I would say, all the criteria below applies to orcs and humans in BFA at least.
Kul Tiras, Lordaeron, Stromgarde. are all clear examples for humans. First, “Has relevance to what the playable faction/race is doing”. Needing the Kul Tiran Fleet, retaliation for War of Thorns at Lordaeron, and Stromgarde is key defensive position in the Eastern Kingdoms.
All places are relevant to human lore. Kul Tiras is the homeland of a major human character. Humans have been wanting to retake Lordaeron for years “For Lordaeron” is still a battle cry of humanity. Stromgard is the homeland of a major human lore character, though he hasn’t been super relevant since WC2. Yet, with the return of Turalyon and Alleria, WC2 heroes are sort of front-and-center again.
“It changes nothing about them going forward” Jaina underwent significant changes in BfA. Actually revitalizing some of her old pre-cata age willingness to work with the Horde. She is the Leader of Kul Tiras now, and presumably Danath is the leader of Stromgarde again. In BFA, the Night Elves lost their home for the sake of humans near effectively tripling the number of standing Kingdoms in the Alliance.
BFA was basically all about humans. Jaina got the killing blow on Rhastakhan AND Azshara FFS.
Yes. And all the races secured it. It is still content used to develop the story of the Night Elves, even if an outside party needed to be stopped by all the races combined.
I don’t see your point. Seems odd to state:
“If it wasn’t being destroyed it wouldn’t have to be saved. Full Stop.”
But it was being destroyed by Ragnaros. So it was saved by the united forces of various races. And it is content being used to develop the Night Elf story, as they are there now, licking their wounds.
Sorry - if the Night Elves in Val’sharah don’t count because they aren’t members of the playable Night Elf society, how exactly is Kul Tiras, Stromgarde, and Lordaeron Human content when the Playable Human society is Stormwind? It’s arguably an even larger distinction.
Yes, secured it for a neutral organization that again, at the time, was being confused for being its own country.
The post BFA placement of the Night Elves there is in no way set up by this content. Hyjal was just a convenient place to stick them. Cata’s content did nothing to develop the zone - the zone was just a backdrop for a conflict that started and ended in that expansion.
I feel like I’ve missed something. When was the Cenarion Circle ever counted as its own country? Is that an RP thing? Because I’ve never gotten that impression myself.
Val’sharah concentrates heavily on Tyrande in her capacity as a leader of her people. It’s more of a narrative focus consideration, and she’s not representing a neutral party that seems to be aloof to the concerns of said people.
Unclear on how Malfurion fighting to save his peoples most sacred holy site from Fandral - a once-leader of the Night Elf people turned traitor - does not concentrate on the capacity of Night Elf leadership. Malfurion is not either the co-leader of Darnassus OR the leader of the Circle - he is both at once.
Like I get it - you want him to slap the Orcs around - but they aren’t the sole problem facing the race.
I realize that on paper he is both at once, but in his actions he represents one party to the near-exclusion of the other. Regarding Staghelm, if you were to tell me that there could have been more here to make it relate to the playable race, I might agree with you - but the potential of that got sucked up by another force in the story, which then concentrated largely on that.
I’ve been going back to old posts from the Children of Wrath blog, and that guy still puts that particular problem better than I do.
Past that, we find the most relevance in the Leyara questline. Which, if you want to count that, okay, but that’s an explicitly negative portrayal that seems to frame the idea of being upset about the invasion of Ashenvale as “evil” - one that Malfurion acts against with nary a mention of “she’s crazy and we can’t let her destroy the world, but she does have a point”. I’m not sure if that’s what you want to lead with if you’re trying to tell me that I should be happy with Hyjal content.
The settlement at the time was presented as something distinct and apart from the playable race itself, something under the dominion of the Cenarion Circle. Again, this fed into the impression of the CC being its own country, rather than an organization that was operating in these territories.
It’s hard to overstate how much BFA changed things in this front, and this is actually one area of BFA that I do appreciate and encourage.
The idea here seems to be that one can only be either a Darnassian elf or a Cenarion elf at any given time, which is a concept I wholly reject and don’t really think the game supports either.
Hyjal is Hyjal. It’s meaning and relation to the Night Elves (and their fans, ideally) does not stop existing because of the neutral tag on their NPCs.
I’d argue that Cataclysm started off a terrible decade for most non-human races, not just the Night Elves, it just resonated in a different way for each of them. While some were winning in terms of battles, they were still getting their themes and stories destroyed.
Dwarves nearly get into a civil war and need the Stormwind king to bail them out, reform their government, pat them on the head, and then leave.
Orcs get pulled back into the narrative of being dumb warmongers.
Tauren, despite being walking tanks capable of beating a knight to death with his own horse, are consistent victims.
Gnomes get advancement of their lore in the form of an A-Team reference and then promptly lose most of their retaken territory.
Forsaken get reframed as evil (there is some messed up stuff in Silverpine, for instance).
For the last eleven years or so, every race has been getting steamrolled narratively in favour of Stormwind, even other Human nations. Only a handful, like Goblins, and even Trolls to an extent, managed to carve some advancement out of it. And Stormwind itself is a shell of the more complex system it was back in Vanilla, it’s now an absolute monarchy where the king is the leader of the state and there’s no one to challenge him.
Edit: Though Night Elves seem to have earned a particular ire from the writers, even with some good stuff to partially balance. Same thing with Draenei, my god.
I want to make sure I understand this point, because there’s a bit of a lexical ambiguity. Are you suggesting you lack perspective and/or are biased? Or are you suggesting that Horde players are biased and have a lack of perspective? Because it seems more likely that the person biased with respect to Night Elves would be the Night Elf proponent, but I suspect you aren’t saying that.
I also object to the idea that somehow we should only consider canon that you consider important, but ignore canon that you don’t. That delineation is one step shy of saying, “Only consider the evidence supporting my case, and none of the evidence against my case.”
I cannot emphasize enough how close-minded it is to actually reduce all possible answers to the 3 that you are willing to consider. You’ve already decided the answers you will accept - one of which supports your claim - so there’s really no point in discussing it. Nevertheless, I will try to engage you, but I suggest you consider what it says about you and your inherent biases that you are willing to take such a stance.
Why you are comparison WoW Vanilla populations to WoW Classic as opposed to WoW Retail populations? This point is entirely made with respect to selection bias.
A comparison of WoW Vanilla populations and WoW Classic populations assumes that these two audiences are at least representative of the same underlying group of players, with no intrinsically different characteristics that might draw them into Classic. I find that proposition highly unlikely.
Your hypothesis that “The way that Night Elves have been presented and framed has deteriorated their brand equity, making them less appealing to play” seems to be inherently driven post-hoc.
Your evidence is that WoW Classic selection of Night Elves has dropped off, except I see no reason to expect that outcome. I would argue that my expectation would be that if your premise is true, we should see more players selecting Night Elves in WoW Classic, because they would prefer to play in the environment where they are not suffering from perceived humiliation. The findings then that you present seem, inherently, to be a rebuttal to your premise. How do you differentiate why your hypothesis is a better explanation?
Since I do not know of a way to determine if there is an intrinsic difference between the players that opted into WoW Classic, why shouldn’t we compare WoW Vanilla to WoW Retail?
By your given numbers, during Vanilla - Night Elves made up between 19-25% of population numbers. With 8 playable races they made up between 1/4 and 1/5 of the entire population suggesting they were wildly overrepresented. You even acknowledge Horde content was lacking and we can see that since the ratio was roughly 1.5:1 in favor of the Alliance. Unless the game was intended to continue developing in that ratio, it would seem likely that Horde content would be introduced to help alleviate the gap.
To attempt to avoid that concern, we can just examine the relative proportion of Alliance players that picked each race. Night Elves (36.5%) came up just below Humans (37.2%) within the 4 races of the Alliance.
I would argue that the expectation over time would be to see that number intentionally moved downward by developing more content. Likewise, as the number of races increased, Night Elf popularity would be expected to see a decline. I wouldn’t expect to see them drop to equally distributed (8%) but lower than during Vanilla. So I took a peek at some numbers (https://www.statista.com/statistics/276315/distribution-of-world-of-warcraft-characters-by-race/). Among 12 Alliance races, Night Elves are roughly 23% of the population (and about 11.6% overall). While that’s a far cry from 36.5% - with 3 times as many races, that’s not a very steep decline. And before you completely discredit Allied Races, just note Void Elves make up 1.8% of the overall population and Goblins make up 2.2% of the overall population.
Why would we expect Night Elves to remain highly over represented among races?
Night Elves made up between 1/5 and 1/4 of overall populations during Vanilla, and more than 1/3 of Alliance populations during the same time period. You accurately pointed out there was a lack of Horde content which did change, but unless Devs sought to maintain that disparity within the Alliance, wouldn’t they also add additional content for other races? Wouldn’t just adding more races also cause it to lower?
While you’ve tried to present your argument in terms of overall population statistics, you really haven’t pointed to any aspects that somehow support your claim that Night Elves have been crippled over the last decade.
Humans have the most plentiful/powerful NPCs in the game. I’m not sure anyone will argue against that (but I’m more than welcome to be wrong). In a hero-dominated storyline though, I’m not sure anyone beyond Humans top Night Elves with Malfurion, Tyrande, Maiev, Shandris, Jarod, and at least part of Illidan.
On top of that, the Night Elves are the race that is primarily associated with both the Wild Gods and the only confirmed deity in WoW (their patron Elune). At the very least it’s hard to argue that their prominence within the story has somehow declined as we’ve consistently seen them at the forefront - as heroes.
See, this is the annoying thing about the particularly aggressively anti-nelf posters here (Not calling you that, just using a snip of your post as an example).
Night Elves is the only individual race, when any complaint is brought to bare, the retort is so often “Well, it’s not just Night Elves.”
Why is that? No one is going to argue that Tauren need more development. Or Gnomes.
Hell, if I want a post to get a lot of likes, all I really need to do is say something positive about Trolls. But if it’s night elves, it is so often dismissal if not outright vitriol.
I have seen this with specific characters as well. Jaina, Tyrande, Talanji, to a lesser extent Sylvanas too. Weird that it is so often female characters.
I have said this before, it is no surprise to me how this “Gamer community” has this sort of reaction to the race that just-so-happens to be the hotbed of girl boss characters. Has this sort of reaction to members of that sort of community. That any concerns they might have can be chalked up to unfounded “female hysteria”.
It’s all pretty typical from a community of people that brought you the Gamergate controversy.