I think the things you pointed out here are truly the crux of the issue and all these endless threads about the Horde vs Alliance “wins” is simply a symptom of it.
Even if you were to make a thread about this on its own as it surely merits it I doubt the discussion would ever get past the “yeah we knew, so what?”
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You are quite right that the response might well be a shrug.
I guess, I might hope that we could reframe the discussion from what is or isn’t a victory to how such events are portrayed in the game and received by the players. It seems to me that this leads to a potentially more productive conversation.
To be clear, this is not an issue that impacts only the Alliance player base. In an xpac that was sold on being about faction pride where we were explicitly told that the developers didn’t want players to feel like they picked the wrong faction - the Horde players got sent to burn a whole bunch of civilians to a crisp and annihilate an entire zone. Not really a feel good moment for them.
Surely, it was possible to write a faction war xpac in such a way that players on both sides could have felt good about their faction?
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I think the problem is. Blizzard actually build a lot of hype on ‘‘faction pride’’, as in: “Oh we’re gonna do this be epic and you will shout FOR THE HORDE /ALLIANCE with pride!” and…
Blizz opens up the expansion with the Horde burning civilians, everyone including an expressive amount of Horde players where pissed cause this is not a faction pride moment, it’s a “Are you kiding Blizzard? You think I’m gonna have pride in burning kids?”
Then Alliance gets the Battle for Lordaeron, it wins by a technical standpoint cause the Horde is off the picture, but the place is so plagued nothing can live in it.
Then it’s reduced to. Horde does something, Alliance undoes it during the War Campaign and nothing seems to go anywhere.
Then Darkshore where it IS the time for Alliance to have some sort of retribution and…Tyrande kills one valkyr and then ‘‘Oh she had her moment’’ like…dude…this is just the warm up it’s not even a fraction of a moment.
Then the Battle of Zuldazar, finally ONE victory for the Alliance where it manages to destroy the one thing that could match the Kul Tiran fleet…
I think that was the ONE full victory the Alliance has, like ok the Zandalari are with the Horde now…with no fleet wich was the reason the Horde reached out to them, a dead king, it’s kingdom divided between people who love Talanji and who thinks she’s a puppet of Bwomsandi and to add to the political turmoil, it’s army weakened by the battle.
And now Nazjatar…where urgh…the old ‘‘we have to work together against the big baddie’’ that was the complete oposite of what they promised.
End result? Everyone is mad. The Horde for being painted as the bad guys AGAIN when no one signed for it, and the Alliance for being overly nerfed (like the ''oh forget about the ALIEN SPACE SHIP they have) and having way less victories when you compare to the Horde.
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I think even in Dazaralor there was a presentation problem.
“The MIGHT of the Alliance! Fear us oh Horde!”
And at the end the battle was just a raid. Not on a gameplay level. But as a military term.
This was an Alliance raid that was only achieved by sacrificing troops as a diversion for the sole purpose of capturing/killing the Zandalari King.
And then run away before the Horde and Zandalari army get back.
The fleet was already doomed in the war campaign.
If the Alliance just destroyed the ships and left Dazaralor they would have been exactly where they started. The whole “sacrifice” fellow soldiers for something that was unnecessary in the first place is not exactly an epic victory either.
It seems Blizzard’s sole mission this expansion is make everyone miserable.
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You already saw what we consider losing. The burning of Teldrassil was shown not just in an animatic, but fully rendered in CGI, too.
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And this time, there’s no third party of chubby bears to quote cheap fortune cookies and pass it off as some deep wisdom. So it’s the Alliance warhawks who have to handwave the genocide of not-their-race, and pull a 180° in 0.5 seconds to pull off the “work together” plot.
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Not just rendered – played through in the pre-xpac quests by Alliance players for the sole purpose of showing us how many kaldorei died in the flames, how many we couldn’t save compared to the scant handful we could. Oh, and to get a mount. Admittedly, it’s a cool mount but dear god that quest chain was a gut-punch. I played it through on four alts, mostly because I wanted in-game footage for a video I wanted to make, before I just couldn’t take it anymore. So we don’t get to play through our victories, like storming our way to Lordaeron, we only get play-throughs of incompetence and heart-rending tragedy.
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And this is why Horde complaints about “Oh we had to abandon Lordaeron” or “Oh no we lost a navy we never really saw” feel so shallow in comparison.
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Darnassus was absolutely nothing in importance compared to the most important city in the entire setting, which was the crux of the game, Warcraft 3 and the Frozen Throne, that put Warcraft on the map: Lordaeron.
Horde was never ranting and raving about Teldrassil being Horde holy land.
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No one is comparing the historical importance of Darnassus to the historical importance of Lordaeron.
People are complaining about Teldrassil being a horrific display of burning countless Night Elves and comparing relatively bloodless loss of the Undercity to that, and neither getting appropriate recognition in the story after.
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I’m not sure what war campaign you played.
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Right? What did the red team win exactly? Everything we do is undone by the Alliance and then some.
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Wait… what? Did I miss something, somewhere? No, wait, you said, ‘Since Legion.’ Sure, let’s ignore the history of the game and latch onto an expansion where the factions were the background and the story was largely relegated to neutral factions, an expansion where BOTH the Horde and Alliance were incompetent. Just ignore the equal incompetence of the Alliance during Legion, why not? Not like we didn’t go to the Broken Shore due to a Dreadlord impersonating our spymaster.
And despite this, every time, the Horde wins. Go figure.
I’m speechless. If you think that then you’ve never been Alliance and played through such memorable moments in the game as the Battle for Andorhal, or Stonetalon Mountains. Perhaps the scenario that was the Bombing of Theramore?
Yeah, the Alliance sure is winning. I remember the victory at Lordaeron. We took the city and Sylvanas’ head, didn’t lose a single soldier. It was great. The Horde didn’t even get it’s civilians out in time.
Dazar’alor sure was a victory as well. We took Rastakan hostage and held the entire city, preventing the Zandalari from joining their might to the Horde’s out of concern for their King.
Let’s not forget Tyrande’s victory in Darkshore where the Horde was pushed out, Nathanos was killed before he could open his mouth to snap some snarky comment, and the last of the Val’kyr were obliterated in moonfire.
Even in 8.2 we’re doing so well. We chased a Horde fleet down and utterly destroyed it before single-handedly making our way into Naz’jatar to take care of Azshara as well.
So many glowing victories, ESPECIALLY against the Horde. Why, I’ve never been MORE satisfied as an Alliance player.
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The same one you played. I just don’t retroactively look at the blue side and because they won their own war campaign to negate my own.
Besides the Alliance never beat me directly, they just punished the Zandalari like stealing stuff from their treasury.
That has nothing to do with me or the Horde. Its the Zandalari’s fault… besides why did we give them our spoils of war? That is a bigger question for me.
I have no idea what you are talking about. It seems your argumentative style is to belittle other people’s opinions while advancing yours as the only legitimate opinion.
I don’t see how you can have a constructive discussion with that attitude.
Especially in 8.1, the entire Alliance War Campaign negates the Horde War Campaign, and in fact some of the ‘gains’ made in the original 8.0 campaign are turned against the Horde. By 8.1.5, everything except Amalia Stoneheart has been undone or lost.
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But again that is just how the war campaign developed. We won first then they won. Just because they won something does not negate our own accomplishments.
That is really short-sighted in my opinion.
In our war campaign we were given an objective, and we accomplished it.
Honestly if we didn’t play the Alliance side of the quests I doubt we would have even know what they did.
I’m going to have to agree with Shieyra and Jellex on this one. The Horde players don’t have to play the Alliance side to know everything they worked at was undone. Marshal Valentine is killed in the Horde questing. In the Horde questing they find out that the Alliance somehow got the Abyssal Scepter back and were using it against the Horde at Nazmir. The Horde player helps Baine return Derek to Jaina. Sylvanas has Nathanos execute Zelling. Sylvanas intentionally has what remains of the Zandalari fleet sacrificed in the Nazjatar trap. Ashvale is a raid boss in The Eternal Palace. Horde players don’t have to do any Alliance content to see any of that.
However, none of that is relevant to or makes up for the burning of Teldrassil nor makes BfA somehow satisfying for the Night Elves, either.
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The current discussion is really about presentation. I guess I was a little dismissive with some of the setbacks.
If I had to sum up the war campaign it would be summed up as a “meh” or rather:
Blizzard went out of their way to make the war of thorns as horrific as they can. If they had an equally justice inducing content without extra addons that take away from it I would be more sympathetic to fellow Horde players about “losing”.
Its just nothing really measures up. I really don’t care the Abyssal Sceptre was taken back. I didn’t know it existed 10 minutes ago and now that I have lost it I doubt it would be brought up again.
I just don’t really care or have any attachment to the Abyssal Sceptre.
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