I have long regarded the Night Elves as being in a bad spot since 2010’s Cataclysm, when they along with the rest of the Alliance got to be on the receiving end of in-your-face Horde expansionism, combined with a lackluster Alliance response. (If you want a time capsule for what the forums felt like back then - here’s an idea. htt^p://childrenofwrath.blogspot.com/2011/12/blizzard-forum-angst-and-confluence-of.html)
But, eight to ten years on, I find myself encountering a post like this - which I’ve created a new thread for out of desire for not derailing the other one.
This is not the first time I’ve encountered this claim, and as someone who has been commenting on WoW as a Night Elf fan since Cataclysm, and who had played the game starting in Vanilla, I can’t find an explanation for this other than a lack of perspective (read: bias).
The Decade of Humiliation - 2010-(Present)
Cataclysm showed the Night Elves in a terrible position versus the Horde onscreen, in what looked like a string of humiliating defeats. What makes this particularly odd is, in the actual canon, Ashenvale is a victory for the Night Elves (something confirmed years later), but the questing makes it appear to be a loss. It then dovetails into Stonetalon, whose setpiece moment is the player failing to save a druidic school from a bomb that they were chasing through the entire zone. These moments were locked into questing forever, not improved by phasing as we believed they would be back then, and have been there for almost twice as long as the content that they replaced.
MOP most prominently features Night Elves in patch 5.1, the Shieldwall Campaign. Dave Kosak promised “Badass Night Elves” in a podcast that released the day before the spoilers did. What we got instead was this:
- A Little Patience
- The introduction and subsequent killing-off of the “Crack Team” of Night Elves by the player and a blademaster.
- The leader of that “crack team” giving away military secrets.
- The Horde successfully infiltrating Darnassus, and swiping the divine bell out from under the Night Elves’ noses.
As far as playable Night Elf content goes, there were quests in Krasarang (which were okay, but didn’t even attempt to mend Cataclysm’s damage), and there was Tyrande showing up at Orgrimmar, which as events go was as muted as it could have been. 5.1 was the big drop of Night Elf content - and it was there to show instances of the Alliance failing and having setbacks, not triumphs - those were reserved for Varian and the humans.
WoD had the good sense to leave us alone, but it did nothing to correct the image of Night Elven incompetence. Legion frankly didn’t either, unless we are talking about Wardens and Demon Hunters, which I’ll take, but we have to put that in context to debacles like Val’sharah, and the decision to block the Night Elves from striking back against their faction rival - that instead was given to Genn - for better or for worse. Legion wasn’t actively bad in the sense that Cata or MOP was for the playable race, but it and MOP did nothing to lift us from the swamp that those two expansions left us in. (For more complete thoughts on legion - here’s some further reading: http^s://forums.scrollsoflore.com/showpost.php?p=1611127&postcount=51 )
The overall feel of this era can probably be summarized in a satirical tweet from Ghostcrawler about what he would do in the place of Dave (Fargo) Kosak, who had an outsized hand in a lot of these lore decisions.
http^s://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/295409451555487744
This was pre-BFA. We all know what happened with the playable race afterwards.
Because though that I am on the story forums and the audience here is majority-Horde (wonder how that happened?), I do kind of expect to see this in response:
Which is why I brought numbers.
Study 1: Vanilla (2005) vs Vanilla (2006) vs Classic Reddit (2019) vs. Classic (2019)
During Vanilla, Night Elves made up between 19-25% of population numbers for any given server. Part of the reason for this was because Horde content was lacking when compared to Alliance content. On PVE servers they were pulling around 30% of the overall population, on PVP it was 46%.
Vanilla’s most direct contemporary comparison is World of Warcraft: Classic, and before its release, there was a survey taken of what people would roll. I took that survey and compared it to 2005 Vanilla numbers, and came up with the following:
http^s://forums.scrollsoflore.com/showpost.php?p=1625405&postcount=190
Updated for release:
http^s://forums.scrollsoflore.com/showpost.php?p=1625803&postcount=255
As you can see, there is a stark red bar in the %change data, with Night Elf numbers decreasing by a range of 20.63-23.68% (RP Servers) to 48.66% (PVP Servers). The next highest decrease suffered by any of the races is 17.67% - happening to Tauren on PVP servers.
Taking a brief look this morning, it doesn’t look like that situation has changed:
http^s://wowclassicpopulation.com/characters
Commentary on Study 1
This isn’t the first time I’ve presented these findings, and I suspect that a lot of the replies to this data are those that I’ve seen before - and I’m going to be quicker as a result to ignore intentionally defective arguments, of those that are not:
- The way that Night Elves have been presented and framed has deteriorated their brand equity, making them less appealing to play.
- A series of decisions, including those regarding racials in the base game, have increased the Horde’s overall brand equity. People want to play with their friends, their friends are rolling Horde because they play that in retail.
- Contemporary WoW populations are more into endgame raiding than 2005-2006 populations, and are more into minmaxing as a result. (I will pause to note that I’m putting more weight on this point than I used to - that does represent a partial movement in my position - for those who have argued with me on this before)
Note: I reject the learning curve argument - if such a curve existed, you would have seen it take shape in 2006 when compared to 2005. It does not.
I don’t believe any one of these three factors completely explains this change, but in combination, I think all three go a long way to explaining what’s happening. I of course have isolated factor 1 for the purposes of this discussion. For another view as to why, I present:
Study 2: Google Search Interest - 2004-2019
The one thing I want to note before I dive into this is that Google Search interest has been found to be a pretty good predictor of subscriber numbers. I am therefore comfortable with using it as a rough proxy.
http^s://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/acqhph/i_estimated_subscriber_numbers_using_google_trend/
When I went to look at interest for World of Warcraft and Night Elves, and I came up with the following:
http^s://forums.scrollsoflore.com/showpost.php?p=1625519&postcount=226
Observations:
- The decline of World of Warcraft itself explains roughly 69% of overall decrease in Night Elves as a concept (not surprising). (Figure 1)
- The appeal of characters like Tyrande and Illidan (but not Maiev and Malfurion) partially explain the appeal of Night Elves. Tyrande is negatively related, Illidan is positively related. (Figures 3 & 4)
- When the effects of Warcraft are removed, Night Elves only increase in interest through BC, and peak around 2008-mid 2010, before they embark on a slide from which they do not recover. (Figure 6)
- Illidan partially explains their staying power despite the introduction of the Blood Elves in BC, which should have cannibalized from their interest. This happens after BC’s initial launch, but turns around sharply around July 2007 before increasing to its all-time peak. (Still Figure 6)
- After 2015, the decline continues - character factors fail to be able to explain the trend, and notably: Legion content did not mark a reversal of the decline.
Conclusion
The most notable piece of the above analysis is when the fall started to happen - that was in 2010, in Cataclysm, when the problems that I and others have been highlighting started. If we agree that interest is a rough proxy for subscriber numbers, a relation that holds up for WoW generally, then we can see that the position that the 2010s were some Golden Era for the Night Elves is not one that was shared by the people who played them, and while as with any movement in Warcraft, this is the result of a number of factors, I’m quite comfortable in asserting, particularly given where the decline after we consider and remove Warcraft’s decline itself as a factor - that abysmal lore, presentation, and framing was a part of it.
