Horde also has the whole “found family” thing.
Which a lot of us appreciate, having gone through it in real life.
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And next up, they showed that the major characters in the expansion will be 4 alliance characters (maybe one might be neutral) and 1 Horde character. So tell me, does that justify them claiming that it favors the Alliance?
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And yet the Horde was the less popular faction Blizzard had to give an Alliance coded race to them to prop it up.
Look, WoW probably was more lightning in a bottle rather anything else. It had a massive world, lots to do and was relatively casual friendly(I still remember playing Ragnarok online where if you die, you lost 1% exp, 1% that at higher levels took hours!)
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It’s not a jump, at all.
Your claim:
My response:
Your assertion is that early WoW was noteworthy because of the existence of the Horde. I’ve asked you not once, not twice, but now three times to explain your rationale.
The fact that you’re just obfuscating your own position, and trying to hide behind the semantic technicalities of English verbiage, suggests you don’t actually have any justification for your position. 
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There were plenty of reasons for this.
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Aesthetic: There’s no beating around the bush, the Horde was just plain ugly. It was meant to be. Ugly, and primitive. Orgrimmar was an eyesore. Trolls didn’t even have a home. Tauren were pretty cool, but little was done with their aesthetic. Forsaken were living in the ruins of human buildings.
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Game Mechanics: Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Zul’Gurub etc… the Alliance was just well placed geographically for easy access to endgame content back in the day. This was a time without meeting stones, without LFR. It was just convenient to be Alliance.
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Gameplay: Put bluntly, there was more content available to Alliance players than there was Horde players, and Alliance content was often better. The Onyxia Attunement questline comes to mind, for example. Overall, though, there was something like 200+ more quests for the Alliance than the Horde.
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World Building: The Eastern Kingdoms was created first and was well fleshed out and developed. By contrast, most of Kalimdor was desolate and underdeveloped. Cataclysm brought this discrepancy to an end, but it definitely existed.
To put it simply, there were more reasons to choose Alliance back in the day than there were Horde.
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Blizzard needs a dedicated writing team just.
I’m an Alliance player through and through, but I’m sorry, the Horde being bad guys for most of WoW’s life in macro-scale plot only for them to be forgotten makes me so sad.
The Horde’s really cool. They need, like, some actual heroism in their stories that isn’t them helping the Alliance or fighting against the sins of the past. It’s so tired, it really is.
Undermine doesn’t count as the goblins were mostly neutral. You can have quality faction-based storytelling without screwing over the Armistice.
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And yet to this day the blood elves and I think nightborne still dominate the Horde population. Like if those two were removed, I expect half the Horde population to drop.
Look, I wont deny that the “beast races are not actually evil” was a fairly novel concept in Warcraft 3(less so nowadays) but I think you are giving it too much credit for WoW’s success.
I would also point out the devs were actually at one point thinking of not having factions. I honestly think the factions were not the make or break thing that made WoW special and has probably become a hindrance over the years. I think WoW’s gameplay simply outshines any other MMO that has come and gone. Heck, with Housing being added soon I can’t think of anything another MMO can offer that WoW does not.
Some Horde quests literally had quest text like “Horde equivalent of Alliance quest 2834 goes here.”
It kept going afterwards, too. In Mists of Pandaria there were NPC flight masters who would return you to your HQ, and for Horde players it would say “Return to me Shrine of Seven Stars” (the Alliance HQ) instead of Shrine of Two Moons (the Horde one).
The game is written and created with the Alliance first and foremost. It always has been, ever since Alpha.
Then they do a coat of paint on it for Horde. And usually botch it, somewhere along the way.
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There is a new alliance (lower case “a”) which replaces the Alliance (upper case “A”) vs Horde. They are now all part of the Azeroth alliance (lower case “a”).
I’m pretty sure Midnight will be the first time -any- Horde faction has had actual heroism for themselves ever since… BFA?
Agreed. I’d rather take Vanilla Darkshore going up and down the zone repeatedly over the massively big eyesore that is the Barrens.
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Nope. WoD.
Or the aptly-named Desolace. Which was just a kodo skeleton and an infernal.
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No. The Army of the Light did. Which works with both factions. And the cinematic doesn’t tell all, skippy. This is getting old. Just because you don’t see everything in a teaser cinematic, doesn’t mean the Horde aren’t there. 
Yes.
Having 1 alliance NPC during a patch story does not make a story “too much alliance focus”.
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And any of that heroism being overshadowed by the burning of Teldrassil makes my blood boil. The Horde literally saved the Vulpera people in BfA but you can’t really put that as heroism when the start of the Fourth War was an act of utter evil so out of character it’s laughable.
Sad zug zug noises
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It was a novel concept, yes, but there was also more to WoW’s success.
At the end of the day, WoW wasn’t so complex or complicated. It was accessible. That having been said, from WC3, the faction that had the most identity amongst the players WAS the Horde.
Consider the factions at the end of WC3. The Horde was established in a new land, having build a new home, and had redeemed itself by defending the world.
By contrast, the Alliance was in shambles. Some players thought Stormwind and Ironforge had been destroyed by the Scourge because Blizzard never mentioned them in WC3. It was just assumed the Scourge destroyed ALL of the Eastern Kingdoms. When WoW came around, the modern Alliance was just introduced to us. Compare this to the Horde which was been firmly established in WC3.
The Horde was absolutely more iconic to players as a selling point than the Alliance was. I wouldn’t say the Horde was the sole contributing factor to WoW’s success, but had WoW been another generic, “Orcs and Trolls are the bad guys,” game, it wouldn’t have had that unique aspect to it.
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The main city of the expansion is Silvermoon, a Horde city… Also, we will be surrounded by blood elves and trolls characters…
Meanwhile… The War Within had nothing with the Alliance.
All the Alliance characters present there only had participation during entrance patch in the leveling campaign and some side quests and that is it. They totally disappeared during most of the expansion. Also all they action had nothing to do with the Alliance, it was all about help Khaz Algar inhabitants.
I’m just tired of this Horde players ridiculous and no sense complaints.
The best thing about playing Horde, is not playing with people like this.
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You can’t beat the hair products though. We must save the hair spray!
I don’t think this is true especially considering Theramore effectively does the exact same thing. It was establishing itself in a new land, building a new home for itself and dealing with the fall out from both Arthas and the Legion.
I also don’t think it was. I mean, the moment I saw Stormwind and saw 5 statues I knew exactly who they would be. Like, Warcraft was always built on its roots and part of the reason Warcraft 3 sold so well was because Warcraft 2 was popular.
Everyone knew who Alleria and Turaylon was hence why we keep asking where they were all these years!
Except even Vanilla WoW had the “orcs and frosaken” have a good degree of bad guy energy to them and hence why we all ended up with their two faction leaders as bosses we inevitably defeated.
People loved to say Illidan was an Alliance character despite being exiled before Nightelves even joined the Alliance so yaknow, “he’s a nelf so he’s alliance” works on belfs too either they is or they isn’t which is it gonna be.
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