Sylvanas' new faction. Will you join? ☠

Lore Story Forum
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Well, as we’re already sharpening those edges…

Seriously who in their right mind, prefers a muddy fur & ivory hut that probably brought all Azerothian mammoths towards extinction, compared to a Necropolis?

With an Undead ruled faction you will get beautiful (nerubian?) architecture, or gorgeous catacomb style that rivals with Giger’s most morbid dreams.

And no more honor as a pathetic excuse for not giving results (cough-Saurfang-cough).

And about the Lich King? Ha! Him accusing Sylvanas of tilting the balance…boy bit his own tongue. But i’ll blame the Bolvar part of him for that. Just give him time, he will see reason… or stay frozen (don’t think he can die :thinking:).

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For all your sass, I bet both sides would be happier if the more ends-justify-the-fiends types had our own faction where we could do morally dubious things for the good of Azeroth without roping the goody two shoes of the world into our moral turpitude.

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For all my sass I see absolutely no reason why shoving all of the “morally dubious” people into a single place wouldn’t result in both factions from brutalizing the absolute crap out of them (because, hey, placing all the problem children in one place … lets wipe them out). Honestly … the only think functionally protecting the Sylvanas “pragmatists” is the game mechanics and the reality that the “Goody Two-Shoes” cannot be punished alongside them.

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Simple — we’d kick the stuffing out of you ;3

I’m sure the devs could find a way to finagle a morally dubious faction if they really wanted it (they don’t, I know, but let me dream). I imagine it would involve the evil being a bit more on the downlow than Teldrassil, and the costs of confrontation being high.

Maybe the Alliance can’t attack us without making themselves vulnerable to the Horde. Hell, we can make it a prisoner’s dilemma, such that ultimately it’s the distrust between the Horde and Alliance that allows our nefariocity to persist. It can be all thematic that way

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Or … with the primary instigators of antagonism flushed out of the Horde and Alliance and shoved into a single spot (especially if Sylvanas is part of that faction) … the Horde and Alliance could do its patented team-up to fight the Big Bad … and shatter the hell out of a faction that is almost guaranteed to become a Big Bad in the future (before its allowed to become a problem)?

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They could do that, sure, but that’d ruin the fun. Why are you ruining fun Droité? Fun ruining is, like, a vice, man.

Agree about Sylvanas though. She’s a little high on visibility right now. It’s sad, but we’d need a different leader. I nominate Illidan, so that our first evil act can be betraying our leader and killing him.

Ooh oh! Then Sylvanas can secretly resurrect him, mind control him, and lead the faction from the shadows without it being official and damning.

Yes. The fan fiction grows within me.

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INCIDENTALLY, this is another world building tidbit that EverQuest did better than WoW. See, in EverQuest certain factions like the Humans and the Gnomes were “good aligned races” in theory, but then there were…secrets.

For instance, if you play a human necromancer in the city of Freeport, instead of the usual guild summons to your class hall, you start with a cryptic letter directing you to the sewers. You would then have to find a secret entrance to the depths of Freeport, where the Necromancer guildmaster would be waiting for you.

The really cool part of this is that you could play an entire career as a human paladin, say, and never know that this faction even exists. The secret entrances are well-hidden, and if you did happen into it by chance, the evil wizards would kill you without explanation. But then when you roll an evil toon and learn what’s really going on, it turns out evil agents are everywhere, and there are hidden entrances to the evil faction’s hideouts all over the two human cities.

Anyway, apart from being AWESOME worldbuilding (with its own set of really interesting secret questlines to boot), this allowed good and evil players to coexist in a way more believable and interesting way than WoW’s mechanics would allow.

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Naw, its no big deal. :smiley:

Essentially my post was that one of the reasons that I have an issue with the concept is that it would likely require hurting quite a few PC racial fantasies to achieve. The Horde already had to be stretched to the breaking point to look the other way on Sylvie’s actions (even before she became Warchief). Hell, part of the reason I think Jin had to die was because it would have been increasingly difficult to justify why he wouldn’t have just kicked the Forsaken (under Sylvie’s leadership) out of the Horde (especially if he had been Warchief when Sylvie pulled that stunt in Stormheim).

A better example of this (the needs of one races racial fantasy comes at the expense of the racial fantasy of another) comes in the form of Blizz’s tendencies to try preserving the more traditional fantasy theme in WoW. For example, NEs (despite all their hardship and poor writing) benefit heavily from the preservation of the more traditional Warcraft Fantasy Setting (they are conceptually VERY strong in such a world); while races like Gobs or Gnomes suffer under such preservation (because it requires Blizz to be VERY inconsistent in the way they shine, their tech).

In essence, can you imagine how much Blizz would have to bend the now “cleansed” Horde and Alliance to justify why they wouldn’t work together to deal with all the “problem-children” if they were put into a single spot?

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If Sylvanas gets to have any Orcs on her team, Geyarah and the Maghar seem down with her style so far.

They had no part in the burning of Teldrassil, but they also do not seem that shook up about it after the fact.

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Geya’rah and the Maghar have been on Azeroth for like a grand total of 3 months, and she was the previous strong-arm for a Warmongering despot. Lets just say that her opinion on current events holds very little weight; and with her own recruiter already starting to turn on Sylvanas … its only a matter of time before the woman that asked if the Horde values “Honor” abandons the corpse that holds honor as meaningless.

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Oh yeah–it would be pretty hard, if not impossible to make it work. Mostly I’m just having fun crowing for my amoralist team.

If I were going to take it seriously — well, we need them to give players the ability to do something that qualifies as “evil,” while not requiring the other factions to intervene. How could this work?

Well, it could be that the evil or the faction is secret, so the Horde / Alliance don’t know to intervene — like the Sith in the Republic, or Necromancers in Freeport, or the Dark Brotherhood in ESO. But that doesn’t mesh well with WoW’s pvp mechanics and would present a challenge for integrating its characters into the plot.

It could be that the “evil” isn’t THAT evil — and it’s directed at the right targets, sort of like pre-cataclysm Forsaken. But that might not be what edgelords want from the faction.

It could be that the faction is always LESS threatening than the evil it’s helping to fight, like the void or the Lich Queen or whatever. But that’s demeaning for the Horde and Alliance factions.

Eh, yeah, I don’t think it would work. But I think it could work if the faction mechanics, big-name character driven story, and pvp mechanics weren’t so restrictive on WoW’s story—which to me is the larger and more interesting problem. Factions can’t plausibly be anything other than powerful, visible groups pursuing the good of Azeroth for mechanical reasons, and for an rpg, that kind of…eh.

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What edgelords seem to want from such a faction (and I am VERY cynical on this) is essentially being allowed to be evil without consequence. Its not JUST being allowed to be “pragmatic”, its doing so in a way where the world needs to bend over backwards to justify why they never suffer blowback from those very acts. In short, the expense comes at the other two faction’s narratives … who are forced to tolerate far beyond sane toleration; and overlook a faction bound to be a massive problem down the road (solely so that faction and those players have time to thrive).

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I guess?

But that’s not why I like the idea. I want to play a character who doesn’t like herself, not because she has confidence issues, but because she…really isn’t very likable–because exploring guilt, blame, regret, self-deception, and doubt give me bigger hits of catharsis than other types melodrama. It would be easier to play that kind of character in a story that doesn’t have heroism hard-coded into its DNA.

So—I’m sure there are people who want more opportunities to join morally dubious groups because they want a power fantasy with an evil twist, but it’s not the only reason. Sort of like how the Human PaladinTM fantasy isn’t the only reason to play Alliance.

I guess it’s not a very relevant debate since it has little bearing on whether a third faction would be good for the game. Even I don’t think it would be, the way the game is set up now. Blizzard can barely handle writing for two factions. But I do wonder if your attitude towards us edgelords is fair?

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Ouff that would’ve been a great concept!

Probably exactly what Sylvanas wanted before Vol’jin pulled her to stand right in the spotlight and entertain the masses. We still have the Lich King and the Uncrowned :hocho:

I’ll quote a phrase I read from another post “sometimes they just have to let the story guide the game and not the game guide the story”.