It’s true. The most effective way to defeat the Alliance is to wait patiently for them to be crushed by the story.
9 Likes
I have plot armor to keep me from becoming teen Dora.
Can you say awkward? Say awkward!
Very good!
1 Like
If it makes you feel any better I assure you it has been a pyrrhic victory so drastic that I often wish our positions were reversed.
Is it better to be used as a punching bag for over a decade, or to slowly watch everything you loved about your people slowly morph into things you detest?
I feel for the Alliance and their legitimate story complaints. But I also lament what was taken from Horde players as we were constantly used as the stick. At least the Alli get the moral high ground on a lot of it. I’m not saying that makes it any better though.
Nobody won. For a long time, this was a place where I could escape to because its reality was far more appealing to ours. Borgg was everything I wished I could be (in terms of character, I mean. Maybe not so much on the “feel the jugular spray of the human dogs on our faces” part, but I -did- start him while working at Red Lobster, so…). It took me a long time to learn that he’s just a representation of who I am, but for all those years I hated myself- this was where I could be happy. I didn’t have another alt survive past lvl30 until BFA because anytime I wanted to do something in-game, I inevitably wanted to be him.
And while I’m in a much, much better place than I was a decade ago, I don’t know if I can ever really forgive Blizzard from what they’ve stolen from me personally and from us as role-players by jacking things up so much that I can no longer justify playing a character who was such a huge part of my life, for so long, on a realm that became a second home.
I mean, how can they give that back? They can’t. It’s gone. And therefore, so is any motivation for me to continue playing. But I miss the people so I still like to lurk and grumble like the old man I have become.
11 Likes
One of the things that drew me to this game - and the reason I still check the forums even though I’ve unsubbed - is that I absolutely loved the setting.
Orcs, minotaurs, and zombies who are good guys? The classic fantasy races as, essentially, apocalypse survivors who are trying to hold onto what they have left? Conflict between them that was based on mutual distrust, grudges, competition, panic, and other very human qualities that didn’t require one side to be evil, just people muddling through difficult times? I loved it.
The writing has never been all that deep, but it had deep themes, and for a long time the game respected those themes. Garrosh was a bit too much, I think, and undermined the ‘we will not be rampaging monsters’ theme the orcs had going. But the story was still salvageable.
But BfA stomped on those themes so hard that I can’t think they can ever recover.
For the Horde - it’s been said a million times by people who could word it better than me. The Horde were designed as scary, loud, warlike - but not as monsters. Their whole theme is being monstrous creatures who were not the monsters the world thought them to be and persecuted them as. Then BfA made them be those monsters, said they were always those monsters. That’s not the setting I joined the game for, and not the one I want to play.
For the Alliance - I think Blizz severely misunderstood how the Burning would impact Alliance players. It wasn’t just an atrocity, not just a short story about some faceless NPCs dying to drive the hero to avenge them - it was a complete refutation of the Alliance’s capability and competence to do the one thing that it exists for: to protect its people. I think Blizz underestimated how many Alliance players shared that sentiment. It doesn’t matter if the individuals are unknown, or if the number of the slain is never going to affect gameplay - the massive death toll, what Blizzard itself decided to describe explicitly as genocide, of fleeing civilians who died in agony on our home turf because we, their defenders, failed them is emotionally crushing even if they were just pixels. And the Kalimdor story ended on that note, left the player wallowing in it for months. No wonder people quit.
I’m angry and depressed even now, just thinking of that story beat. I didn’t decide to play this adventurer to go kill monsters because I hate monsters and want them dead, I made this adventurer so I could go kill monsters so the monsters didn’t kill the people back home that I’m protecting. For the game to tell me ‘yeah, but they die anyway - here’s a video showing them burning alive and a short story describing their screams’ - that doesn’t motivate me to play. I know the game won’t let me destroy the Horde for what they did (and that the Horde player absolutely doesn’t deserve that story either), and anything less would still leave my faction open to a repeat of this same story beat happening - so what is the point? What did Blizzard possibly think would be the result? How on earth did they think BfA’s ending would be enough to salve this wound they purposefully inflicted?
At this point, I am hoping for BfA to be written off as N’zoth machinations, even if it’s just to the level of ‘everything still happened, but under N’zoth illusions, so the tree is still burned but it was Old God cultists on both sides who did it and you totally slew them all in Ny’alotha’. It’s not satisfying, but it’s still a lot better than the current state of the factions.
10 Likes
I agree wholeheartedly with your post, one of the things I always liked about WoW, despite being an Alliance main, is that the Horde was always advertised as the monster races who aren’t really monsters. That was always so cool to me, like they are just different and trying to survive.
With that said I wish BfA was reversed. That would have made the expansion better in every way. And it would have felt like an Alliance win no matter how you slice it considering all of WoW’s history has been the Alliance taking one too the chin and the Horde self-destructing which causes the Alliance to win.
Imagine:
-
Anduin decides to attack Lordaeron and destroys it somehow (in the way that Teldrassil was destroyed), and the Horde has to save the civilians but FAIL, the way Alliance players had to go through that.
-
Then (we know they won’t destroy Stormwind because lololol gameplay) Anduin retreats to Teldrassil with the rest of the Alliance leaders for reasons as the Horde launches an attack as retribution. Horde is successful in taking Teldrassil but is led into a trap by Anduin and is saved at the last second by Thalyrssra teleporting them out of there as Anduin blows up Teldrassil.
-
Tyrande meanwhile rebels against Anduin and ends up being basically the Saurfang of the story. With Genn being the Baine on Alliance side effectively.
-
And then BfA ends with Tyrande challenging Anduin to a duel to show he shouldn’t be leading the Alliance and dying somehow (Blizzard would have to really find a good reason why Tyrande loses to Anduin) and we find out Anduin is “corrupted” by the Light/Void which leads us into the Light/Void expansion.
I mean you can’t tell me this would be worse than the BfA we got… The Alliance gets to have the needed win with Lordaeron, they get to be aggressive FOR ONCE, Alliance gets villain batted for the first time EVER and has in-faction conflict, Alliance finally loses characters which the Horde players have been whining to happen for years as Tyrande dies and Anduin leaves the Alliance. And then of course the Alliance gets away with everything they did at the end of the expansion by scapegoating everything onto Anduin.
I have seen people mention the Alliance having the moral high ground before but honestly whats the point of that when you constantly have your teeth kicked in? Id rather the Alliance have a backbone and actually give the Horde something to fear.
3 Likes
BfA premise could have been we’ve fought literal world ending monsters and with them finally defeated we turn on each other using all the horrible methods we’ve learned.
The Horde and Alliance become the very monsters we have always had to put down and the players have to separate themselves from the factions they love to save the world from them.
Legion is overrated and BfA is underrated.
4 Likes
I had the best gameplay and most boring RP during Legion and the best RP and most boring gameplay during BfA, so I guess it all evens out.
4 Likes
I agree Legion is vastly overrated (I will never agree with Legion starships and the Illidan Cheerleading Naaru), but BfA being underrated?
I legit don’t know there. If the Alliance had gotten the same tight narrative focus of the Horde’s zones maybe. Questing was never a chore in BfA like in Shadowlands on either faction, but the Alliance really had three separate zone stories as opposed to the constant build up of the Horde narrative leading into Uldir.
Admittedly the Alliance-side laid the groundwork for Azshara and N’zoth, but only in isolation and in one single zone. I supposed you could argue the Drust got paid off in Shadowlands but I’m assuming the Drust are the focus of the Night Fae Campaign, which they might not be.
3 Likes
Cata was my golden age, but not because of anything Blizzard did. It was solely because of the friends I made and our community at the time.
6 Likes
Yeah, all of it is extremely population-reliant. I admittedly had more RP during Mists of Pandaria when people actually still liked the game.
I’ve always preferred cross-faction and open conflict-driven RP, so MoP and BfA were both good for that. But BfA felt like it was a real gloves-off, stakes-are-real edginess that went a long way for quality of conflict and premise.
Then everyone quit.
4 Likes
BfA is just weird to judge.
It had a lot of stuff I really liked. New faction cities for the first time since BC! (no panda shrines and ashran camps dont count!)
It had huge amounts of new customization!
It had a jaunty sailor jig for Boralus BGM that is still stuck in my head!
It had cool zug orc mogs and shiny paladin mogs from warfronts!
It had heritage armors! Not for me, but for other people…
It had lore that inspired people to RP! Zandas everywhere! Void Elf guilds popping up like tentacles in corrupt earth!
But uh it topped all that off with “and also some horrible grind systems and a bad faction war plot” and I guess the bad makes it hard to notice all the good. It was still way more fun than Shadowlands, and I even enjoyed it more than some popular expansions like MoP, but its story and its systems did a lot of damage.
6 Likes
I was very excited for what we were told BFA would be. Finally, an expansion centered on faction war. That was my jam! Sign me up, pre-ordered, all the works.
Then it turned out to be nothing but Sylvanas and her self-insert beta-waifu, genocide, Azerite and “woonds.” Talk about a bait and switch.
8 Likes
It had a few aspects.
My favorite parts of the faction war were seeing the various Horde and Alliance units pitted against each other. Gnome Pounders vs. Goblin Shredders, Draenei Clerics vs. Undead Warlocks and so forth. We had…some of that, I guess?
But the main parts of BfA were gross, I agree.
3 Likes
The only thing I can credit them for was how cool some of the new faction armor sets looked.
But that doesn’t come close to making up for the things I mentioned, along with completely ruining my favorite character and the Orc I originally modeled Borgg after.
Rest in piece, version of Saurfang I could respect.
3 Likes
But he showed up in Anduin’s dad fantasy, what are you so unhappy about.
3 Likes
it’s still incredibly funny to me that saurfang died during brewfest
5 Likes
Don’t get me started because I won’t shut up and it will just ruin my day to think about.
1 Like
In this, you see the true power of the Alliance.
When all your characters suck, they cannot be ruined.
3 Likes
I loved the Warfronts and remain sad we only ever got two of them. I love the fact they used sharding as a way of bringing FORWARD zones into present day. I feel like that’s a better way of updating the old world than a full on revamp while saving a lot of dev time cooking up/coding in flyable zones. I’d love it if in addition to the new stuff every expansion included a zone or two from Azeroth that got “moved forward” in the timeline for relevance.
I love the Warbringers animations, all of them.
4 years later, this still gives me chills.
Damn shame nothing was ever done with it from an in-game narrative aspect.
9 Likes