You can always come back next expansion.
Me, I’m not spending another dime on WoW till I can roll the Zandalari I purchased the xpac for.
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Blizzard lying to our faces? XD What a shock!
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Totally agree, OP. I play both factions, but I care about 80% about the Horde, as represented by my main, and about 20% for my various Alliance alts. Of that 20% Alliance interest, about 15% of that is night elf interest. So, 15% of me is happy the night elves are finally getting some vindication and retribution for Teldrassil, but mostly, I’m just upset about the entire BfA story, and this just reinforces it. There shouldn’t have to BE any retribution because Teldrassil never should have happened. This cinematic reinforces that the Horde are nothing more than monsters and villains, and I have no desire to play that storyline on my main. I try to get psyched about playing on my night elf alts, but my despair about how bad the Horde story infects my Alliance-side playing, too, because then all the narrative tells me is how evil and horrible my Horde characters are, and its not wrong. I honestly haven’t logged in in several weeks, and I don’t especially miss it. I’ll pop on to get my corgi glasses, and if 8.1 lets me side with Saurfang without completing any war campaign quests, then I’ll do that. Otherwise, I doubt I’ll touch much of anything in WoW until the inevitable handwave that the Horde actually aren’t all evil monster villains.
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Why would anyone side with the Alliance? Anything you hold dear can be taken away from you, and the ones responsible are people you need to forgive while they take more away.
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The problem is that the general Horde fan-base has been the more (vocally) passionate of the two sides of the WoW community. It likely stems from having been the underdogs in the beginning (and it also helps that their race options weren’t the more stereotypical “player races” of fantasy settings, minus the Blood Elves). Someone yelling, “For the Horde!” was the catchphrase for a WoW player. Someone yelling “For the Alliance!” would be more likely to be met with confusion. They needed to make the Alliance want to participate.
This all leads to a gradual decline of Alliance pride that they tried to fan the flames of in Legion. The death of Varian Wrynn brought a lot of it back, because he died like a hero against insurmountable odds. Yet the Alliance didn’t have any real motivation to fight the Horde, whereas most Horde players (namely ones who don’t look too deeply into the story) didn’t need an excuse to want to fight Alliance other than, “BLOOD AND THUNDER, FOR THE HORDE”, so they wrote in something to make Alliance fans hate Sylvanas and anyone complicit with her actions.
The downside to this, of course, being that they pushed it so far into villainy that people are, as you said, feeling like they picked the wrong faction. We saw the same back in MoP, where people were demoralized that the Horde was being hit with the villain bat under Garrosh, and moreover, that they needed the Alliance to bail them out in the Siege of Orgrimmar.
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i am sorry what?
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She’s got a point. Genn is frosty about Gilneas still, but up until the Alliance attacked the Alliance and Horde were working together against a larger threat.
From the perspective of most players I know, it looked like Genn was ignoring a world ending threat on a personal vendetta and that’s not going to motivate people who aren’t invested in his vendetta with him.
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And that was all broken by the ‘betrayal’ at the Broken Shore. Jaina, Genn and even Anduin had good reason to believe that Sylvanas abandoned them when they needed their help the most. Furthermore, Sylvanas was basically still at large since Cata for what she did to Gilneas. She never had a trial, now did she?
Yes, his attack on Sylvanas is only loosely justified… but don’t believe for a second that after the Broken Shore that the Alliance and Horde were still on ‘working together’ terms.
Yeah we can pick like any of the backstabs they have done in the past.
A “betrayal” that all but the most obtuse players knew was no betrayal at all. You think alot of Alliance players were raring to have a go at the Horde over a misunderstanding born out of Genn jumping to a conclusion?
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Yes, actually. Because any Alliance player who has played since Cataclysm knows very well that Genn is owed vengeance for his nation and his son.
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But the characters dont know 100% even if the players do.
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So you think Alliance players want to be lied to if it lets them justify getting revenge on a completely different issue?
No, I think Alliance players would have been more enthusiastic about attacking the Horde if the reason had been Genn’s revenge. But as you pointed out before, that wasn’t the reason. The actual reason was that Genn jumped to a conclusion after the Burning Legion played their faction for fools.
That’s fine, but we’re talking about player enthusiasm.
Edit: Or at least I thought we were.
Double Edit: Yep, reread Cantaloupe’s post, we’re talking about the gradual decline of Alliance pride amongst the playerbase.
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Even if you don’t support genn as an alliance player, still have plenty of reason to go against the horde, theramore by example, even if people didn’t exactly supported jaina, they liked the place for being a wc3 city or their vainilla nostalgia or whatever.
Alliance players have way too many reasons to go against the horde, even in the middle of the legion invasion where we hated that we were forced to neutrality again or our characters going neutral AGAIN.
in fact, i loved genn’s attack in stormheilm.
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I think the issue is the core, the alliance was never made to beat up the horde, they where always made to combant horde aggression. Many players who joined that knew the story knew this as well, so we just wait and wait for the horde to do something bad cause they alway do. The horde are the ones who think the alliance is out to get them but they never where out to do that. It’s almost why this story needs to happen, all the bad blood needs to be cleaned
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That… makes no sense whatsoever.
“The issue was that the Alliance was never aggressive against the Horde, just fighting back… so this story about the Alliance fighting back against Horde aggression had to happen!”
Am… am I just completely misunderstanding you?
On top of which, bad blood doesn’t get “cleansed” because no retribution is ever enough, without being more than enough to incite a reciprocal grudge.
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Theramore’s actually a great example of a bad example. After Mists of Pandaria, Purge of Dalaran, Isle of Thunder, then the Warcrimes novel, followed by Warlords of Draenor. I’m sick of Theramore and with the perpetrators of that tragedy all very dead and for the most part killed by the Horde, it no longer inspires a response in me.
You can’t expect the Alliance playerbase to get fired up over an issue that has been concluded as well as it ever will.
Alliance players aren’t being lied to by the NPCs. The NPCs themselves don’t know the truth. A lie is told when you have knowledge of the truth and tell the opposite. They only know what had been shown in front of their eyes.
Look at it from an Alliance perspective- here we are, given a chance to finally strike back at the Horde for inflicting a sore wound on us a few expacs back. Any Alliance player who has a single ounce of faction pride would gladly jump at that opportunity.
In the grander scheme of things, Sylvanas’s crimes of the past were finally coming back to bite her in the butt. It would be bad writing if it did not.
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Think about it, who in the story is left that has done major damage to the alliance even before bfa?
It wasn’t concluded, we still need to destroy a horde city. the horde needs to pay.
doesn’t that sounds like motivation to you?
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