinks of basically an NDA where you choose money to renew your life or you choose revenge and pursue your legal action against your wrong doer.
You cant have both. You must choose one.
They didn’t just go along with Afrisiabi they are actively participating even after his departure.
13 Likes
Not if you retcon the Burning of Teldrassil into not so big a disaster, which is what I called for. If you turn it into mostly the loss of a capital and not the mass murder of civilians it is in current lore, I think it would probably be okay.
(also, the Horde - and not just a few individuals - being to blame for the War of the Thorns is already an established fact)
Btw I’m not saying I know exactly what to do with that mess. I don’t
2 Likes
Even if you lose the angle of supposedly almost wiping out a playable race, you’ve still got the whole problem of torching a tree full of noncombatants for no good strategic reason. (And the problem of how stupid it is that this even worked, given the stuff that’s already been discussed to death about how the catapults shouldn’t have had the range to even hit Teldrassil or how the fire shouldn’t have spread so quickly.)
11 Likes
I am quick to blame the writers, particularly where word choices have an effect on the story that otherwise doesnt yet exist in the narrative (like Golden’s use of “genocide” in elegy). Bad writing deserves to be criticized. But the overall story failures mostly fall on marketing (if I had to guess). Not even a highschooler would decide to focus on Sylvanas for the narrative, then make her story so completely schizophrenic. Thats the kind of thing a group of marketing people do, knowing nothing about writing.
I imagine a scene where a couple ad men, the social networking influencer type and a few writers are sitting at a conference table, and the influencer is explaining that all the redditors are threatening to quit if the story progresses to its obvious conclusion, the ad men just handwave and say “do the opposite, no big deal” and the writers look at one another with a mix of dread and confusion at what they now have to do to their own story.
As for Afrasiabi, he can’t have been a very bad mmo narrative designer because we never hated his contributions until now. And its not like the game he was working on wasnt a good example of an MMO… it was and is the flagship of the genre. If anything the systems have gotten worse and trying to fit them into the narrative has gotten harder. There is something else causing the story to suck. BFA was fine. Afrasiabi was right… there was nothing out of character for Sylvanas to lead the Horde to war. To burn the tree. To sacrifice UC and use her own troops as fodder in a trap. She’s not a good person and never was. She’s cold and calculated even prior to undeath. This doesn’t exactly depart from her character development in cata and legion, but it did require some exposition to explain. I dont think we got that and I dont think it was Afrasiabi’s fault.
2 Likes
There was no genocide until after Golden inserted it. It was a low effort use of slanted language in order to easily provoke emotion. It was a tiny mistake that was compunded by the devs not waving away that angle. They liked the extra weight of the non-sensical genocide.
The whole problem of the tree being full of non-combatants is waved away by the fact that the tree was mostly full of non-combatants at the start of the invasion, and the evacuation was pretty much complete, or at least well underway. That was a pivotal part of Saurfang’s strategy. They didnt want to rule over a night elf population, as foreign occupiers and jailers. They wanted to hold an empty tree… which is basically what they burned. That, or the night elves evacuated not women and children first, but all the defenders… thats what Golden would have had us believe (and only Golden until the “genocide” became the preferred narrative).