My subscription will run out in a few days, but before it does there are a few grenades I want to roll through the door on my way out. This is one of them.
Teldrassil was deliberately presented to look as devastating as possible, and in terms of its blow to the morale of Night Elf players to feel good about their race, their faction, and the game in general - it absolutely WAS devastating. However, some have tried to amplify and overstate the canonical impact of an already horrible event in a manner that muddles the facts and misleads observers. I have created this thread as a community tool - because the people advancing these claims have been corrected in the past but have raised the falsehoods I am about to discuss anyway. This thread is here for your convenience, to link in response to these claims when you see them.
Without further ado, letâs address the claims.
Claim #1: Ashenvale was lost
Do note, the reverse isnât true either. We donât know what the status of Ashenvale is because they failed to tell us - however, my issue with this argument is that it presumes that the Horde attack acted like a wave that swept through and comprehensively rooted out every hint of Night Elf resistance. We know just from the mission tables that this isnât true. But additionally from that, the novellas and the questing indicate that this offensive was never concerned with holding territory, but with transiting the Horde army towards Teldrassil. They moved in a line, they did not advance a front, and as the Alliance questing indicates in Astraanar: when they took a settlement, they did not leave behind sufficient forces to hold it.
Claim #2: Most of the Night Elves who lived in Teldrassil were killed.
We have to understand this in context to the RPG books, which established that 90% of the Night Elvesâ population lived on Teldrassil - presumably to flee from the devastation of the Third War and the Hordeâs subsequent transformation of Ashenvale into a warzone. While the RPG was declared as not being canon by around MOP - this figure was never contradicted.
So, stating that the majority of Teldrassilâs population is dead is the same as saying that the majority of the Night Elves period are dead.
To that, I offer the following, which is a (mostly) copy-paste of a conversation on this same topic that I originally put on Scrolls of Lore two years ago:
Page 88 of Elegy contains the following:
"The World Tree was more than a city. It was an entire land, home to countless innocents. How many Night Elves were elsewhere in the world? Far too few. Now, they were all that remained of their people.
Sylvanas Windrunner had committed genocide."
Note: this is not a third-person omniscient viewpoint - these are the thoughts of Anduin Wrynn immediately after learning that Teldrassil had been destroyed. Anduin is not an expert on populations, nor is he familiar with every measure the Night Elves may have taken in evacuating the tree. For example, we know that some overseas evacuation had taken place due to the presence of refugees crowded on the decks of Rutâtheran (Page 79).
The evacuations themselves began relatively early in the War, taking place before the stand at the Farfallen River, the attempted decapitation strike at Astraanar, and the time it took for the Horde to find a way to address the wisp wall. (Page 33) This had led to a situation where, in Stormwind itself "The flood [of refugees] spread to seemingly every surface of the city, continued down through the Valley of Heroes, and spilled out most of the way to Goldshire (Page 78).
Portals, however, are limited in their ability to transport people - perhaps being able to transport two or three people at a time, although that seems to be an acknowledgement of its nature as a physical bottleneck than a sort of cooldown effect. (Page 82 makes this clear)
So, how do we assess the capacity of a portal to process a line of people in travelling from one destination to another?
How about using air travel as an analogy?
Yes, perhaps itâs bad that I was thinking of CGP Greyâs video on boarding methods, but there are similarities in the problem. You can only put people through the gate or portal one at a time, and there is an element of expected delay built in with the problem of bags.
In fact, as I was researching this problem, I found out exactly how slow that boarding process truly can be, because Mythbusters did a segment on it:
Taking a look at the experiments performed, it took 200 people to board a plane under the following conditions, the following times:
Back to front = 24:29
Random with Seats = 17.15
Window, Middle, Aisle =14:55/15:07
Random no seats = 14:07
Reverse Pyramid = 15:10
Back to front therefore seems ridiculous, and I would add, not probable in the case of refugees who donât have assigned seats and donât need to hold up the entire line to stow a bag once they get to their seats. There are in fact, no seats at all and in theory they can fan out into the city. But for reasons of conservatism, letâs assume the structure. Weâre going to toss out back to front because thatâs a little too ridiculous, but letâs consider average âboardingâ times of 20 minutes (to roughly average between the two most extreme values) and 15 minutes (which cuts closer to the ârandom, no seatsâ idea that I would expect from refugees being simply put anywhere, unless there was some gate agent in Darnassus that no one informed me about).
Presuming that mages work in shifts to keep the portals open - thatâs 200 people every 20, or 15 minutes, for twenty-four hours in a day.
20 minutes: 200 * (60/20) * 24 = 14,400 evacuees per day
15 minutes: 200 * (60/15) * 24 = 19,200 evacuees per day
The books themselves depict the invasion in multiple instances of taking days, not hours, making specific provision to the problem of needing to eat and sleep. The prepatch itself also went for a few weeks. I think, given this, and my previous comments on the territorial size of the area weâre talking about, that two weeks is a reasonable timeframe for this analysis.
14,900 evacuees per day * 14 days = 208,600
19,200 evacuees per day * 14 days = 268,800
Page 36 establishes that the Night Elves are not a populous people, and that the primary concern is that Darnassus is a major city. To appreciate what that means by standards of the time, London would not reach that until between 1600 and 1650 [1]. Paris hovered around these values from 1300 to about 1600.[2] Prague wouldnât get there until 1900 [3].
Thereâs one other thing to consider:
âAnduin had ordered that the portals be constantly open throughout the city, but the magi had to sleep and eat, as did every one of the stoic but emotionally wrung-out refugees.â (Page 69)
There were multiple portals in play, and while doubtlessly those maintaining them would have needed to take shifts, including instances where some portals for a time would need to be closed, they had the capacity to have several of them open. Increase our number of gates to two or three, and the number of evacuated refugees accordingly, doubles or triples.
None of this should be taken of course as an expression of admiration or hope for the story of course - nor should it be presented as a defense for Blizzardâs decision to have this happen at all, but I do find it to be interesting - as well as a strong basis to conclude that canonically, the species is far from over (even if it will never again be taken seriously and remains constructively dead).
Additional References:
[1] - http^://www.demographia.com/dm-lon31.htm
[2] - http^s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris
[3] - http^s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Prague
Claim #3: Most of the Night Elf souls who ended up in the Maw were obliterated.
This one is based on the inconsistent, and improper, shifting of methods. Some more math is required, but I ask that you bear with me.
Teldrassilâs casualties can be estimated using a proportional sampling method based on the quest that the player is given to save Teldrassian victims in Darnassus. This quest gives you the impossible assignment to rescue over two-thousand civilians and at best, you can maybe a couple-hundred. The result is that of those that remained on Teldrassil when it started to burn, we can comfortably assume that the vast majority of them died horribly.
To be cold and calculating about it?
If:
T = The population of Teldrassil
E = Those evacuated before the burning
Q = Those evacuated during the quest
P = The total population of civilians eligible to be saved during the quest
D = Total number of Teldrassil fatalities
then:
D = (T-E)*(P-Q)/P
To be clear, I am not arguing that D is a small number, but the population of those lost at Pearl Harbor or during 9/11 were not small numbers either - but they also were not the majority of the American population - or anything close to that.
With that out of the way, and returning to the claim, Iâm going to introduce another variable.
N = P-Q
N is "Not saved during the quest, we will assume that this number is 1800.
This is important because thereâs a narrative thatâs been built that the majority of the Night Elf souls were obliterated, and it gets there with a dishonest accounting method that goes something like this:
M = The number of civilians encountered during the quest where Tyrande saves Night Elf souls from the maw
A = Those drawn into the amalgam that Tyrande fights and are permanently obliterated
W = Those saved by the Maw Walker.
O = The number of souls obliterated.
If we apply the proportional sampling method, therefore, the equation for the number of souls obliterated is:
O = D*A/M
Because about 10 souls form the amalgam, out of around 100 possible souls, thatâs a rescue rate of 90%
However, the narrative instead proposes the following equation for those lost:
O = D*(N-(M-A))/N
This equation pretends to represent proportional sampling, but improperly lifts the absolute value of the previous calculation and applies it in the most uncharitable way possible towards an entirely different scenario. This method of accounting is improper and dishonest.
Conclusion
I donât want this to come off as minimizing how bad Teldrassil was as a story event. It was atrocious, and for Night Elf fans - it killed a lot of our motivation to play the game. But to my fellow Night Elf fans: let us traffic in fact instead of fiction driven by our extreme, if justified pessimism.
