Believe me, I know the difference between “should happen” and “will happen”…
Excuse me, but the poor taste of ignorant people is not the problem of the rest of us. If anything was mediocre and BAD on Legion (and got rightfully criticized HERE), that was precisely Legion´s lore. The only reason that expac seemed so “good” was because only the very worst of them all expacs (A.K.A. WoD) was inmediately before it.
Sorry but THIS current writting team has churned out literally NOTHING decent EVER. Heck, the whole set of expansions are quite mediocre when read with some modicum of effort; it´s just that after WotLK the bad writting became waaay more evident.
I think the poor taste of ignorant people is very much our problem.
It’s what allowed people to think that Warcraft III was a “good story” that wasn’t full of massive retcons, melodramatic stories, and simplistic characterization as a thin veneer for what was at the time rather slickly produced RTS gameplay. When it was, in reality, a rather mediocre and derivative story that ended up being lauded and turned into the basis for what’s now one of the biggest MMO on the planet.
It’s just that when WC:III TFT came out, most of us in our 20’s and 30s now were only teenagers. And we really enjoyed the game. And nostalgia’s a hell of a drug.
I am pretty sure I didn’t say the current game is for the Alliance players. I am saying that what people are claiming the Alliance should get would make it that way. Please actually read what I was saying.
The War of Thorns isn’t a power trip for anyone unless they get off on genocide of innocent people which a lot of people don’t. I mean even then we had ONE alliance race fight off a combined force of multiple Horde races attacking from ambush when their armies weren’t even at home. People seem to forget how pissed off the Horde player base was directly after the end of the War of Thorns with players going on social media to spit rage at the writing team. It even got reported in gaming media.
There is a huge grass is greener thing going on here with Alliance players totally convinced it is so much better on the Horde side without frankly understanding why the Horde side is getting screwed too. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying the Alliance side is better. I am saying that the Horde side is just as screwed as the Alliance side, just in a different way, and most people’s solution is to have the Horde not only have to go through its own crap but then have to get the treatment the Alliance got too. How is that in any way fair?
This I think is the key thing and you summed it up well. God knows I can’t suggest a fix for this mess because I don’t think it can be fixed but the alternative is for the same crap to just keep on happening which is why I am hoping it gets left far behind. The factions will be a very minor part of the next expansion which is probably for the better at this point.
Tell that to blizzard, not us. You didn’t need more motivation and Lordearon was a joke for motivating the Horde because in the end we destroyed it and apparently according to Ion, losing one of our major cities counted as a ‘win’.
Cause their alternative is to accept the reality, hate their faction and quit the game and they want to play World of Warcraft. It is easier to lie to oneself to make things tolerable than to just give up and quit. Blizzard has been treating the Horde (and for that matter the Alliance) in this way for years. The Horde gets constantly made to look bad and the Alliance never gets to do anything serious about it.
It has been this way since Cata. There were more shades of grey before then but when was the last time you saw the Alliance genuinely screw over another group out of greed or bigotry? When was the last time the Alliance did something you genuinely felt was unjustified?
This isn’t benefiting the horde. The Horde has made it’s identity and pride a joke. It couldn’t even put up a fair fight this expansion. The only conflicts we won were through either attacks without any warning (the war of thorns) or underhanded methods involving the aid of evil third parties (Naz’jatar). Outside that pretty much everything the horde tried to do this expansion ended in failure. Killing G’huun was the only exception.
You miss understand. I don’t think the Alliance having a good story has to come at the expense of the Horde. I am saying this story isn’t salvagable at the moment. I am saying that Blizzard’s meta writing of the factions doesn’t allow for a good story.
No type of horde fan has won in this situation. The ones who wanted to be villains had the side they wanted to win lose in the end and their preferred leader cast out. The ones who didn’t want to be villains were forced to be. Plus considering you consider a couple of empty words said after a crushing defeat as ‘a Horde triumph moment’ I am not really convinced what you call ‘a good Horde story’ would be a good Horde story.
I don’t like the current situation but you don’t fix it by having the Alliance get righteous justice crapping all over the Horde. That doesn’t bring the Alliance down to the Horde’s level because the Alliance is given justification for it’s actions and the Horde just gets the worst of both worlds.
I don’t think they are capable of it.
Possibly though they seem more interested currently in making elements of the Alliance lean warmongery which is at least a little different from the past if still falling short since those poeple’s attitudes at least seem justifiable.
Then they are useless and lose their value as they continually fail to pay off. Put it this way. Varian taking down a Fel Reaver at the end of the Broken Shore was going out in style. He died but he went out like a champion. The Horde getting kicked like a dog and then having Sylvanas spout some empty words doesn’t really have the same effect.
There is a difference between empty words and actions. See my previous paragraph.
So you count the Alliance invasion of the Barrens as a fist pumping moment because if so you are the first person I have seen that does.
I thought you said it was the moment, not the follow through, that mattered. Plus Southshore isn’t a hub. The questing states that it will be pretty much unusable land due to over blighting. Even the Forsaken can’t use it.
Really because how many actual victories do you think the Horde has had this expansion? The horde got its butt kicked and needed the Naga to save it.
So basically only players like me are screwed? As I pointed out above, no horde player wins in this situation.
I am yet to meet a Horde player who had an issue with working with Malfurion. Tyrande’s problem is she talked to us like we were crap. Not great motivation to help her. There is also Anduin, Velen, Alleria and Turalyon. Those last two were nothing like Thalysrra who was at least still realistically neutral when the Alliance worked with her. I had to listen to Alleria spout hate about the Horde on the Vindicar. Most Horde complaints is that Horde characters are very rarely involved. No Horde character, or former horde character, has had a serious major role since Thrall did in Cata and that is around a decade ago. Right now we are following around Magni.
Horde identity hasn’t evolved at all in ten years so that is rubbish. Yeah the Alliance has been forced to be part of that but it isn’t like they have had nothing to themselves and you might get what you want with the way Tyrande is acting. The Alliance has been proactive in non faction conflicts where the Horde has barely been a background feature.
We had them shoehorning characters into the Horde this expansion due to the lack of time actually developing Horde characters which is why they had to rewrite Garona and Lillian’s dialog in the Beta cause what they said at first was laughably nonsensical with their established characters. Lillian Voss still makes very little sense going from someone with a rabid hatred of Necromancy to someone actively aiding in raising the dead.
No one is getting it good in any way in the current situation. The Horde is ALWAYS to blame and is ALWAYS the one who screws up. We just had an entire expansion with the Horde showing how incompetent it was and in the end the Horde didn’t decide to turn way from the path she had chosen for it because of honor or morals or ethics but because she said something mean to them and turned on that. That alone entirely invalidates the entire claim that this expansion is in any way about the horde self reflecting on itself. At best it is about Saurfang doing it and that is it.
I didn’t say this game is designed only for the Alliance. I am saying that the outcome that some Alliance players want with the Alliance taking its righteous revenge on the Horde would be leaning the game in that direction because it would mean the Horde only served the purpose of being the villain for the Alliance while leaving an opening to shoehorning in paying horde players when they want to do neutral content.
We might have been the proverbial useful idiots, but incompetent described the Alliance far better.
No air support or blight countermeasures in the initial Lordaeron invasion plan, attacking DA with no logical objective, losing naval superiority falling for the same trick a second time, forgetting Felwood exists, forget the Zenedar exists, falling for a verbal-only decoy invasion of Silithus, not blasting Sylvanas as soon as they saw her, leaving the Gnomes armored support behind if not for Alleria having slightly more common sense than Anduin, extremely limited use of submarine warfare…
And for crying out loud, there are portals and flying cruisers and fighters with multi lock seeker missiles, somebody invent the aircraft carrier already.
In your opinion. But I’m actually going to address this after my response to Syaelas.
Ahh, a Syaeles response. Ignore the point of the post, change the topic, and throw enough shade that there’s a good chance you can lure someone into the umpteenth repetition of a popular side argument. Now as easy as it would be to correct your mistake or address your troll baiting, I’m not going to except for this part which notices you changing the subject because even you are probably smart enough to realize you’re wrong.
Staying on topic. Your failure is in attempting to make your dissatisfaction the other faction’s responsibility.
We’ve seen Blizzard producing power fantasies and War of Thorns was not a Horde power fantasy. If it were it would have concluded with Saurfang and Sylvanas high fiving while talking about how the Malfurion was a threat to the entire planet, all the while the Night Elves would be greeting the Horde as liberators.
And now, while you’re sure to be copying and pasting just enough of the above to make it look like a sincere suggestion and not a criticism of your position. I’ll explain the comparison, War of Thorns ended with a deeply fractious moment designed specifically to pull attention away from the victory and bring the horrific consequences into tight focus. To the Horde, War of Thorns was set up for the incoming faction schism.
Now for both of you and Etheldald. It sounds like your complaint is that you didn’t LIKE the story that was designed for you. That’s fine, I have nothing but sympathy for that complaint. You should voice that criticism in clear, unequivocal language, that does not in any way shape or form redirect responsibility for your disappointment on the other faction.
The horde is yet to solve an internal issue without resorting to civil war. Sylvanas showed us we learned absolutely nothing from Garrosh. Furthermore, even after she goes behind the back of most of the Horde leadership in her attack on Tedrassil leading to a major war with the Alliance, none of the leaders do anything to try and reign in her power. For all the talk of Honor, the Horde completely fails to display any conviction on that part.
In the War of Thorns, an attack force with much of the Horde’s strength in Kalimdor attacks the NE lands without warning and while their armies are half the continent away and STILL the Horde gets driven to a stand still with basically civilian militia from just one of the Alliance’s races. Roughly half our strength vs one alliance race caught by surprise and we still have to fight tooth and nail to win.
Later that one race with some support from a displaced bunch of Gilneans are able to completely drive the horde out of Darkshore.
The Horde fails on every turn to stop Zul in Zandalar and are forced to crawl down into the lair of G’huun after completely failing to stop him being released. Then the Alliance totally out maneuvers the Horde in Dazar’Alor, destroying the one thing the Horde went their to try and acquire while the horde fails to make any lasting injury to Kul Tiras. The Alliance gets out of their attack with minimal losses having destroyed the Zandalari fleet, killed a bunch of their champions and their king and used the artifact from Kul Tiras the Horde poured a large amount of effort into acquiring against the Horde. The Horde literally helped the Alliance attack their allies by finding the Scepter of Tides for them.
The only reason that the Horde wasn’t pretty much doomed to lose the war is that the Naga of all people saved us by destroying the Alliance fleet. We had to be saved from the Alliance by Naga cause we were incapable of actually beating them in a stand up war.
The problem with your logic is it is impossible now because the only way it would work for Horde players is if the actions of the Alliance felt unjustified and at this point there isn’t much that would feel unjustified. Just ‘Throwing a little of their morals out the window’ wouldn’t be enough. You need to have the baby with the bathwater.
The problem is, you want payback for being wronged. In your mind that would make such an attack justified and you would be able to argue it as such. Unfortunately so would we and that just means the whole time we would have a little voice telling us the horde kind of deserves it at this point and that would piss us off because the horde should have never been forced into a position where it deserves it.
So no, we cant both get what we want. For you to get what you truly want, Horde players have to get screwed. Anything less and your just getting the monkey paw and getting forced into our position of being angry with Blizzard for ruining your faction and making their rhetoric sound pathetically hypocritical.
okay i am not going to avoid this question.
so here i am thinking has hard as possible and trying to be honest with myself.
And… i don’t really have an answer other than… daelin,arthas and garithos… someone who wasn’t even in this game.
all other events…to me are simply justified because it is responding to a previous aggression. hell even the purge and their sunreaver traitors.
maybe is just the way in how blizzard writtes that creates these situations.
Now… that doesn’t mean that in many of these scenarios we didn’t have a gray area where maybe it wasn’t exactly “the way” to do it .
and i don’t personally feel that going more dark will ruin the alliance forever because i know that we also kinda still have “good” people, the question is in how they will react in this situation.
But, of course if it is the same team of writters that we already have and gived us an example of what happens when blizzard wants a story at all cost just to have a new expansion and raid tiers. then the end result would be pure ruin.
i… see… hm…good point to be honest…
i…don’t really see how we can make it unjustified… maybe attacking baine?.
but i already feel justified to do anything…
You are right.
Not really, the targets are somewhat limited. It’s justified to attack any individual or group, or disband any organization that, were their crimes laid bare, the Neuremberg trials would have convicted. That would be most of the list of acceptable targets.
I honestly think I have never felt more disgusted and worn out doing anything in my life then I have playing BFA. To say this expansion sucked is an understatement, it is by FAR the worst expansion to date just for the storytelling alone, but the obvious time gating grindfests are also sucky. But seriously, while the gameplay is below average as far as WOW is concerned the STORY, my god the story is without a doubt the worst Warcraft, no, Blizzard related story in existence and I would even go so far to say that in all of gaming it would be in the top 10 worse story telling and in all fictitious media in the top 100, it is THAT BAD.
Anyone who still thinks WOD is worse than this s&*t show is an idiot and I hate you for being such a god damn moron and please shut up and don’t even reply to me. Writing this I’m probably aware that this post is going to get deleted because the mods here are a bunch of soft sacks but whatever, i’ll just copy this and keep posting till I get forum banned, I don’t even care anymore, I have to get this off my chest.
Being an Alliance player for years, especially one who ranks Night Elves as one of my more favoured races, I think If I spent my money to get crapped on by an aids infested hobo I would have ended up with more of my dignity intact. What the actual f were they thinking? Well I know the answer to that, “We’re going with a very controversial and edgy start to BFA, and although we don’t currently have a satisfying conclusion to the story that everyone will enjoy we are sure to come up with something in the next couple of years”, spoiler alert, they didn’t.
The Alliance in BFA is the worst combination of punching bag, pacifist idiots, weaklings, beta b**ches I have ever seen. Not only do the Alliance leaders show more concern and attention to the Horde then the Kal’dorei, they also refuse to do anything decisive in battle for fears of going ‘too hard’ on the poor wittle, mass murdering Horde P.O.S. When Jaina said, "Let the Zandalari mourn, they lost their king"I wanted to vomit and gave up on the Alliance completely. Does the Alliance even get brownie points for showing undeserved mercy? Nope, the Zandalari want to exterminate the Alliance just as much as any other Horde race.
The worst part, the WORST part has to be the bits where we are FORCED to help the Horde. When Jaina asked we bail Baine from Orgrimmar I had to scratch my head because the “Kill this traitourous b**ch” open didn’t show up in the speech options. What, because Baine saved her brother we are meant to show any gratitude? Jaina’s ‘thanks’ to Baine was when she chose not to kill him in Theramore, after that the debt had been repayed. Then while I am rescuing Baine, Saurfang made me infuriated when he compared what happened in Dazar’alor to the burning of Darnassus. My character would have never stood for that s&*t and demanded Jaina teleport me out. But no, because Blizzard doesn’t give one crap about the Alliance, the Horde get options to be antagonistic or not to the opposite faction and Alliance don’t.
All I wanted to do the entire expansion was kill and genocide the Horde scum for what they did, but no, I gotta worry about Azeroth, or helping poor Baine or wasting time messing with some stupid Trolls who weren’t even involved. I couldn’t give a crap about Azeroth, let the Horde solve that problem, I wanted to stop Elves from being killed and raised into Undeath in their own homes but no, I had to collect stupid shiny rocks to save our crummy world.
Anyone saying that the Alliance doesn’t want to genocide the Horde in retaliation is wrong, I want to see Horde children slaughtered, Horde scum used as fertilizer to repair the damage to the Night Elfs lands, the crappy writers for this garbage expansion fired and forced onto the streets and maybe, just maybe we can call it even. I feel betrayed playing the Alliance, what a worthless, piss weak faction.
Still in stage 2, huh? I remember that, back in Theramore. Good bad times, good bad times.
Join the Horde, it sucks that the Alliance, well, sucks, but it’s actually pretty nice over here. We got a cohesive multi part narrative over in Zandalar, filler villain or not, and not the scattered A.D.D. story Kul’tiras’ three zones gave.
You can even make a Vulpera, whose hands are currently clean of the blood of the innocent!
Oh trust me I know, the Alliance is being eternally punished for attracting the most amount of players in Vanilla despite how ‘awesome’ Blizzard made the Horde out to be, so now the devs themselves are making playing the Alliance as joyless and torturous as possible
All Horde races, who still continue to align with the Horde, whether it was before what happened in BFA or after, have the blood of innocents on their hand. It may be because they shook hands with a murderer but they’re dirty nonetheless.
If any of the Horde races who are ‘indebted’ to the Horde had any moral fibre whatsoever they would demand to pay their way out and go neutral.
Be disappointed with the result just like Horde players are. We’re already seeing that our council is no better than a warchief at stopping the endless internal strife storyline.
With extra land in Ashenvale, naval strength brought to parity, less land that is damached which is more temporarily so, all Alliance moves being evening the score or a score we soon evened, a traitor expunged before she could spring whatever trap she had for us, and the Human military and Night Elf population down to the bare bones?
A positive resolution to the Night Elf story with proper catharsis does have to come at the expense of the Horde. That doesn’t mean the Horde player base has to be subjected to it. They have and still can make quests that showcase the factions fighting each other and only offer one side to the story.
But we get these disingenuous Horde posters that refuse to believe that it’s anything other than “Alliance players try to bully me.”
This much is agreed, for sure. It was beyond salvaging right at launch, and that takes some special kind of writing.
Lol. I’m going to offering one last response to this and then stop arguing this point with you because it doesn’t seem to be clicking. Fist pumping moments are not final triumphs; they are inspiring moment to reinvigorate readers/players/characters after a dark moment. Sylvanas’ speech after Vol’jin’s death absolutely is (at least for many) one of those moments.
If it didn’t jive with you, that’s something about you, and that’s totally fine. Like I’ve said a bazillion times in this thread - it’s all about preference.
And I haven’t been advocating for this; Eth has, not me.
I spent a good half dozen posts in another thread the other day talking about how both factions’ narratives for resolution should be told separately. Just like how Brenndam is told only to the Alliance, both factions should get some moments of resolution that the other faction doesn’t see.
At this point, both sets of players are being little babies and cannot separate themselves from their favorite faction long enough to see the story through without soiling their pants. They refuse to accept that there has to be some compromise. The only solution is to do all the things without them looking, and be sure it’s in game.
Example:
An ALLIANCE ONLY quest in which Horde npcs come and help rebuild some burned down farms, and we see genuine sympathy or empathy from a faction that has been portrayed as being nothing more than bloodthirsty savages. **This shows the Alliance that there is remorse and humanity in their opposition.
A HORDE ONLY quest in which Elwynn loggers sail over to Orgrimmar to negotiate with the Horde to be sure that they get lumber for Orgrimmar without stepping on Kaldorei territory and saber rattling. Give them an opportunity to see the Alliance as willing to help and support, instead of be aggressive.
These are two extremely basic things that took a half minute to push out: both would offer a net positive experience without humiliating the other faction
because the other faction doesn’t see them, and
because it’s about positive construction and not destruction, for a change.
We don’t need to resolve everything through fighting, nor should we, but Blizzard has the writing skills of a 2nd grader who can only isolate major story moments and not the sinew that links them all together.
Both factions are in dire need of being built up.
Yes. This is what I’ve said. Multiple times. They’re not meant to carry you all the way through, they’re meant to be small, momentary bursts of positivity. That is it.
It actually does have the exact same weight, but in reverse.
The Alliance gets a heroic moment that is sobered by death, and leaves players yearning to avenge their king.
The Horde’s loss at the shore rings heavy with the death of Vol’jin, but Sylvanas brings a demoralized Horde together and leaves players yearning to avenge their warchief.
The beginnings are flipped, but they are meant to serve the same purpose. To say that the Alliance didn’t get
is to deliberately ignore everything that happened on the Broken Shore. The Horde isn’t the only one who lost someone there.
I’m done arguing this; you seem to be ignoring the point.
You are misreading. I was comparing your measure of victory in both places.
You claimed that Alliance players should count their Ashenvale “victory” in BFA (which was explained off screen) as a legit thing, but that the Horde shouldn’t count their complete and total claiming of Hillsbrad in Cata as a victory (which was ON SCREEN). To be honest and blunt, I think that’s bull - and your bias is showing.
This, specifically, was not a point about fist pumping, to be clear - it was about pointing out that you have a skewed understanding of balance.
In Hillsbrad you get both. Maybe not Southshore itself, but you have a million moments in that zone in which the Horde demolishes the Alliance - so idk why you’re on about this.
Even if the town is unusable, the Horde… and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough so I’m going to do a rare thing and put it in caps so you can see it… THE HORDE GOT AN ENTIRE ZONE. THAT IS A VICTORY. EVEN IF ONE TOWN WAS WIPED OFF THE MAP OFF SCREEN, THE HORDE STILL CLAIMED AN ENTIRE ZONE.
I hope that helps clear it up.
We’re not going apples to apples because we will literally be here all week; every expansion shifts the balance slightly. So comparing victories in Cata, against BFA, will yield skewed results.
Players like you and me are screwed, yes. We play World of Warcraft, why would we be anything else but screwed? The developers actively hate the players, they trash the story, and they hold no respect for the product itself.
No players came out of this expansion having won. Everyone lost. Everyone is pissed off. Everyone is miserable. There is no net gain - only loss, and then a lack of resolution.
Cities were destroyed, a race was nearly wiped out, leaders were killed, we wasted a legit entire f-ing expansion only to have everything we fought for be meaningless. I’m not painting any of BFA as a victory.
I’m just gunna quote myself.
Yup. Said it before, and will say it again - there are no net positives.
Alliance is written as lawful stupid because if they were written intelligently, they’d wipe the Horde off the planet, unfortunately. Super lasers, space ships, the most OP set of characters… we’ve covered this point.
This was one of the most irritating points for me. After all of Saurfang’s huffing and puffing about Garrosh going down a dark path, and vowing he’d kill the guy before he allowed it… he does a whole lot of nothing when it counts. He only leads a rebellion when it’s too late.
Agreed - it’s why I stopped playing it. All I’ve been doing is rping privately and occasionally hopping on to do old world raids.
Lol. After Teldrassil I, personally, have not been able to stomach the Horde’s storyline - no matter how interesting parts of it may be. I played through BFA Horde side once and haven’t touched my Horde toons since. I wouldn’t say “pretty nice” is the right term.
No matter how you try to rationalize it, once a faction stands to support a leader who embraces genocide, even if it is in fiction, my support gets pulled. Granted, I haven’t played Alliance since 8.1 either so… shrugs.
While I disagree with the first part, like I mentioned above - exclusive quests that don’t subject the other faction to humiliation are necessary to get anywhere going forwards from here - but only if they result in a net positive result.