The Infamous Horde Bias

Community General Discussion
503

I’ll give you a heads up which took the anti helf players here to realize for months: European players can’t use their characters on the US-forums.

I wrote about this in the past already but I did something similar - but with both sexes. I don’t know how you have managed the Death Knights or Humans/Elves but I ended up having three of a few races because of the hero classes.

The reason we’re in this bad situation is for two reasons:

  • Bad writing
  • Neglectence

At the same time the Alliance-heroes are simply better written and linked to the overall storyline compared to the Horde because nobody ever made an attempt to establish the Horde-characters better. Thrall went overboard thanks to Metzen, Vol’jin did die an unesseccary death but this was more a mirroring than actual plot reason - and both Sylvanas and Garrosh were destroyed at different moments during the expansions.

You cannot blame the Alliance for the problems the developers caused. They are not talented enough, especially the writers. They could have brought up a revolution within the Alliance because they do not accept Anduin as their king (but thankfully we are going to see somthing similar with Turalyon now) where something else will cause the troubles. At the same time the Horde was forced into a genocide-storyline which contradicts itself several times in the additional media and how things went down (especially in BfA-related stuff).

The whole Night Elf story was simpy too much with no real pay off and losses for the Horde. Undercity completely evacuated, Sylvanas always one step ahead and then she gets redeemed at the end? Absolute cheap writing. I don’t think the Alliance-players would mind a “bad Alliance”-story as long it does not takes the development of the main characters away.

I have no pride as Horde-player and how the other people are treated. I don’t know if you even thought about it but would you like to be treated like this by a company as a player, like the Alliance-players suffer? Always a laughing stock, reduced to a mere speck of their former strength in the name of the developers and their tribalism for the Horde? A regular player does not reflect about such things, they simply go with it without thinking about the consequences. It’s a human thing to do, same happens with the global warming and pollution situation. As long as it doesn’t concern us or we feel the danger, we love to live in this blissful world.

The developers did not had much to do but to keep the ball even. Even now they cannot get a grasp on the storytelling and why every second expansion has to switch the faction. It’s borderline insulting that such people are allowed to write stories and earn the big money with such limited abilities. They aren’t the first ones to write a story about two groups at war.

If you have played both sides then you know that Rastakhan sealed his own fate when his pride took over. And yes, this is what brought the Zandalari to the Horde but it’s nothing what would insult the players like the genocide.

Yes - because the war should have ended with Legion. You have only the writers to blame for this and their lust for more classic battles between the factions. And it could have actually worked if it would have been written better and involved the class halls as well. Like I said before, these people are not talented enough to make such a story working. They are world builders but not storytellers.

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504

That checks out. I do watch the EU forums at times, do you only have a NA sub for forums?

Started different servers until they released the one of this hero class per server gimmick.

Truth but don’t forget them overthinking one area while neglecting other things.

Still salty.

The alliance can not blame the horde for things the horde did not ask for. I don’t think it’s a secret the horde as a majority loath the banshee queen shadowlands/bfa arc. Even forsaken players hate this.

No gains for the horde either.

Rastakhan’ sin is sloth. He literally wasn’t going to act to fight the evils overtaking his kingdom. It is hardly pride to defend your own kingdom from foreign invaders. It’s stuff like this that actually discredits your arguments. If the alliance dealt with Anduin being told to surrender by the horde and him fighting and dying it would be a huge deal. But no one cares for the trolls, they aren’t white pretty humans…

This is because they try to go tooo big! WOD had a relative peace between the factions but two smaller military groups did conflict with each other without dragging both factions into a world war of stupid plot armor, huge losses on all sides and no gains and the usual alliance is the winner tag at the end. My suggestion is take the more violent races and have them make little skirmishes in the new expansion. You know Talanji still wants a fight, I’m sure dark iron and void elves are game for it.

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505

Don’t need an NA Sub. All he needs is a sub on his main account, then an NA trial account with a character level 10 minimum, then he is able to post on the NA Forums.

506

I think the most horde bias thing was when they made all open world horde with cross realm, or maybe was the battle for nazjatar drama, they changed the timing to avoid Ruin to gather groups and gank the horde, or maybe was the racials nerf (human) back in wod, or maybe was thrall on cata.

507

You can use your EU-subscription for both forums but you need a LV12-14 character to post on both sides.

The Alliance despises the Horde for its behavior towards the players and the entitlement which comes being the pet faction because how these people treat us. I’m not nearly as affected as other players but it takes the fun for my relatives and me away from the game when the developer purposefully ignores the problems they cause for half of the player base. We did not feel any satisfaction when we WMed in Battle for Azeroth and given that the game asks too much from its players to be somewhat similar geared on both sides, the whole game was in a fast decline. Thanks to Ion Hazzikostas.

You do forget that Rastkhan is still in character with his pride, do you? A nearly immortal being through the Loa, it went to his head. Greymane asked him to stay down but in the end he sealed his own fate. The problems arise because Blizzard believed they were super smart by releasing different point of views and non-canon events (Orc/Goblin-raid on a city, Alliance attack Vulpera) while trying to force an artificial war to steer hate within the playerbase. Absolutely disgusting in my eyes.

She will likely be part of a future expansion cycle, like Nazjatar, where her story goes one for a single patch, I believe.

Yes.

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508

I actually don’t see a lot of that. If anything, I see both groups acting right about the same way. Not much difference unless you’re on RP servers, at least in my own experience. Maybe the Alliance players that you mention want to be seen as equal by the Horde players? Might be barking up the wrong tree on RP servers, though, as they seem to attract people that feel VERY strongly about either faction.

Massive player culture problem here. Blizz can’t directly fix that. It can only apply feckless band-aids or pendulum swings that then reverse the roles of who has problems. You can see where the shift happened, which was around MoP and WoD. With how things got balanced out, or unbalanced out, there was never any strong reason to go back to the other side for the massive amounts that switched.

Some folks get it, some don’t. As has been mentioned repeatedly: both sides have been burned. Oh, and then open discussion with the other side always turns into “Horde Favoritism!” or “Lolumad!” Of course, the litany of slights to either faction is ignored in favor of who can shout the loudest or spam the most, and anything good is rarely acknowledged, with one side often calling for the downfall of the other. Can’t we just give up shouting over bias already, especially with cross-faction? Do we not want both factions to be in a better place than they are now? I still have to ask, too: Do the complainers really want to be Blizz’s favorites after how much The Horde has been ground down into an absolute husk-like shadow of what it was as a result of that favoritism?

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509

You mean you can use your alliance main EU sub and use a lvl 14 horde alt on NA forums to act like you have anything to do with horde.

You forget I was alliance, I loved WM even outnumbered because it means you get AOO.

They asked him to surrender. I will never understand how you alliance especially those who probably play European centric humans see nothing wrong with forcing a tribal king to surrender as if he’s some weak creature. Trolls are like dwarves, they don’t just roll over to every alliance imperialist colonizer invader on their lands. I’m not mad Rastakhan died, he died fighting for his people. I’m saying the alliance is in the wrong to think you are somehow justified in attacking the Zandalari and justified in attacking a foreign king committing regicide because he didn’t roll over. You want a story where Magni is told to surrender and when refusing gets killed? Should I tote all day that you little alliance should’ve surrendered. It’s Magni’s fault he fought I say! What a sad thing.

And none in Ardenweald with Bwonsamdi because Tyrande needed the spotlight!

^
Both pretend they are justified… except horde gets told by the story. You did wrong, feel bad!

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I’m not into fanboyism over pixels. Upset players trying to provoke others through fanboyism. The game works as a tandem project which it clearly lacks at the moment which is why the upcoming changes come into play.

You had your chance for a discussion, let’s move on.

511

Did you notice the colour of the factions? Blue vs Red?
Doesn’t that tell you something…

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Take a look a the next MDI and try and tell me you see anything other than Dwarf, DI Dwarf or Night Elf

In 9.2.5 they are literally allowing cross faction play to try and address this because they don’t know what to do try and bring more players to the Alliance. Not to mention blizzard has also tried to help more people come to the Alliance side by reducing the cutoffs for rank 1 achievements for the Alliance by a significant margin and they give Alliance free heroic gear every 2 weeks for going into warmode and camping a flight point. Credit where it’s due, they’ve tried.

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Aren’t these one-time only heroic/mythic gear offers during a season? I know that something like this exists over there but as far as I know you get it only once a season.

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Yeah. It is 2022, not 2004. The red and blue doesn’t mean anything anymore

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Doesn’t mean to whom? On the contrary never have i seen this much of contention now then ever was not even on 2004. It feels like it was Pandaria few years ago where opposite factions agreed to disagree and move on, but now it feels like BFA! There’s no stopping to it. That’s my observation anyway,

516

Man, it doesn’t feel like BfA.

It feels like this

517

Here we go again great points are made by either me or Kixi. But the ones defending alliance choose one thing and state move on. No rebuttal for the other stuff? Ignore Kixi’s entire post? Want to claim victim hood on alliance instead?

The Quest is AOO, it happens every WEEK. A free conquest level piece of gear to kill 25 horde.(hence the flight point camping) no raid groups only 5 mans.

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My examples of horde bias from vanilla:

Dungeon locations

Horde zone dungeons - 9

Alliance zone dungeons - 3, and Horde get a teleport to one of them.

Transportation

The “neutral” boat goes from a horde controlled zone to a contested zone. Horde get there by walking through a level 10-15ish Barrons. Alliance get there by walking through 2 contested zones with levels 20-40.

Zeppelins/Boats.

Horde get Org/UC zeppelins right outside their capitol in horde controlled zones.

Alliance get one of theirs placed in a contested zone where guards don’t even reach. The equivalent would have been if the Org zepplin was placed somewhere in Thousand Needles instead.

519

You had your chance a few posts before in our interaction and after you showed me what’s in the cards (changed behavior, bad faith approach, pursuit before reason) I simply chose not to continue. Let’s be clear here that I do not see this as a “stop feeding the troll”-situation because I think you can actually be an interesting discussion partner but I’m not wasting my time with an emotional person.

I actually forgot about this user.

I think you need to differentiate the situation here a bit. It doesn’t matter what your personal style is to play World of Warcraft. The bigger problem is that we are favored in many way which benefits us in the gameplay-department. And yes, while we suffer story-wise, which was a valid excuse several expansions ago, times have changed and we all have to endure bad writing at this point.

Everyone wants to be treated fair but for some reason it’s always the Alliance when it comes to the gameplay-related issues. There is no deny that the Alliance took a massive blow when it comes to the new playable races, the memes and discussions alone about “fat people”, “diaper amputee babies” and “no true High Elf” pop up from time to time and stay relevant. And these people are not RPer who reflect “strongly” on this aspect. These players are just a minority player group who started suffering from the Alliance-players who flee from regular servers to them.

As far as my relatives and I believe to see is that the Alliance player flow collapsed in itself and Blizzard followed suit by their new PR addressing policy.

They can. But it fails through several reasons:

  • Hesitancy
  • Wrong approaches later on which are band-aid fixes (“welfare gear” with opting out soon after)
  • Not addressing the problem head-on while it was manageable.

The problem isn’t new and they tried to “fix” it and it backfired in unseen proportions: The Teldrassil “genocide”, how it was called during the interviews. The very same mistakes were done (story, gameplay) but this time it amplified to a massive backlash. When people talk about Horde bias it’s about the gameplay loop which sustain the game and favors the bigger player pool. You can dislike the MAU-centric issues Ion Hazzikostas introduced but as long you suffer with friends through it, I guess, it’s bearable? This is what the Alliance lacks and reduced them to a RP-meme community who love to transmog. If you take away the players, then who should be left?

Fact is that the Horde got too powerful and given how the gameplay is designed, it won against the other half of players. Nobody wins here, we all will see a decrease of players which will hurt us all in the long run. But people have already posted enough about this.

It’s bit too late for this and you have to thank Ion Hazzikostas as the game director for the mess. The often described “rockstar” and “high ground” mentality broke the camel’s back when it was already too late. They philosophical approach was to have one faction per expansion as the central focus. They tried to fix several issues with one single band-aid and it didn’t worked out. Winning back Alliance-players in Legion by making them the central characters with the Horde covering a few class halls was a very dumb idea but I get why they made it, because all the important characters are Alliance. But then, again, they had enough time to push several Horde-characters to take the spotlight but did nothing with them.

Yes. This is what happens when you let one side bleed out. It will come back to haunt you. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Alliance or the Horde at this point, these people simply did not act fast enough to keep the status quo and the gameplay feature (two different factions) alive. And while the Horde loves to rant about mud huts, bike- and bee mounts, they forget that these issues can be easily tracked back why everything turned out like this. Enough people have parroting about this already.

Can you perhaps describe what do you mean with “husk-like shadow”?
As far as I am concerned you enjoy a working gameplay loop with access to many players. If this is story-related, then I’m with you - but Danuser’s antics are a whole another level of cringe I really don’t want to discuss again.

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520

Hardly a emotional person, just find it fun to poke fun that alliance never accept the villain role. When I was alliance I reveled in the villain role as it’s a welcome break from knight in blinding shiny armor.

Actually to me your the new one, this thread is filled with tons of my posts. All easily addressing the issue, hence my Zandalari test I put forward to see if those I argue with have so much cognizant dissonance they can’t fathom their favored faction being the bad guy or unfavored in some way. If you really want I can quote my dozens and dozens of answers to this same question that is repeated by every new alliance guy who thinks this same material hasn’t already been covered. It’s post 519, everything has been mostly discussed, parties who can see eye to eye, have. But for discussion we need understanding on both sides hence my test since again you know if you through the earlier posts you would see I already answered these questions atleast twice probably. I might also state during this entire time the blues have not looked here once as I guarantee they either don’t care, or don’t think we could ever have any solutions to them so they don’t look.

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Result of player culture. Blizz can’t fix that.

This, again, is the result of player culture, not Blizzard itself. You pretty ignored what I said about the shifts in player numbers around MoP and WoD. That was a player culture issue. That was the origin of most of the complaints about gameplay issues. Can’t find anyone? Blame Timmy Tryhard and the FotM faction swaps that crippled the Alliance raiding scene around that time. They didn’t have a reason to go back once things go rebalanced so they didn’t.

So getting a few duds but then something that was massively requested wasn’t enough? This just seems like its self-conditioned into never being satisfied and looking at everything like a slight. Mechagnomes and Kul’tirans are quite fitting for The Alliance. Way more than Void Elves, but Alliance got its High Elf options. You are finding fault with The Alliance being thrown a massive bone?

Player culture. It’s that annoyingly simple.

Blizz can’t. It’s down to the players to fix it now.

Got two words you’re probably sick of seeing by now. Player Culture. The MoP/WoD shift really did The Alliance in, as mentioned before. It is a MASSIVE, MASSIVE problem that Blizz can’t fix. Probably tried with High Elves/Void Elves, but it isn’t enough, and that’s because racials are so trivial now, it’s not seen as worth it to return. Then there’s that big perception that Alliance is dying that’s been made actually manifest now because it’s actually dying because no one wants to go back. What sucks on top of it is that, while its getting addressed with cross-faction, there’s no impetus to make any mass-switching unless you REALLY want to play your character as an alli race among horde races

Cross-faction was probably the best thing they did to “fix” it because it merely opened The Horde’s raiding scene up to The Alliance.

Cross-faction go brr. It is now (or will be soon) in the players’ hands to solve the player culture issue.

Selfish players let The Alliance bleed out.

Story bad, faction struggles with identity. Basically Red Alliance now. Complete joke in lore.

I don’t think you know what you’re asking for. That much attention is going to erode what’s left of anything good in The Alliance’s lore and turn it into as much of a joke as the Horde is on the story front.

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522

I think you pay too much lip service to this player culture approach. I ignore it because I do see not the problem here and I will explain you in detail why this so is. Let’s just say that it started with a shift in player perception. It is the job of the developer to keep things running, especially when the game is balanced and maintained through player numbers.

The developers are infamously known for their “big changes only during new expansions”-stance which is possibly the reason for the decapitating of the Alliance. They are willingly to dish out fast changes if the want to, we have seen this before but the reason why they did not was because either the balancing department wasn’t aware of how strong the Horde racials were at that time (let’s be honest, they were) or simply wished for this change.

I do not remember when the nerfs usually hit the raids but as far as I am aware of, they happen either at the end of the raid’s life cycle or next expansion. Blizzard neglected do nerf several aspects which made the Horde during several raids the to-go faction (Beast-damage, Troll during ToT and Goblin Rocket Jump during Sargaras comes into the mind) which begs the question why the Alliance had to be nerfed in advance this time around during Shadowlands? It does matter in retrospect so we can see and understand where this “Horde bias” comes when people talk about it.

But in the end it turned out good for everyone, if you think about it. They were forced to abandon future Alliance VS Horde conflicts as a story feature because of the careless work they did. Gameplay- and storywise which only shows how sloppy and careless they work actually.

Let’s break the situation down:

  • Void Elves were not requested and people were not satisfied. Even to this day this race gets criticized for coming out of nowhere and the lack of story behind them which is rather paper thin. The people who adore and dislike them have been fighting for the past four years on these forums and it was a major headache community-wise so Blizzard had to throw a bone because of the negative reception as a cheap cope-out solution for the often requested High Elves. Unlike the Blood Elves, the actual Void Elves lost their own identity because of this issue.
  • The Lightforged Draenei is the only Alliance-race which the faction got during Legion with some sort of presence. I do hope you realize that we got two major zone races as playable characters here. Despite the lack of customization, they had at least a significant presence in Legion.
  • The Dark Iron Dwarves were a race which people wanted to play and got them.
  • The Kul Tiran were a highly requested race, despite people not wanting to admit it. Similar to the Mechagnomes, they were not easy to recruit and required more work to acquire than the Horde-races due it’s confusing and bug-riddled quest approach. Over time people started to dislike them for their body proportions and the lack of thin model available.
  • The Mechagnomes were initially leaked with the Vulperas on wowhead back when they started datamining the Battle for Azeroth Brewfestival changes. People were absolutely disgusted by the idea and it is easy to see why this is so. Gnomes are already a very disliked player race and yet they get another player race, just because they’re the current storyline focus? Despite insane racials, they suffered also from a few bugs (quests, mount animation). I do not think we need go further here.

Despite the Nightborne fiasco, the Horde “nailed” the races. I think they were likely also chosen to give them Broken Ilse presence because of how many Night Elves and Gilneas NPCs are around the island. The Zandalari and Vulpera were a highly requested race and are still loved to this day and yet the Alliance still keeps asking for better races. They got one race they truly wanted, a human-variation, a compromise race and something which could have been swapped with the Broken and nothing would have been lost.

They can and they jumped onto these problems when they see one. The Dwarf-racial during the first SL-raid.

It’s a mirror argument and you’re likely aware of this.

Well, this happens, when you want to be the good guys. My oldest brother argues this is due the Blood Elf-players who can’t stand playing the bad guys/misunderstood ones and I do not know if I should agree with this or not but it makes somewhat sense in retrospect.

I do want this. I know both side’s stories very well and you can actually make easy and interesting moments. Danuser is such a big fan of Game of Thrones, perhaps he should pay more attention to the older seasons than the last one, perhaps he gets the hint there what good writing is. Speaking of him, I really do not understand how incompetent this man can be. Bellular and several fans write great theories which can be used to make both factions actually moral grey but it looks like he isn’t cut out for this.

The Alliance needs to be supported and pushed if the players care about both factions, otherwise we could simply abandon the concept right now and play with each other all the time.

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