"The developers disrespect the Alliance player races"

Community General Discussion
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I met up with my siblings online, a kind of breakfast across the continent, and all three of my brothers threw a fit about the new Allied Race. They had a heated discussion about how much dreck the Alliance is nowadays and the sheer disrespect they get as a player community.

I didn’t get involved in their debate, I already posted enough about the situation yesterday after the BlizzCon opening ceremony, but I do agree on a larger scale about the issue. Why does the Alliance needs another clone race? Who thought this would be such a great idea to begin with? They have big, regular and small humans in various degrees of body fat and beard size, with a few other races being actual fantasy races. Let’s take a look:

  • The Worgen don’t get the love and treatment they have been asking for. In fact, they are being mocked by the developers through NPC-dialogues in Dragonflight and why they don’t have tails.
  • The Void Elves are a failed allied race with not enough backstory and love given, most of them serve as a High Elves-replacement nowadays. Obviously this race has its fans but at the same time they were abandoned. The have no racial flying mount, they have no story presence until one of the new expansions and they don’t get enough customization options and glyphes to justify their mere existence as a token race. The poster child for “spit into the face”- Blizzard management
  • The Wildhammers are, like the High Elves, a shoved-in subrace into another main race with wrong racials and no love given to them until the upcoming trading post vanity items, where everyone can equip Wildhammer-themed head gears. No heritage armor, no race title, nothing. The very same issues. And on top of that, the Earthen become an actual allied race while they won’t.
  • The Draenei started as a mistake-race based on lore according to Metzen, if I remember correctly, grew however to be another human-looking races with hooves, human hands, a human face, tendrils, horns and a tail.
  • The Kul Tiran are an unique model nobody plays, because they aren’t Vrykuls - and they look “fat”, which does not satisfy the casual fantasy player. They are just another flavor of humans. Again.
  • The Mechagnomes are a failed attempt on Steampunk, with lack of customization. They got some love with an updated racial mount, but otherwise they are despised and mocked for being amputee diaper gnomes.
  • The Pandaren were planned as an Alliance-only race in the early stages of TBC, which to be frankly, should have stayed this way. People already fear for the upcoming Heritage Armor (Blue/Red, what most people don’t want to see) and the lack of proper care or upgraded models.
  • The Drac’thyr was the first fantasy race in a long time the Alliance got, and yet they missed the mark globally with the sleek design.
  • The Dark Iron Dwarves are a race, which was requested and they also got.

Comparing this to the Horde, where we got a) all our popular requests fulfilled (straight-back Orcs, Zandalari Trolls, Vulpera, Nightbornes) and b) even get Dwarves now, which was also requested to some degree by Horde-players, I really can’t blame people who are upset about this outcome. The Alliance is worth nothing these days and I do agree with my brothers, that they are just a mindless collective to give them funding money for the good of the Horde-developers.

This begs the question: Why do we need Anduin and Alleria as hero characters in the upcoming expansion at all, when the good-feels are Horde-centered? I rather would have replaced them with a Pandaren and Troll hero, to spice things up.

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Marketing. Elves and humans do really well on posters and ad-space in general.

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Rofl. Imagine thinking Horde getting vulpera is a positive thing. You can have them. Please. Take them!

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big shocker nobody wants to play as a fat ugly human or an ugly lame dragon. people would have been far more pleased with vrykul and drakonid

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All of the races Blizzard have been adding to the game, all of them except Zandalari Trolls and Dark Iron Dwarves and Mag’har, have been questionable head-scratchers.

They are seemingly bent on giving people something other than what was asked, lol.

Or they monkey-paw it, like with “High Elves” being a skin for Void Elves and Blood Elves, or the mechagnome implementation, with very little player choice on the mechanical limbs and stuff. Should be able to choose which limbs are robotic, not all of them baseline. Or, give fully robotic, Northrend-style.

Again, what people wanted.

Whenever they do this half-botched stuff like Kul’Tirans, it’s mostly wasted dev time because no one plays them.

I feel like Earthen are gonna end up like some of the other less-played allied races like Nightborne or Highmountain.

It’s already a sub-race of an already not-super-popular race, like mechagnomes are.

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We literally played through their coming into existence. How much more back can you get in a story?

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I don’t really see it as something to get upset about, but i don’t blame people for seeing the devs as being horde supporters and not really being in touch with anything alliance related, either they’re constantly and deliberately failing on delivering anything that’s even close to what the masses seem to want, or they’re flat out incompetent (or just completely out of touch i guess).

The Mechagnome thing is what really did it for me, to give a slight variant on an already unpopular race instead of something that people actually wanted was a just… :woman_facepalming:

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Do you have any proof of this? I would love to see your source considering it was chen who helped found orgimmar

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I remember how highly contested they were on both sides, until wowhead dropped a brewfestival leak regarding the next two allied races. It was a disaster.

It’s definitely monkey-pawing the situation. The so called “account-wide” thing coming in the next expansion is only for the new expansion planned so far. Read the wiki Q&A about it, I’m not pleased. No old content account-wide reputations.

I think so too. The Earthen will be another wasted developer time because they didn’t respect the players.

I don’t think that a 15 minute quest is enough backstory going forward. There is literally nothing to them. They have absolutely no significance until Midnight.

If they act like yesterday’s presentation, then it’s no wonder they look like incompetent fools. I think one of them even mocked the Alliance-players again on stage, which was disgraceful and unprofessional. Don’t see the “fun” in it. At least Metzen knew how to be on point when it comes to funny jabs.

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/History_of_pandaren_in_Warcraft#Scrapped_race_in_The_Burning_Crusade

The pandaren were initially planned to be the new playable race for the Alliance in World of Warcraft’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, but about halfway through development they were replaced with the draenei.[9][10][11] In a Q&A thread on Reddit in April 2020, former Blizzard artist Trent Kaniuga stated that this was because the Chinese government told Blizzard that they couldn’t use pandas in the game. By that point, the artists had already created concept art for pandaren cities and buildings, but the change happened early enough in development that not much content was cut. The developers would not get permission to implement pandas until 5 years later. According to Kaniuga, “In reality it was probably just that they needed more time to negotiate it. Panda’s[sic] are a national treasure in China, so it takes a lot of negotiating to work a deal to distribute characters that look like that in China.”[12][13]
Pandaren The Burning Crusade

A fanmade hoax originally presented as a leaked pandaren screenshot from The Burning Crusade

Because of this, the pandaren’s replacement—the draenei—were not ready to be showcased in time for the public announcement of The Burning Crusade at BlizzCon 2005; only the new Horde race—the blood elves—was revealed, with no mention of what the Alliance race would be. This quickly led to a large amount of rumors and speculation among fans, with the pandaren being one of the more popular races brought up as a possibility. A “leaked” pandaren screenshot began circulating around various forums the day before BlizzCon, but on April 1 the following year it was revealed to have been a prank created by Ian McConville of the Mac Hall webcomic.[14][15] A BlizzCon 2005 article by Eurogamer stated that “mentioning the ex-April-Fools-joke Pandaren Empire to Blizzard staff got a surprisingly cagey response…”[16] On October 31, a few days after BlizzCon, Stephen Glicker of the website Gaming Steve—who claimed to have unofficial contacts at Blizzard—stated that when editors from various gaming magazines were brought to Blizzard’s offices to view The Burning Crusade for the first time, they saw dozens of posters and artwork depicting pandaren as the new Alliance race. Glicker further stated that, at the time, Blizzard had been “80% certain” that the pandaren would be the new Alliance race, but due to the political reasons surrounding the issue there was now a “zero percent chance” of the race making it into the game.[17]

The draenei were officially unveiled as the new Alliance race at E3 2006, roughly 6 months after the announcement of The Burning Crusade,[18] but rumors persisted that the developers had originally planned to use pandaren instead. Blizzard would not confirm or deny these rumors directly until BlizzCon 2011, when Chris Metzen revealed during an interview with Direct TV that this was indeed the case.[9]

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I think that’s going to be remedied with Midnight expac.

I think this will be because they play a pivotal role in the next expac.

Both those npcs are main characters and play an important role in the upcoming expacs is what my best guess would be.

As for the “good-feels are horde centered”, Idk what this means.

You can’t really compare the 2 factions. Both get good stuff but it shows up in different ways. Some are cosmetic, some are story related. In BfA alliance got the better stories, better zones and main hub, imo.

While alliance did get a lot of updated horses for mounts versus horde’s dino mounts and stuff like that, Blizzard has been updating the game all along so I think that’s why all the horse mounts in BfA.

Same thing with other things that may not seem fair. They only have so much time, resources and man power so they’re going to update and then toss it in and call it a new thing.

Wait, are you saying that those new Magni style dwarves in this coming expac are going to be horde only?
I’m confused. I thought all dwarves are alliance only.

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We don’t know this yet. We all also expected a better allied race for the upcoming expansion and what we got are dwarves, with the Alliance suffering again another unfair cause. As a Horde-player you always win as a customer.

You do not suffer in the gameplay department. You will never disappointed, you always get the races you ask for. As a red player you a privilege.

The biggest issue stems from the main hub made first and foremost as a raid.

The horses are not the problem but the asking price back then. 10k gold for an additional saddle was simply offensive towards the other half of the customer base, which is why the bee mount was justified in the end. These horse mounts were low effort mounts and people have pointed this out with pictures. They simply copied the saddles from Mop/WoD mounts. Nothing else was done for most of the part. That was 10min work.

The Earthen will be available to both sides, with the Horde getting the better deal out of it again, like always.

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i dunno. i’m kinda getting use to my mechagnomes. i have 3. the rest are elves, mostly void, and some humans.

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Just going to comment on this… The issue with Kul’tiran’s isn’t that they ‘look fat’ It’s that they look like m-preg body builders.
The arm’s are perfectly jacked muscle arms with intense definition like they have 0% body fat to the point the veins are protruding, and the pectorials are compact well muscled and defined too, then you get to the gut which is comically spherical and bloated, looking like a pregnancy rather than a ‘muscle gut’ look of the strong man build they are MEANT to have.

If you toned down the gut to look like a muscle gut instead of a male pregnancy, and gave them some Vrykul beard/hair options, Kul’tiran popularity would skyrocket.

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one thing i noticed when watching the hardcore mak’gora, every one of those world class pvpers was horde. every single one lol
min max meta = horde

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You forget how they dumbed down and demolished the Night Elves.
One of the most ancient race in Azeroth, experienced in every kind of warfare. Yet they got beaten by some greenskins and a rotting emo queen.

I guess, thank you Danuser!

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yes, look at her arms. nice biceps and forearms but the rest is sumo wrestler

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The fact that Alliance never got actual High Elves and Horde never got Ogres is just pathetic. The Night elves also keep getting dumped on in the storytelling since Legion.

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I mean, that’s kind of the only thing that can happen given the situation. It’s hard for a race to have history when it has canonically only existed for less than a decade, anything that delves into what they were before explicitly becomes Blood/High Elf territory because that’s what they were until they went and kicked void rocks.

Void Elves were a mistake, they should’ve just done High Elves and been done with it.

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Just say you want sexy cat people and be done with it. Kul Tiran top 3 Alliance race.

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You’re joking, right? Vulpera were extremely requested as a playable race.

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