Not sure that counts as a ‘negotiation’ (not sure any of this counts as a negotiation since we don’t really have much ability to affect the writing decisions)
if the compromise is a mollifying act years later. At that point the negotiation is long over.
It is a negotiation. We as customers provide feedback, and from time to time that feedback is considered. We also have leverage in the form of our wallets, and while it is true that people on the forums are a small portion of the playerbase, that’s true of all forms of feedback and the reason why every company on earth berates you for survey responses. The people who are motivated to complain do represent general sentiments when taken in aggregate - but most consumers will just feel these things and rather than leave feedback - quit without saying anything. (At least if my old marketing class was any good)
Regarding this - yeah, you have a point. It does represent that Blizzard really doesn’t have respect for our concerns. They just want to keep us on that treadmill for long enough to get to what they really want - that hasn’t changed, and it really means that our feedback is going to management instead of the writers. But - given the state of things, I absolutely do not anchor to a status quo at any given time, because that status quo is the result of already losing something huge through a round of “compromise”.
For the most part, no, WoD did not affect the playable races in the Horde, but there is a giant asterisk I have to set next to this: it did completely demolish the demon blood explanation - and there I do have to permit an exception. That aside, you certainly didn’t get say, the Shattered Hand clan’s actions materially affecting or changing the Horde. They were stock bad guys to beat up on - it didn’t translate into anything that meant anything for the playable race going forward.
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Yes, but that’s not the threshold I’m setting. Mine is “Is it orc-related content?” and to that I have to answer yes.
I get that you answer no. I get why you answer no. I just don’t have the same parameters.
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I guess not.
I am concerned with where I’m allowed to actually place my investment - as opposed to neutral actors who either don’t care about what I’m representing, or in the case you’re referencing: want to destroy it.
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Yeah, it’s still the orcs’ living history, of a sort. That’s partially why the demon blood fig leaf is wrecked by it. If the game was trying to go “oh these orcs act nothing like the ones that actually matter” then going in-depth with them would be worthless. But that’d also make the “they didn’t need the blood after all” thing pointless because they’re effectively different people in the same skin suits.
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This actually gets to a core problem with the game writing as a whole, pretty much everything is dealing with neutral actors advancing the game/world story but very few advancing racial story.
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Oh no, we’re certainly getting a racial story advanced - it’s just one of depression, loss, and decline - and that’s not fun to play.
It also feels more than a little unfair, taking Cataclysm as an example, that when I picked the race that’s all about protecting the wilds - I was really signing up for feeling like I’m losing all of the time to the other faction and its attempt to desecrate them. But that doesn’t stop the other faction from questing with nominally one of my racial leaders while enjoying the very experience that my race was supposed to be all about, who suddenly doesn’t seem to care about the nation he represents, and the only time he DOES, it’s to reprimand me for fighting the Horde in the form of a cardboard cut-out villain who is that way because of the conflict the playable race has to deal with.
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The problem is that you don’t have any data to back up your own claims. You immediately assume that nelf popularity is based purely on lore and how it affects the playerbase. But majority of Wow players don’t really care for the lore. Some do of course, the but some select their characters purely for the looks and some select for min/maxing, some reroll because they found other race more exciting or they simply wanted to try something new, or they wanted to faction change to play with friends.
Unless you won’t do any big scale survey you cannot tell that for sure. You don’t have any evidence to back up your claim other than your own personal interpretation.
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Well she’s cherry picking numbers when she ignores that nelf are still the 2 most popular race on the alliance down from wait they alway been that
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I couldn’t disagree more about WoD. The draenei got a ton of cultural background and development. It’s what created the Council of Exarchs, it’s what gave us details on how the different sects of society like Auchenai - that BC didn’t really do more than just introduce - work. It expanded on how their magitech works with arkonite and introduced new groups like the Rangari.
Yeah it sucks that Shattrath and Telmor are constantly on fire but the actual lore it gave draenei was great. That has more bearing on RP than a place to actually do the RP in, at least IMO. You can do RP anywhere in the game, but with Blizzard getting actual culture about races is exceedingly rare, but WoD provided aplenty for draenei (and orcs, though at the same time orcs also got hit stupidly hard with the retconning villain bat so WoD was a double edged sword for them).
The Army of Light just being Edgier Draenei because Blizzard hates writing anyone that isn’t Metal And Savage™ did suck though.
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The Iron Horde has the right to the name. It was the politics of Garoosh that drove them to invasion, they weren’t ingesting the demonic Fel juice like Outland’s Horde. They were the same brown skinned orcs as the one’s you’re referencing.
Their entrance into Azeroth flows naturally from the story of WOD. Whereas the Mag’har of Outland are content where they are…especially in Nagrand. Also to many newer wow players, Outland is just as removed from their context as Classic Wow.
Culture is more important and a land or place
No, I’m not. If you are discussing the impact of a factor, that is not immediately the same thing as assuming that the factor is the only one worth mentioning.
How is analyzing population-level data cherry picking, exactly?
You already have that answer you ignore pop numbers from retail
Which itself was answered. I didn’t examine retail due to a lack of comparability in study 1. Retail was considered in study 2 with the search interest data.
See cherry picked
No, it isn’t.
But it is and that’s not a even taking into account The Whole nelves still being number 2 on retail even though supposedly they have a terrible story and supposedly that’s all people care about
But it didn’t stop you from using population as evidence that the problem is with lore.
Then why you didn’t use the retail data? I’m pretty sure that nelves are still one of the 3 most played races at the moment, and they should now have edge over humans due to access to the exclusive class which is DH.
I just don’t think that there is any real backup for your claims.
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Evidence that A problem is lore - there’s a difference - and the reason, for about the eighth time, that I compared vanilla data to classic was to control for factors including additional races, class changes, and changes in racials that would have introduced so much noise to the comparison that it would have been meaningless.
Comparing Vanilla to Classic allows me to take a look at the same game, but at different points in time.