TLDR for me to read everything…
But I will say that I hated how they handled a 15000 year old warrior queen and veteran of multiple wars (Tyrande) in the Mists of Pandario scenarios. They made her out to be a bumbling fool about to walk headlong into an ambush…
And now the Night Warrior stuff seems like a real slap in the face, as yes she chose vengeance but it just strikes me as lazy writing…
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night elves were a mistake
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Interesting choice of words and comparisons
I’m just loving how this thread revealed the sheer sense of entitlement for everyone to bear witness to.
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Given that you generated a thread recently whose sole purpose was to tear down the Alliance and those who play it - while explicitly telling Alliance players that their opinions about that weren’t worth considering - under the guise of improving the Horde, I’m not sure that I’d find you to be the best person to be making comments on entitlement.
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Says the person who excuses explicit claims in her own threads of Alliance players demanding Horde opinions be ignored and that the Night Elves deserve x or y at the expense of multiple Horde races with zero narrative returns.
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Zero narrative returns is a known lie on your part. As is the idea that I simply ignore your concerns. That’s not the same thing as dismissing positions that explicitly try to throw other player communities under the bus for your sole beneift.
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That’s 100% wrong.
Even your "WC3 fans could never like, or play Nelves and want to know what happened to Arthas, because… I a WoW player say so!
Is extremly silly.
I really think Night Elves had a hard times in WoW. Some is based in them getting a new / different culture with WoW.
But this is silly.
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The Arthas point is a matter of whether that’s correlated to search interest in Night Elves in a specific enough way that it warranted inclusion in the regression analyses presented earlier, as opposed to simply using Warcraft as a proxy for more generic events.
None of that, of course, has to do with the bizarre thread that I’m referencing, which was created because Baal didn’t like the idea that solutions to our present conundrum must consider all perspectives.
Not the villainous Iron Horde but the Mag’har Orcs… and Yrel’s approach isn’t that uncharacteristic of the more inflexible N’aaru.
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That’s the thing. You don’t do that. Not at all.
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They’re not really Mag’har, though, per the lore. They just took the name to give to the allied race, but the Mag’har were specifically the ‘Uncorrupted’. The AU Iron Horde call themselves by the same name, but in essentially every respect, they’re Iron Horde still, not Mag’har as we knew of them from TBC until BfA. Same tech, same methods, even the same leader.
The Mag’har allied race scenario is also one of the weirder things Blizzard has done, we’re given no context other than what the Mag’har tell us, and we’re told that the Orcs are essentially so weak that the only reason they were able to win against the Draenei prior was because the Draenei weren’t… trying hard enough. They kept all their old weapons, their war gronn, their Void magic, and certainly have far superior numbers, likely even more so than in WoD, since Draenei don’t multiply as quickly as Orcs due, and decades had passed.
They could have just given us the Outland Mag’har, aka the actual ones that have been associated with the Horde for over a decade, and called it a day. There are so many Orc lore characters just sitting in Outland, forgotten.
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And this isn’t true.
My suggestions admittedly attempt to walk a tightrope, but I will continue to distinguish between feedback that demonstrates a lack of understanding from the person giving it and feedback that actually considers its elements and provides constructive criticism. There’s no value in the former, but I have and will listen to the latter.
If you think Baal is stomping on the Alliance with his thread, then yes it is true, then you don’t care for all sides.
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I mean, if he just doesn’t like the Alliance - that’s fine. We’re under a faction rivalry, it’s okay to not like your rival. But when you are making suggestions to a video game that trades on identity, and filters that through said rivalry, then you’ve lost the luxury of being able to only consider your side to the exclusion of the other.
Can you represent your issues? Absolutely, but you have to have the maturity to recognize that solving them means that you’ve got to work with other people - not excoriate them for wanting things at the same time that you want things.
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What are you even talking about? That Sounds nothing like the problem people have with the Horde.
I strayed to far from your topic. So simply ignore it. Just know I am very confused by your awnser.
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The confusion is expected and understandable. We tend to pre-load assumptions about each other in these debates before we get to the text of them, and that prevents us from understanding each other. It doesn’t help that I’m drawing on context from two threads that are hundreds if not thousands of posts long, which themselves reference other posts, and split over an (in my opinion) nothingburger controversy that itself was the product of a failure to read those posts.
Suffice to say, I favor solutions that address my issues and Horde issues in the same stroke due to the interconnected nature of said issues. That necessarily involves compromise, and no one likes compromise. That’s just how it is. That said however, this post isn’t about solutions, this post is about drawing a circle around one particular issue, and how that has manifested.
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Ironically this is partly why I don’t hate BfA as much as some other night elf fans.
The race basically has not had good content at any period in WoW’s history. They were punted off Kalimdor into the game world’s corner of shame from the very beginning, almost all of their cool stuff was taken away, half the RTS faction (i.e. the druids) spent most of WoW’s history thumbing their noses at Sentinel suffering while benefitting from Sentinel protection, Tyrande was useless, Malfurion was useless, Blizzard’s hamfisted attempts at including them in the narrative were always bad (e.g. A Little Patience), and, last but not least, they were always used as the Horde’s primary punching bag.
Then BfA rolls around and they lose Teldrassil. Which is bad, but hey, apparently they’re back on Hyjal, so I’ll take it. (And, while losing Teldrassil, Malfurion and the druids were right there alongside their people, finally seeing the Horde for what it is: an enemy of nature).
Anduin gets upset that Tyrande wants to defend her homeland, she tells him to suck rocks, then she and the worgen run the Horde army out of Darkshore near-singlehandedly. She achieved a thus far unheard of feat: standing up to Anduin and being proven correct.
Plus she goes HAM and starts using severed orc heads in Elune rituals, achieving another unheard of feat: finding a use for the grey matter above an orc’s shoulders.
So, on the balance of it, pretty good imo.
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That depends on how you count the Night Elf-themed zones and instances that have been in so many expansions. Mount Hyjal. Azsuna. Val’sharah. Black Rook Hold. The War of the Ancients dungeon (which was originally going to be an entire raid). Nazjatar. I don’t think any other race in the game gets so much of its history presented. Then there’s the Illidari storyline from Legion—they may never have been Alliance, but they were certainly Night Elves.
I’m aware that the OP doesn’t think any of this counts, but if you do count it, then I think it’s hard to say the majority of NE content since Cata has been negative.
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I want to note something here.
You pointed this out as well, but none of this allegedly positive content (except Val’sharah, which I heavily dispute as positive), and Tyrande’s appearance in the War of the Ancients dungeon (which did NOT do favors for her) is something that actually concerns the playable race. The weird, seemingly intentional dividing line appears to me as such.
If it looks druidy and Night Elven, and the playable race is not involved - it stands a chance to present those themes positively.
If it looks druidy and Night Elven, and the playable race IS involved, buckle up for content designed to beat up on whoever is representing those themes.
I understand that it is in the interest of Horde posters in particular to want to tiptoe around this issue, likely because the good parts are set aside as neutral so that they can partake - but the playable race is being asked to identify with the bad ones. We get trotted out when it’s time to get beaten on - and an issue that holding up neutral content tends to obscure.
@ Gandred
BFA did introduce some good elements, and indeed some elements that Night Elf fans have been calling for, for years - but we do have to place it within its greater context.
A textbook negotiating tactic (as in, I was literally taught this in Business School) is that in order to get to what you want, you have to open with an outrageous opening bid. Your counterparty is completely outraged, but you play gracious and “compromise”. They feel like they beat a concession out of you, and at the end of the day, you still get what you want. You can always renegotiate later. Now, let’s go over what this looked like in MOP/Cata, followed by BFA.
Opening Bid: Night Elves lose Azshara and appear to be losing in Ashenvale.
Objection: Why are we losing everything? Are we ever going to be allowed to hit back?
Compromise: Ashenvale confirmed years later to be a win for the Night Elves.
Result: Night Elves lose Azshara, still don’t appear competent in any respect, later lose Ashenvale anyway.
Opening Bid: There’s a High King for the Alliance now.
Objection: An Alliance is a bunch of independent countries, Tyrande shouldn’t pledge fealty to a human king.
Compromise: Oh, but he’s really a Supreme Allied Commander.
Result: High King stays - later functionally becomes what it was intended to be in the first place. Teldrassil later destroyed to force Night Elves even further into the humans’ orbit.
Or:
Opening Bid: Night Elves lose Teldrassil, Darkshore, and Ashenvale.
Objection: We just lost our entire country after eight prior years of humiliation.
Compromise: Druids return, Tyrande bucks the Alliance, Darkshore reclaimed in a tweet.
Result: Teldrassil is still gone, Ashenvale is likely still gone, Night Elves still look inferior to their opposing-faction counterparts. Tyrande possibly may end up as a raid boss later for thematic defiance of the High King. (Stay tuned, we’ll see).
So, given that I’m aware of this tactic, I do have to act with that knowledge, and reject that the compromise is good enough if they are going to continue to bring us down incrementally.
Sorry, but I consider illuminating the history of the playable race to come under the umbrella of “concerning.”
You disagree, and that’s fine.
ETA: You say it’s “in my interest” to feel this way, but it’s really the WoD issue: was that “an orc expansion”? In some ways, it was. I’d say it concerned orcs. Was it positive orc development? Well, no.
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