I’d say that the problem with this is the presentation. With Teldrasil, Sylvanas responded by basically just saying “Well if I can’t have it, nobody can” and then destroyed everything. In reciprocation, the Alliance attacked Undercity and Sylvanas responded by saying “Well if I can’t have it, nobody can” and then destroying everything. In both situations, the entire story was moved by Sylvanas’ actions, which feels kind of cheap.
On the topic of the thread though, I can agree that the Horde as a story faction needs a devastating loss, and I don’t think any reasonable person could say otherwise. I cannot agree that the Horde playerbase deserves that, though. You can argue that Alliance players have already experienced that, but I can’t really accept condoning more crap story telling and poor story engagement for a group of players who never asked for any of this just to have things “fair and equal”.
If there’s a good way to punish the faction without punishing the players, I’d love to hear it.
Not necessarily? If you look at it purely on a territorial level, the Horde effectively took control of: Ashenvale; Darkshore; Felwood; Winterspring; and uncontested the zones of Feralas; Desolace; and Stonetalon. The Alliance in contrast would have picked up (for the most part): Arathi; Alterac; Hillsbrad; Silverpine; Gilneas; Tirisfal; Western Plaguelands; Eastern Plaguelands (and … lets be honest, with both Kul Tiras and a potential Alliance Gilneas … Tol Barad is theirs as well).
Of ALL the people and cultures of this world that could bring back life to even the most blighted landscapes in Northern EK … its the Kaldorei. Time and Time again magic of the domain of LIFE has been shown to cleanse DEATH domain magic far FAR more effectively than LIGHT magic can. This is especially present in Western Plaguelands … where the Cenarian Circle made absurd progress in Cata to revitalize that terrain. Bluntly, just about the ONLY people in this world that could turn the once breadbasket of Lordaeron into a rich, fertile land again is the NEs.
Not saying they should have to … but they ARE about the only people that could.
This is assuming they not only would, but even can at this point. Remember, the Kaldorei have suffered genocide. The number left in the Alliance (and thus not neutral and not going to dismiss them for neutrality), number so few that it’d probably be ages before even Tirisfal is in a fit state for habitation.
Not only that, but the removal of the Forsaken does not remove other Horde forces, such as the Frostwolf Clan. Territories such as the Plaguelands remain in the hands of the Argent Crusade (with Andorhal no doubt serving as the Forsaken’s remaining bastion in the Eastern Kingdoms). As mentioned before, the Forest Trolls could be roused by the Zandalari to fight for the Horde as well.
The Alliance has no such allies in Kalimdor to call upon, and the lands of Ashenvale are rich and relatively unscathed by the war, ripe for the Horde to put to use immediately.
Tirisfal was a loss no matter how you look at it, and while the Horde failed at it’s objective of, ‘Killing Kaldorei Hope,’ it succeeded at reducing their numbers so drastically that the race is bordering on extinction. Killing hope doesn’t matter if the race doesn’t even exist. The bountiful lands are icing on the cake.
“Killing the Kaldorei’s Hope” wasn’t ever specifically a Horde objective, in fact as far as I’m aware that sentiment was never spoken aloud by Sylvanas (just one of dozen reasons to suggest that her reasons for this war have very little to do with the Horde). God Blizz … its truly such a wonderful thing fighting for in war when you have no idea what exactly you are fighting for; because the writers want to keep that “reveal” a twist when Sylvie finally betrays the crap out of you.
But … I do agree, that the Kaldorei have suffered a catastrophic blow … which is why I’m a little worried about them investing in a solo-campaign on the opposite side of the world (especially now that the Alliance fleet has been decimated alongside the Horde’s). If it weren’t for the rebellion, this would be about the time the Horde decided to refocus its efforts on securing its borders; and pushing the Kaldorei off of Kalimdor for good. I get the emotion, but the logic …
Long story short, I have no idea how this conflict is going to end; but if not for the stirring Horde rebellion the Kaldorei in Darkshore would be in DEEP trouble atm … Night Warrior or no. And as a side note, Sylvie outright contradicts the plan she gives Saurfang almost immediately, by not only implying that she fully expected Teldrassil to burn eventually; but also that she was fully intending to attempt to end the Kaldorei as a Nation AND People (Saurfang was never aware of this).
Moments of internal dialogue from Sylvie are truly a window into her true character.
So you’re saying that working with a character in the opposite faction, doesn’t make the expansion they star in biased to that faction? Great. Now we can stop complaining about Cata and Legion.
Horde bias gets tossed around a lot, but as I’ve said before, while I think Horde bias exists I don’t think said bias/passion is for the Horde as we think of it. I’ve said for some time that the writers have a passion for writing ‘metal’ things, at least all of them except Golden do. They like orcs, but not the orcs we as players associate with WoW, but the bloodthirsty conquering orcs like we saw in WoD. You think it was by accident that the orcs described by the old website as ‘peaceful and shamanistic’ were almost completely different in Warlords?
The same can be said of Forsaken, or the Goblins. The Horde the writers have a bias for and the Horde that the players remember and consider ‘in-character’ for the faction are not the same thing, which is why overall Horde characterization gets tossed under the bus even though they technically win a lot.
I believe that Golden was hired on full time to write was because the rest of the writing team has a disdain for what they consider peaceful races, or at the very least not as much passion for writing them. But in Golden’s case, she has a bias towards human characters, and moreover humans are easy for Blizzard to write. They’re basically just standard medieval fantasy humans.
Just look at the races who have gotten the most attention over the last several years, and then look at how they’re portrayed versus the outcome of the plot in regards to them.
It genuinely seems like a lot the writers want the Horde to be a bad guy power fantasy but then after their big badass violent moments remember the Horde is supposed to be a heroic faction.
okay so after reading all the posts again i think that you guys made me change my mind.
maybe we don’t need to “humilliate” the entire horde in order to have something “satisfactory”
because, if we go too far, the ones who will be claiming justice will be the horde player, i mean we already have some of that still wanting justice for camp taco, the purge or rastaboi. (and to be honest i don’t think that they will ever get that because that is the benefit of being the hero faction.)
so what about this, let the NELFS have a solid win versus sylvanas’s horde, just a clean win without falling into another trap of sylvanas playing 700d chess,lets say, reclaiming darkshore and ashenvale
hell maybe even a CGI cinematic about she or malfurion bringing the full force of the kaldorei army that we saw in wc3,chymeras, driads, montain giants, maybe even cenarius himself that just annihilate their enemies, we don’t need to nuke thunder bluff or put a void lord into the sunwell.
i will count 8.2 losing the entire fleet as their comeback.
we could see some of this during the war campaign, the horde attacked anglerpoint, we arrived,we killed them all and completely won the day, i think that we need some of this but in a bigger scale.
the horde player didn’t even seen this.
I’ve been playing a Night Elf since vanilla and I was MAD about Teldrassil, but I do not want a similar story to be written for the Horde. No one is happy with this storyline. The Horde don’t feel good about burning Teldrassil (well, some but not all. It seems to have split their playerbase quite a bit) so why would we be petty and say, “Writers, you hit us so HIT THEM TOO.” If the Horde get hit rekt then we just continue with this horrible style of writing in which no one benefits. I don’t want the Horde to have to go through the same hell we have. From what I read here, even they don’t feel like they’ve won.
I will enjoy RPing a bitter, bitter night elf but I’m not going to be bitter IRL over this and demand that other people suffered because I did. Perhaps we should remember that the Alliance is based on nobility too, and if this cycle stops here with us I would prefer that than to perpetuate a bad story for the sake of revenge.
I’ve been arguing against the Alliance in here a lot, but I’ll admit, I agree that the Horde does need their Teldrassil. But it needs be that. I’d rather not get into losing more cities, but I would welcome a massive defeat if it was done right for the horde. Right now only the Alliance has any reason to see the other side as an existential threat, and if we aren’t going into a new frontier with the factions next expansion, I really think that the horde needs a reason to look at the Alliance as a threat.
Let the Night Elves loose in the forests, let them be the horrors they were supposed to be to those that set foot in their lands. Have the Alliance forces better suited to flat out battle hammer a horde army trapped between death in battle and death from the trees.
Let them be ruthless, let them come with hardened hearts to cut down the monsters. Give the horde a heroic last stand where they fight and fall on their own strengths, none of the super weapons that we’ve had to rely on for the story to let us get a win. Let the Alliance win the fight, let the Horde player be in charge of leading out reserves, or trapped civilians who were caught in the fight so that they can pass along what happened.
If they’re not going to have us come together as one in the next expansion, and least let the horde have a reason to think of the Alliance as a threat.
These are two superpowers. Wars between such factions are supposed to be devastating and long. We even see it in our history, particularly between the english and the french. These wars did not end in absolutes, given that the wars are so costly and so long that they spawn unrest at home, as well as logistic complications (the real breaker in ye olde war). With the blood war (as they call it), they have the opportunity to work with this if they want to pursue the narrative of peace. Peace will not be struck on nice feelings. It’ll be struck because neither side can continue the war and neither side is certain they can win the war if they made the push to do so.
As for Varian’s threat, that wasn’t capability. He was posturing. If he said nothing he’d look weak, if he was even buddy-buddy about it, he’d earn no shortage of (profanity) about it. Even if he ordered an attack to kill the leaders of the Horde, he would’ve martyr’d them to unite the Horde and together, they would’ve brought ruin to the Alliance. Even if the Alliance won in the end, the victory would be so pyrrhic that they’d be helpless to any outside influence, or even inside influence, if politics gave way to infighting, as it so often does. Varian Wrynn was groomed for the position of being a king, as is normal for royalty. He knows how to flex and maintain composure to look good to his court/subjects, even if he’s not in a position to deliver on that threat.
The Alliance has not been losing. They overcame a logistical nightmare and took back Darkshore, despite the numbers not being in their favor. They took a fully manned Keep (you may say that victory is pyrrhic, but that’s pretty much the only way an assault on Lordaeron’s going to play out. The Forsaken can’t be starved out, so they have to be attacked physically. Keeps are built to fight 10:1 odds and win.). Despite being down to conscripts, they managed to assail Drazal’alor and win. Mekkatorque didn’t even die. Jaina didn’t even die or suffer any lasting, permanent injuries, despite being in a situation where she feasibly could have. It was nothing but a net gain for them. (You may say the writers were holding their punches with Drazal’alor, and to an extent, they did with the Zandalari, but there’s two reasons why they couldn’t deliver the deathblow;
1: The whole success of the assault banked on the Horde not being present to reinforce the defenses. Once they returned, they successfully ousted the Alliance. Trying to attack a fortified location is, naturally, a meat grinder and after being ousted from the initial attack, it’s most likely they didn’t have the resources to try again.
2: Ordering the army, even if it could, to lay ruin to Drazal’alor would be disastrous. The place is chock full of civilians. No-one wants to go around killing fishmongers, carpenters, clerks and all. That’d be a /huge/ blow to morale that it’d make soldiers unruly and unwilling to carry out future orders. No trained officer is going to do something so hilariously out of whack.)
Also, do you even want cinematics if they tell a bad story? I’m going to give it to you straight, having a bad story is worse than having none at all. I would trade the Horde and Alliance narratives right now, if the option were on the table. I’d rather be locked in a 2004 stagnation bubble like the gnome storyline, rather than watch it become something it is not.
Jaina couldn’t have possibly destroyed Orgrimmar. The place is Shaman central. She’s good, but she’s not Thrall + every shaman under his command good.
You are perfectly entitled to be displeased by the Darkshore storyline. It’s terribly written. It’s so laughable that I would have expected it put together by some dip who was still in the 7th grade. There was no sustenance for either the Alliance or the Horde narrative and if you want a satisfactory payout for (profanity), the payout will be more (profanity).
It’s not that the Alliance doesn’t have reason to want revenge, it’s that this isn’t some trip to the Deadmines. This is a war with an enemy who’s so massive that it could take decades, a generation maybe, to see the war brought to an absolute conclusion. The costs of victory would be so staggeringly high that victory may not even be feasible.
The Alliance doesn’t get all the credit for dismantling the infinite army. To stand a chance, it took the Alliance, the Horde, the Argent Crusade, the Cenarion Circle, the Earthen Ring, the Ebon Blade and the outside help of the Illidari and the Army of the Light, and even then, the losses were beyond substantial.
Internal conflict is certainly needed in the Alliance narrative, but what you’re asking for simply isn’t in the cards, neither politically, on the lanceboard or otherwise. War between the Alliance and Horde will wage on long after all of the primary characters have died of old age, if violence doesn’t find them first. That’s just how long it’d take, if it were to be fought to its conclusion and without the aforementioned pauses in the war brought about by civil unrest or logistical issues.
If it’s any comfort, the Alliance is actually getting the superior storytelling experience right now. Everything is going right for them, they don’t have to compromise self integrity for success and even in situations where they shouldn’t succeed, they do.
They don’t experience themes of decay, deception, destruction and internal conflicts like the Horde storyline does. BFA in its entirety is dog(profanity), but the Alliance is getting it in a flaming bag left on the doorstep, not as a mess that’s spattered all over the front of the house.
The grass is always greener on the other side, as they say. Both sides of the Alliance/Horde divide covet what they perceive as the “benefits” the other gains from their side of the story structure. They acknowledge (sometimes begrudgingly) the issues the other side have, but in their minds these benefits the other gain create, while perhaps not a good story, at least a more satisfying one. And thus, as bias tends to do, they decide that they’ve gotten the shorter end of the stick long enough and they want the shoe to be on the other foot.
To Alliance players, constantly faced with conflict starting loss and a general feeling of impotence, the Horde’s villainization gifts them the benefit of power fantasy. Bitter from years of feeling like they’re pathetic and powerless, Alliance players believe that their protagonist story role is meaningless without the ability to triumphantly strike down their foe in that climactic, satisfying final battle that rids the world of evil. The Horde, in their minds, gets to be cool and strong; they get to humiliate and dominate their foes consistently. Starved for victories as they are, the idea of smashing through your foe’s armies and then burning down one of their capitals is everything they want.
To Horde players, however, it’s a rather different story. After the majority of faction content Cata onward (and arguable instances before that) has piled atrocity and aggression onto atrocity and aggression, with little of the reverse from the enemy (and what little was had quickly retconned and/or ignored), the depressing feeling that YOU ARE WRONG, FEEL BAD pervades. I for one can say I didn’t feel any of the assumed power fantasy when every night elf I fought cried out for their lost lovers and claimed to not actually want to kill me. And thus, to the Horde player’s eyes, the Alliance benefit: moral superiority. The Alliance is in the right. You are wrong. That city you just destroyed (because the game forced you to in order to progress)? Innocent, you monster. Feel bad. To Alliance players, the destruction of these places is Alliance Weakness vs. Horde Strength. To Horde players, the destruction of these places are Horde Villainy and Alliance Righteousness.
Arguments over what the Battle of Lordaeron “counts as” are common and rage still in this thread. And with this perspective in mind I think it’s easy to see why. Lordaeron was a unique opportunity as it’s probably the only location in the lore that both Horde and Alliance players care about owning roughly equally (a similar issue that is beyond the scope of this already long post)-it was thus perfectly situated for a grand battle of wills. But despite setting up a scenario in reverse of what has been established as typical, the battle ended up with each faction’s personal gripes on full display. The Alliance ultimately achieves little, with much of their forces devastated in the battle and their main villain escaping with a quip and a self-destruct button. Lordaeron is not “Retaken”; it’s even more a wasteland than before. But from the Horde perspective, it’s also a failure of that coveted “faction pride”. The occasionally hinted at by devs “not for justice, we will take Lordaeron for the living!” thing was nowhere to be seen; the vast majority of the Alliance’s stated motivation was to capture Sylvanas for the recent atrocity and Teldrassil. Whereas Teldrassil focused heavily on damage to the civilian population, Brill is destroyed without a second thought and most of the population of Undercity is evacuated. Sylvanas uses the opportunity to sacrifice her own forces, make Saurfang S A D and then run off cackling like a supervillain. It’s about as much of a “victory” as being an evil minion helping your boss escape to mustache twirl again can be. Lordaeron is lost…but with none of the much-coveted motivation to show for it.
And that’s the thing about these threads, whether made by Alliance or Horde players…from the perspective of the other, what they’re asking is to force all of one side’s personal gripes onto the other, but with none of the benefits they perceive it gives them. Humiliation without moral superiority and villainization without victory are even less fun than what we already have.
Kharinak just stated what we already knew. So why say it at all?
We are in the “addressing some people’s denials” and “what is the solution” phase of the discussion.
That would have been more pertinent. Yes I am fully aware how much I have been screwed since Cataclysm and unless you are the type of Horde player that enjoys being edgy then it has been a mix bag for you too.
But so what? How do we move on from this dumbster fire?
Well the current idea is to make the Horde suffer like they have made the Alliance suffer.
Is it better than “lets all be friends now for no damn reason”? Who knows.
Don’t complain to me. Someone asked for their comments to be posted here.
Since I AM here now…
I’m not sure that one can reasonably separate punishment for the Horde storywise and punishment for the Horde playerbase anymore. If you’ve played the Horde quests, you’d realize that those story quests are quite literally almost a full year’s worth of loss, division, and frustration. The Horde has failed at everything it has attempted since going to Zandalar and it’s been extraordinarily frustrating not only to play through that but then also to see threads like these demanding more, more, more Horde punishment. The faction is already coming apart at the seams, our heroes don’t support our faction, and Blizzard openly wants us to lose faith in the Horde.
Maybe you could compare the experiences to being hit in the face with a sledgehammer versus death by a thousand cuts. Nobody’s saying these are pleasant things, but at least one ends faster and you can start to heal. Horde players have had to put up with continued narrative insults with every patch, on top of having to put up with the fact that there’s no longer any ground to stand on when arguing. That’s why you see mostly just Alliance or Blue Horde posters in this forum anymore. Most of the actual Horde players have quit and hang out in the Discord.
This is exactly the point you’re missing from what Kharinak said; both sides already are suffering. Yeah, you guys Ally-side are losing a whole lot. Heyt, we’ve been losing all along too.
You lose Teldrassil. We lose any justification for our heroic actions in the narrative.
You don’t get to beat us in Lordaeron. We don’t get to beat anything in Lordaeron, instead watching as our latest warchief twirls her mustache and escaped exactly like an evil villain.
I’ll spare us all from a long, long list of why this crap sucks for all of us and get right to the point.
If you truly want parity, cool. The Alliance can take out Thunder Bluff as recompence for Teldrassil, then blow up Ironforge. And you can also level Crossroads to pay for Theramore.
But for the next ten-ish years, you never get to be a hero. Your entire narrative must make you uncomfortable for no other reason than it’s recompense for what we’ve had to play through. Anduin will die at the hands of a super-powerful gnoll, Velen will start consuming the heart of an old god until you kill him, Falstad will remind you how the actions you’re forced to take part in due to narrative are wrong, and Tyrande will go full sith lord, complete with treating her people as a disposable resource. Malfurion will sit idly by, making sassy comments and doing little else. You’ll never actually kill any major Horde figures in this, mind you, but instead have to ally with them like it or not when you take part in the Siege of the Exodar and it’s follow-up totally-not-the-narative Siege of the Ruins of Teldrassil. And so on.
You want payback for Horde Bias and Teldrassil. I want payback for how Horde Bias actually feels. Hopefully by the end, we’ll both see the grass was never greener because there wasn’t any grass to begin with; just weeds that choked the life out of the grass.
![:thinking:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/thinking.png?v=6" ":thinking:")