The truth about "Orc Fatigue" "night elf fatigue" "Human Fatigue"

Lore Story Forum
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The weird thing is that Blizzard doesn’t even seem to go just based on a race’s popularity. Like, if they did? Night elves would still be ever-present, sure, but not nearly as much as the Best Elves. We would be the ones getting new everythings, getting slaughtered enmass, getting godly visits of questionable merit, so on and so forth.

We are the prettiest elves in the world, the number one race by population, and yet? Still highlighted less than night elves, orcs and humans. All the sites I find that do WoW stats show the blood elf population is more than triple the troll population among players, yet the two races are at best shown equally as often, if not blood elves being shown less often.

Blizzard’s just weird with who they shower in their questionable abusive lovebomb attention.

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I was assuming you meant good content

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Night Elves got unfortunately a push with the undesirable World War 2 scenario, where we burn people. Ever since then they are the focus of every expansion so far.

Blood Elves are tainted by the insufferable amount of players, who want to play their Barbie Dolls in a game. They were introduced to give the Horde a population and have ever since then ruined the overall feeling of the faction. I’m glad that they aren’t the focus, because the game would be much better, if no human or human-like elf is the focus. The Alliance is mainly controlled by humans or a human who turns sometimes into a wolf without a tail. The Horde was lead by a human-like elf in blue for a while.

The game really would benefit if they stopped caring about these two races.

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Well then. I guess we can get into this.

Seventeen years. That’s how long blood elves have been in the game at this point, and we’re still hearing some weirdboi 2007 complaints. The modern Horde only existed for two years at that point. There wasn’t enough time for there to even be a feeling of the faction for it to be ruined. And if you do feel it’s been “ruined”, then maybe it deserved to be ruined, because this mysterious “feeling” couldn’t survive a single race being added to it. It never would have survived the introduction of transmog, where everyone got made into a Barbie Doll, and we all agreed to start playing dress-up with them as our primary motivation for playing the game.

What next? Are we going to revent back to saying the Alliance is for babies and all the real adults play Horde?

It is officially 2024. We should all agree to let our arguments mature.

That’s what would really benefit the game.

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Nah.

A plot means the primary story being played out
B plot is the secondary plot. Usually it is in the background.

So for example, the Simpsons episode Marge vs the Monorail has an A and B plot. Sometimes these intersect or reach the same conclusion.

The A plot of the episode is the town of springfield being swept into Monorail madness. However Marge does not trust the one suggesting the idea. So she tries to find proof that he is a con man. First by sneaking into his office then visiting other towns that he had conned. Hoping to save Springfield before it is to late.
The B plot is Homer training to become the Monorail conductor.

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My reaction to when being asked to helped the Kaldorei again as they make their problems everyone elses

But when the Wild Gods, Dryads, dragons and others need my help? It’s basically

It’s the only amusing way I can put it really

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And these complains are justified. Not only did the developers fail to deliver a great Horde experience, it ultimately ruined also the Alliance in the long run. Not only have they denied an actual player race for their own (Pandaren, which was an Alliance-exclusive race in TBC), they also got everything unnecessary and keep struggling with a fourth dwarf race.

I know this is nobodies’ fault but the developers, but the damage clearly ruined WoW in the long run. We, the Horde, got every race we asked for while they can’t even their requested races. And the worst part is, the other half of the players has been conditioned in only thinking “human”. What they want as player races? Vrykuls and High Elves, of all the possible choices they can have. No bird people, no snake people, nothing what might give them an edge over us. The Vulpera was the last nail on the coffin and it really shows.

This will not happen, until Blizzard actually merges all the human races together and releases two to three exclusive fantasy races for the Alliance. Humans, Worgen and Kul Tiran are just “humans” and even most Worgen-player prefer to stay as humans on the RP-server I play (AD-EU). And don’t get me started how almost every Void Elf TP3 profile is Quel’dorei exclusively.

What will benefit the game is to push the Alliance in the race department, adjust the racials (Bronzebeard, Kaldorei), add subraces racials and a developer’s apologize in not caring enough to keep the faction balance in check in the first place. BfA was truly the beginning of the end for WoW, otherwise they wouldn’t have had opened up the faction system a bit.

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Issues of imbalance don’t just come down to racials or whatever developer malpractice might entail. Racials certainly have place in affecting balance with Horde typically having more that benefit output or NE and Dark Irons having some pretty overtuned actives in PvP, but it doesn’t change the overall balance that much unless you’re trying to be top 100 mythic raiding groups. Which what? Its maybe 5000 people per faction when it really comes down to it. I’d be generous and say 10,000 just because of racials. Drop in the barrel when it comes to the millions who play, not to mention the ease of leveling and playing both factions these days.

Recall, part of the reason Blood Elves went Horde was to give them a ‘pretty’ race, to try and balance through aesthetics and did resolve that to an extent. Now with Void Elves Alliance that BE aesthetic (and lore) over tuning to the Horde had some counter weight. Still room to improve, but been overall aware of balancing the factions. Hell, that was one supposed reason for Warmode.

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Nah, sorry, they aren’t. The complaints that blood elves ruined the Horde are unjustified and long-since gone to dust until some rando tries to bring it back up.

BfA? That ruined the Horde. Sure. No argument from me there.

But blood elves didn’t ruin the feel of the Horde by any stretch. That’s just bullcrap people want to sling around because they remember the meme from 17 years ago and want it to be relevant now.

I’m guessing you understand that, which is why the rest of your post turned into a rant about Alliance not getting cool new toys.

Wrath was the beginning of the end for WoW because dungeon finder exists.
Cata was the beginning of the end for WoW because raid finder exists.
MoP was the beginning of the end for WoW because pandas exist, too many dailies, and titan-forging/war-forging/X-forging.
WoD is the end of WoW because Garrisons and no world content.
Legion is the… Nah, you’re good.
BfA is the beginning of the end for WoW because warmode kills pvp servers, also azerite, also Sylvanas. And I guess now, also faction loosening.
Shadowlands is the beginning of the end for WoW because… Everything.

And Dragonflight is the beginning of the end of WoW because Disnification.

WoW’s had a lot of beginnings of its ending. It’s a miracle that it’s still around, given its earliest deathblow was struck on December 9th, 2009 and somehow has kept going for another fourteen years and counting after.

WoW will eventually die. Someday. But it won’t be anything we’ve seen thus far that marks the beginning of its end.

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Okay but actually because damnit if I didn’t have the time of my life back on Emerald Dream when it was a balanced, high/full pop, RP-PvP server with everyone from your Stormwind RPer who did next to 0 content, your 2k/Hero of the Horde/R1 PvPers, your top raiding guilds, and hardly ever a more than 60/40 server imbalance both directions where WPvP and player/faction rivalry fueled a vibrant and unique server (even if toxic at times). I’ll die on this mole hill :triumph:

Just as an aside to balance though whats the solution? Cause we certainly can’t implement a Classic style of restriction where you can’t create characters of the other faction. We can’t limit folks to only playing one faction per server. Only way forward I see is to give factions the requested customization and races/nations they’ve ask for, for years, and give the existing races the care and depth they deserve, even if its just a single quest chain like the over the top Orc Heritage Armor quest. That quality given to every other race could potentially do real numbers on increasing popularity of a race, and therefore general or perceived balance (cause lets face it, for every BE/Orc/NE/Human there is at least a few less popular alts and vice versa).

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Hell, I remember when worgen and pandas were made playable and people were complaining about how Furries are going to kill WoW now. If I had dollar for everytime something was going to be a deathblow to WoW, I would be the richest person in the world a thousand times over.

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My personal view? Honestly?

Warmode was the biggest mistake made to the game. Ever. I rank it higher than the various Shadowlands debacles, and those are some gloriously big mistakes.

I mean, obviously letting the corporate headquarters descend into a vile hive of scum and villainy was Blizzard’s #1 bad move of all time, but we’re talking strictly game choices here.

Warmode turned servers from having a sense of variety into RP and Normal. Because now every server is a PVP server, if you just believe hard enough!!

Nah, bullcrap.

A better, imo, solution is pretty easy and has been done for other aspects since MoP; that sharding-merging tech they do when a zone is over- or under-populated. Just code it more to focus on factions.

Waking Shore is looking 80% Horde/20% Alliance? Draw players from the Waking Shore zone of an Alliance-heavy server to balance it out more.

Then they could do things like… Do their little quasi-merge thing to smush together more low-pop server into server clutters. Or better yet, introduce all characters being given a last name slot that goes live on the same day you fully merge a bunch of low to mid-pop servers into singular servers, so you can avoid forcing character name changes. Guilds will still get hammered, but that’ll be sorted quick.

Then open free transfers to specific servers for members of lower represented factions until such time as balance is achieved.

Because genberally speaking, the higher population servers hit an equilibrium of somewhere between a 60/40 to 50/50 split a long time ago, and generally maintain it. Once a form of server equilibrium is hit, it usually stays. So just do things to get to that equilibrium.

But I dunno, those are just what I’d’ve wanted to try first before making every server a normal server.

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Oh yeah, there’s been a lot of much smaller “Deathblows of WoW”. Races with fur on them because people forget tauren have fur or something. WoW token. Hell, dailies in TBC were going to kill the game for a hot minute. Flying would kill it. Making flying unavailable until a later patch would inevitably lead to that expansion being the very last one. Artifact weapon grinds. I’m legitimately shocked nobody’s accusing follower dungeons of being a WoW Killer.

And that’s before we even talk about the games that would kill WoW. Age of Conan sticks out in my mind the most because of how many people were absolutely certain Conan having naked boobs would make everyone unsub from WoW. I was going to say “and that died in its crib” but I guess it’s still around. But it never even came remotely to killing WoW. SWTOR was being hyped by some as a WoW killer.

A lot of WoW killers have come and gone and died their own slow demises.

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I’d be shocked if Blizzard didn’t have internal and accurate stats of what balance actually looks like day to day, zone to zone, server to server. Cause if my state university and run a report on the number of Freshman who took this course, but not that one, got at least a B, who are from a under represented or academically challenged background, who are also in at least 2 registered student organizations, whos names start with the letter M, then Blizzard can certainly run numbers on accounts, who they log into, how long, and what activities they participate in. Translating numbers into analysis and action might take a bit, but if we can do the student report each semester, they can do that at least once a year.

You’re probably onto something though on increasing sharding technology and merging servers rather than attempting to separate them out further. Some clusters should of course stay together, all RP servers for example, but surely they can take trends and make relatively even server shard clusters that give a minimum 60/40 balance, and then draw from other shards as needed.

I’d throw in removing Chromie time - creating no fewer than 16 shards to level in (8 expansions to level in x 2 for WM/Not WM) creating this empty feeling all around and just let everything scale to max level. Cool for when it was implemented, but probably not the best long term solution.

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Uhg. Chromie time is possibly the clunkiest way to scale the world to your level, especially when the obvious option to just… Scale the world to (new expansion’s entry level) is right there. Just make the Hero Board open a menu, preferably a menu you can also access without that. That menu lets you select an expansion, suggests a start point based on proximity to the city you’re in (the number of times I have to accept a dozen other zones to get Westfall to pop while I’m literally standing in Stormwind is just silly), but then also lets you pick any level-appropriate zone you want.

Done. Easy-peasy.

Then when a friend is leveling a lowbie and says “hey, you bored, I have a quest for a dungeon and nobody’s queuing for Wrath dungeons at all, wanna breeze me through it” I can like… Just go and do that, and not wait for them to arrive to Org/SW, disable Chromie Time, then fly back to where they already just were to breeze them through the dungeon. Or any of the many, many problems I know I’ve personally encountered with Chromie Time.

It’d be one thing if Chromie Time offered you a curated run through a specific expansion so you hit the major story beats of that expansion. That I could get into. But instead it’s just a bonus extra step for the sake of having a bonus extra step.

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Inshallah with the new solo dungeon mode they’re coming out with, grouping you with your 1-4 NPCs to complete it, they can implement a core narrative experience per expansion which includes capstone dungeon quests and raids that you can complete on your own with maybe a few extra quests to for filler/narration. I don’t expect people to grind 5 weeks of dailies just for the feeling of building up to a raid.

Sunwell as your BC capstone with all the raids sprinkled in between since most are pretty good end zone raids.

Imagine running ICC as your leveling capstone when going through Wrath, with Naxx and maybe TotC as the midpoint raids. Ulduar, for as popular as it is, would probably have to be cut for narrative sake.

Cata is already pretty linear so all those dungeons and raids as midpoints and capstones.

MoP you could go through the entire traditional leveling experience, then a new small questline for the Sha of Anger world boss to defeat, to 5.1 and their quests, 5.2 and their quests and raids, with new filler quests for Battlefield Barrens and SoO.

I could go on, you get the point.

Edit: And as I just realized, they just did this in SL with Threads of Fate choosing to do the story again or go right into questing as you want, and less in your face in DF. So totally there, just built on.

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:smiley:

If nobody in the developer pool is already discussing this, then they need new developers.

One of the biggest hurdles for new players has got to be learning the story of Warcraft, especially the MMO bits. Wrath told a decent narrative over all, but you need to complete each zone, most of the dungeons and all the raids to get it.

Or what they could do instead? Offer a third option to the current leveling paths. Instead of “you hit 20, now do Shadowlands” or “just pick whatever from Chromie, it doesn’t matter”, you could select “pick Storyline progression for (insert expansion)”.

My hypothetical way to handle it is a condensced version of every zone. Quite a lot of quests won’t progress the story, so axe those from this specific system. When a dungeon is needed, Follower Dungeon that up. For raids, have a questline give you the full overview of the progress to access that raid, or even save some of the pre-existing quests for right before that raid. You could easily throw most of Icecrown between say Ulduar and… The tourney raid. Then build a short but meaningful questline between TourneyRaid and ICC where we rally the forces, make the push, etc. When you do the raid, it’s a scaled down version (like, for adds and mechanics) with the Follower Dungeon crew.

And the beautiful thing? You can include your retcons into this system. Now when you stab Arthas for the final time and the cinematic ends, the next quest is given by Bolvar and talks about some strange voice inside the helm. The quest tells you the story is picked up in the Shadowlands Storyline Narrative Experience.

Man, I really want something like this…

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I don’t even think it needs to be that condensed though, if at all. You can use the Dragon Flight quest marking system that primary story quests are a bit more orange with their extra flair, in its own quest log section, keeping all the side quests available. If they want to explore the different side quests, encourage it. Even now with the expansions I’ve gone through if you stick to just mainline story you hardly get to 60 from 10/20. The added quests/contexts/retcons are certainly needed though.

I’d argue though that lets keep the raid feeling like a raid. Make it 25 player especially since, theoretically, making 5 NPCs in all roles to react to mechanics shouldnt be too difficult to scale up. Same logic, just different abilities/classes.

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The main reason I’d suggest scaling the questing down is to avoid the inevitable; outleveling the content before you finish the story. Just before DF, I was leveling my rogue and it took all of 4 Wrath zones to go from 12 to 60 (I was dual gatherer though). I’d want a system like this to be a full experience, where you can do the entire Wrath storyline without suddenly out-leveling it before you reach Arthas. Personally, it’d be more fulfilling to kill Arthas at 47 and just need to do something for those last 13 levels than to ding 60 right as you’re entering the Icecrown zone, and for the game to just suddenly be like “well, read the wiki, off to Dragonlands for you!!”

I can see the arguments for keeping the raids at 25. You’re right. Five people murdering Arthas in an actual quasi-difficult fight doesn’t feel too right.

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Yeah, I’d be supportive of something like that too where they’ve already factored in and did the math for those who are dual gatherers picking every flower and mining every node they come across (and give hefty XP as you know) or those that explore off the beaten path and do the side quests, like Rokhan’s in Dragonblight, so they dont out level. A new weekly quest can pop up like in DF at the end where its “explore the camps and forces of Northrend” and it points you to the small off the beaten path side quest areas. Even unlock the dialies to complete in various areas.

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