Does that really seem unfair though? The Night Elf story is one of Sylvanas, her Forsaken, and some Horde allies destroying Teldrassil, massacring their people, and then ruining/occupying their lands. Does it really make sense for the Night Elf story to say that justice was served because some Zandalari boats were sunk? Or because Sylvanas blighted her own capital as part of her master plan? I don’t think it works to just tally up random Alliance “wins” and then say “well, that basically equals Teldrassil”. I think the story would be more satisfying if a decisive, clear blow could come to those that are acting as the villain for the Night Elf storyline. And it doesn’t have to be about humiliating the Horde, or killing all their heroes, or wiping out the capitals. But I think it would be nice to have a moment where the Alliance and the Night Elves can say “We took the battle to Sylvanas and her allies. We succeeded and impacted her plans in a serious way. We have achieved justice for what we lost. We can now move on and rebuild”.
I see where you are coming from, but the thing I keep coming back to is…what do those have to do with the Night Elves, the burning of Teldrassil, and bringing closure to their storyline?
When? Teldrassil was not a good look for the horde at all. When 1 alliance race’s unskilled new recruits and civilians can hold their own against the entire horde that’s not humiliating them lmao.
Frankly, Dazar’alor was a total victory for the alliance. They walked in, nuked the Zandalari fleet that the horde spent their whole leveling experience securing, killed the Zandalari king who we spent out leveling experience saving and earning his trust, and then pulled out with no named casualties. We got to beat on Mekkatorque and Jaina but they both get away and Jaina is “severely injured” but is speaking with Anduin like nothing is wrong like 10 minutes later after she trash talks us and then ports out lmao.
I do think the Night Elves deserve a win on their own. But the Alliance as a whole have gotten their wins.
The Horde crushed any defense, conquered 3 zones and burned the last one to ashe.
How is this not a complete humiliation?
The Horde didn’t have any named casualties in WoT either.
So… does that mean it was total victory for the Horde too?
Because their army wasn’t there and they inflicted 8-1 casualties on the horde with a bunch of recruits and civilians
I didn’t say that Teldrassil wasn’t a complete military victory for the horde. I said it wasn’t a good look or a “fist bump” moment.
I’m not justifying the NE story, you guys were tossed under the bus by Blizz.
NEs had the perfect moment to shine, their homeland got destroyed, their queen got a “power boost”, Azshara is now the focus. It was the perfect moment to bring the Night Elven empire back.
Tyrande should have had the spotlight for this patch at least. It’s her mortal enemy we are dealing with… and what do we get instead? MORE JAINA and her stupid human potential.
When blizz said this expansion was all about Faction Wars, we didn’t know it was about hating your own faction and sticking to your own race more and more.
Anyway, I feel sorry for the Night Elves cause the writers don’t find all that lore behind you is interesting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sorry for Teldrassil, I’m actually proud of it! it’s war, cities burn, people die (as long as it’s pixels in a fantasy game, that’s fine). The burning of Teldrassil was an event that could have been used as an engine to move things forward, but instead you got nothing…
And Zandalar was not a fist bumping moment either.
According to A Good War a lot of Horde were cheering in their little war. So maybe the Horde soldiers did think it was a fist bump moment
Oh are we moving the goal post again? I thought we were discussing player feelings on these “victories” not npc feelings.
No… we are talking about the same thing.
I personally would not assign your feelings as requirement of what a win or loss is.
However you do.
I am trying to understand why you think your feelings in knowing that NEs had improper defenses (by your own character’s smart strategies) being able to inflict heavy imaginary casualties and not a single named character dying.
Is destroying your enjoyment of owning the Alliance in the hardest way possible unseen ever in the entire game’s history.
Versus.
You feeling the Alliance got a total victory and a feel good moment as they barely pressed a button to destroy the Zanadalari (not horde) fleet, had Alliance throw away sacrificial pawns to distract you as well as have the Horde butcher their way through imaginary soldiers and raid boss 2 Racial Leaders. Defeating them and all of this The Alliance is supposed to fist bump as you say because you failed to kill them?
Did I get that right?
And you think your metrics are being applied equally and fairly?
I never denied that Teldrassil was a victory. Which you would know if you read my response. I was countering the claim that the Alliance never wins by bringing up Dazar’alor which was an Alliance win much like Teldrassil was a Horde win.
You are the one who said that Teldrassil was the Horde humiliating the Alliance which i disagree with since i don’t think getting slaughtered by green recruits and civilians it huge numbers is really an impressive showing from the horde even if they win in the end.
There is a difference between being defeated and being humiliated. I have stated numerous times that I’m fine with the horde being defeated as they were in Dazar’alor. I only pointed out that since the Alliance posters in this thread are seemingly dissatisfied with Dazar’alor and don’t count it as a win that it means what they really want is to humiliate the horde not just win.
Not to mention, you aren’t beat over the head to feel bad about Dazar’alor while Teldrassil is hung over the horde player’s head as something we were awful for participating in and need to atone for.
It sucks when Alliance players do that and they should stop it. Discussing ways to improve stories is one thing, but unless Blizzard is secretly polling Horde players as to how the storyline should go, its not the players fault.
Now talking about how the Horde can atone is fair game, but Blizzard is doing okayish on that. Thrall, Baine, and Saurfang seem interested in atoning.
And my argument is Dazaralor is poor win compared to what Horde accomplished in WoT.
Because Alliance players may feel humiliated by the Horde and want to humiliate them back.
All Jaina and Andiun could do was cry over the sacrifices meanwhile on the Horde side I think I have had Teldrassil mentioned once outside of Darkshore Warfront.
Trust me both sides have something to be beaten over the head with by the Blizzard narrative team.
I think the main problem with the “How the horde can atone” storyline is that there is not a single night elf present in it at the moment, which is why it falls flat on it’s face for me.
I think Teldrassil was a huge mis-step from a storytelling stand point because that should close the door to peace forever moving forward. Tyrande could drop the moon on Orgrimmar and still be justified at this point. If they have her just let it go now that N’Zoth is free is going to be so jarring.
Wasn’t this what Warlords of Draenor was?
Sometimes I used to think Draenor wasn’t really an alternative universe, but merely Admiral Taylor’s personal heaven where he gets to fight Orcs heroically for all of time.
Well, I agreed with this part or this post at least.
Then pay Sylvanas back. Its pretty apparent by now that she’s just using the Horde for some personal “True Objectives” (and I do not doubt for second that she’s going to create a massive death toll on the Horde side). You want to pay the Banshee Queen back, you aren’t going to do that by killing the Horde. It does not matter how many of them you deep-six (innocents OR combatants), that wont hurt her (she does not care). Hell, I honestly believe that if you managed to even kill Nathanos, it ultimately wouldn’t phase her THAT much.
The ONLY thing she’s afraid of is her own afterlife. To torment her, you have to ensure that THAT reality is her ONLY reality left to her; and then ultimately sentence her to that hell for eternity. She could give a crap about the rest of the red team at the end of the day (especially if we fail to actually fulfill our roles as her “Bulwark Against the Infinite” (AKA, her meat-shield against her afterlife). Killing the Horde people under Sylvie is no different than killing Stormtroopers under Palpatine; yeah … really don’t think she cares that much if it still pushes us to her own goals.
I wouldn’t mind this for the horde. At least we will have some pride and our characters could maybe win while defending, even if some of them die.
That’s the crux of player frustrations, I feel. Players can’t actually impact the story, and the writers seem out of touch with their players.
Horde players were railroaded into the burning of Teldrassil and made complicit in all that happened and followed. Cheering it on, or hating it made no difference. The quests are the quests and the Horde are presented as the bad guys.
Alliance players often feel that the Undercity was no real victory, as Sylvanas emptied the city first and chose to blight it rather than lose it to an occupier. Whether that’s right or not, the players don’t get any choice in what to do about it. Night Elf players have it much worse - they want to retaliate against Sylvanas but are given no opportunity (and likely won’t be, given that she is to be “no Garrosh 2.0”).
Now that the Night Elves have lost their homes and much of their population, and the Forsaken have lost their homes, any significant settling of grudges is out of the question, with the two factions being forced together in preparation for the next patch. And that’s leaving aside the whole issue of how hard it is to punish a faction without punishing the players.
We’re all on rails here, and the ride is taking us to places we don’t enjoy that much or that just don’t make sense for the characters making the decisions.
I agree that the Horde needs a devastating loss, with no smirking escapes like Sylvanas after Undercity. I completely disagree that the Horde players should suffer for this, and I can’t see how to do one without the other. It’s probably best just to ride this xpac out with its insane story and terrible blows and try to get to 9.0 with our own sanity intact. Agitating for dramatic story events likely won’t end well for any player or faction.
Funnily enough having played through the intro as horde this is one of the points that makes me feel the whole lead up was intended for the Alliance player and not the horde. By removing all civilians and not saying one thing about what happened when Brill was destroyed it turned this into a situation where there was no possibility of grey actions by the Alliance, nothing to give the Horde a way to say to ourselves, damn, we screwed up with Teldrassil, but here’s something good for us to do and fight for some civilians. We’re just there to try and protect an empty city from an army that’s got every reason to want us gone and there’s nothing good for us to be protecting there.
I mentioned it in the other thread, I think we need a lore loss (I don’t want to see any more of the capital cities destroyed, wish they’d open things up to let the other ones be as useful as Org/SW) Have the great horde force stuck somewhere, outmanuevered by the Alliance, backs up against Night Elf forests where they’ve gone back to the wc3 predators who will kill any horde they find in range of their forests. And with the rest of the Alliance war machine to the front.
Let that army be destroyed, let it mean that horde is back on the survival footing. Leave us most of our characters (Just have Sylvanas disappear to go do whatever she was planning to do while we’re dealing with Azshara instead of another SoO) but break the horde. Just let us go down fighting like the horde for once. No mana bombs, no blight, no wonder weapon to try and save the day. The horde stands on the field of battle and fights for once, and loses.
Just need to have some reason for the Player not to die. Can have them escort out civilians that got trapped with the army, sent with a message to one of the big names, something. And as I’m not feeling vindictive here, don’t even have to have the Alliance get hit with the villain bat, just make them into an existential threat to the horde that does have a reasonable reason for doing what they’re doing.
Something like this I’d hope would at least give some satisfaction to the Alliance (I kinda give up hope with how well some posters are at turning victory into defeat all due to a bad line of dialogue) and it would also give the Horde a reason to feel the Alliance is a threat, it would be a heroic (but lost) battle that we fought without resorting to another plot device for.
And conceptually … I like this, but functionally … Blizzard has an absolutely terrible track record of building up the Horde again after they break us. They wont, and if they actually did take the time necessary to do that … the Alliance playerbase would SCREAM about “Horde Bias” (even though the necessity to build the Horde back up from its foundations comes from their satisfaction). Bluntly, its MORE likely that the Horde Faction will just have Legion Expansion after Legion Expansion to look forward to going forward (with us being barely a footnote in the real Hero’s stories); and Blizz pulling a WoD again to just ignore the damage they truly dealt to the Faction.
The Alliance deserve their win, but repairing them from the damage the Horde inflicted on the Horde pails in comparison to what would be required of Blizz for the Horde should they go the route you are suggesting (which, in the BEST scenario, we keep the majority of our remaining important lore characters … which MANY Alliance players would considered and afront to them as well). Outside of the NEs … its essentially just rebuilding and recolonizing the captured Forsaken territories for the Alliance; for the Horde its trying to repair damage to the lore and racial fantasies of upwards to THREE core Horde races (some, which never may be repairable).