That’s the result of Smallioz’ mindset though. The Horde players thinking like him don’t want to be the only ones who commited PvE genocide, so they demand an a genocide commited by the Alliance against the Horde, followed by ten thousand mea culpas by major Alliance characters and “deep” NPC conversations about hurt feelings.
Meanwhile, the pvpers have fun with the actual game.
I will believe it when I see it. Hence me waiting and not busting out the old trusty VISA.
Just like me :3
I didn’t say he was responsible for all of it. But he’s the one who set the whole MoP 2.0 plot in motion, and those who came after had to deal with that. By the time patch 8.1 started, the damage had been done. And IIRC, most of the Alliance losses came in prepatch and 8.0. The “Horde identity crisis” was also started when he was in charge, since there were several sequences with Saurfang during that time. Mid-BfA, by the time he left, was mostly about the Alliance striking back (Terror of Darkshore), and late BfA was mostly N’Zoth.
Also:
If you feel bad about your cities being attacked, why aren’t Horde players allowed to feel bad about our settlements being attacked? Do you seriously think the size of the place makes a difference? I bet Horde players spent as much actual questing time in Taurajo as the average Alliance player spent in Theramore.
Also, firebombing civilians is not “mildly attacking.” Yeah, I know Alliance players are told that it was a kind and gentle attack, but that’s not what Horde players see. If you’re allowed to be angry about Brennadam, we should be allowed to feel that.
First of all, I want to say that I do not get behind Blizzard treating the Alliance badly. I think they should never have destroyed these places and that they played with your attachment to them for cynical reasons.
But I do think there is a bit of apples to oranges going on here. You lost some locations, including an iconic capital city, and that’s bad. But what you’re asking for in return is a diminished play experience that would go into effect every time we log in. You can go see a bronze dragon and have Darnassus restored. Would we be able to see a bronze dragon and not have to deal with the penalties you want to slap on us?
My point here was that your list is much, much, much shorter than mine.
Which as I said here:
So no, don’t make me out to be saying you should not get anything and I should get everything.
So this is essentially the point I have been taking issue with this entire time.
And I am going to reword for clarity.
Whether it should have never been done is pointless. It has been done, and it has been done multiple times. You brought up Taurajo, well Taurajo’s equal is southshore and in the scale of the losses so far it is minuscule. Your attitude towards any solution whether its punitive or conciliatory is that this punishes Horde player’s experience. It diminishes their experience to have Horde characters actually address Horde’s murder hobo crimes so that maybe they can be something more than the cartoonish evil character roles they have been made to act on until now.
Why? Idk. Diminished player experience certainly wasn’t an issue for Blizzard in Cata, MoP, BFA or SL… and now Dragonflight from the looks of it.
So why is your diminished experience more important than mine? Do you pay a premium?
I don’t deny that the Alliance has had more and bigger losses of territory. But you were implying that Horde players had no right to complain about the losses they did have: “maybe one or two locations that get mildly attacked and still brought up a decade later.” The implication is that you think Horde players should shut up about the settlements we lost because there weren’t as many of them, it was a long time ago, and they were only “mildly attacked.” My point is that player attachment to game locations doesn’t work that way, as Alliance players should know.
Other people have tried to explain this to you and have put it more eloquently than I could, and you apparently still don’t get it, so I won’t try. But do please understand that as much as you accuse Micah of not “getting it,” you sound every bit as obtuse from my point of view as Micah does from yours.
I will just say this: Horde characters spent most of BfA talking about how bad it was and telling Horde players we were bad. How much does it take before you feel like we’ve heard it enough?
Is your play experience worse every time you log in because Theramore, Southshore, and Darnassus are gone? Can you describe in what way?
/whine
I don’t want a neutral hub. I want a Forsaken port city with an awesome Forsaken tower with <Insert 1 Syllable Word> Admiral Proudmoore lol.
/whine
My implication was that if we are going to bring things up, lets bring up everything which I think is a fair expectation and request. Don’t you think so?
I played through BFA on both sides I got the mounts to prove it and this is not a very accurate statement.
We can go through it if you want. As for Micah if they did anything more than personal attacks and drama baits i would humor discussing lore with them.
But Micah has never been interested in that sort of discussion.
Well everytime Tyrande, Jaina or any of these characters that went through these losses are brought up these events, can’t do anything about it and the characters directly and indirectly guilty of the events escape any consequence and when they do its more of a self sacrifice martyrdom like they are doing us a favor.
So to answer your question. Yes. Yes absolutely.
And this trend has continued into DF with Malfurion dying so there is some sort of equilibrium because Nathanos died early in SL.
I’m gonna delve into this with a bit of trepidation here, because I’m not looking to start a fight. Late 2022 Alynsa is less fighty than early 2022 Alynsa.
I’m gonna guess there’s a few reasons for this, but let’s address the one that, IMO, is the biggest one from Blizzard’s POV; faction imbalance.
If you have to alienate a portion of your player base because you’re just not able to tell a nuanced story from both perspectives, do you piss off the 70% or the 30%? I’m making those numbers up, but any data points regarding the overall faction populations I’ve seen and the situation as confirmed by Blizzard is that players heavily favor the Horde. It’s just poor customer service to alienate the group with more people in it.
But that inability to tell a properly nuanced story from both perspectives is a very close second. I’m absolutely not defending that lacking, but it absolutely does exist and plays a role. For the Alliance, they’re constantly getting their teeth kicked in. For the Horde, they’re constantly having a case of Sudden Onset Genocide Syndrom (AKA the Sogs) where they go from happy little world-saviors to frothing blood-drunk madmen… Who then get a bad case of the feels and kick their own teeth in.
Neither experience is going to be overly fun to play through. To make the Alliance feel just freaking validated, you have to then force another unfavory narrative on to the Horde players. To make the Horde players feel satisfied with any conclusion, you have to… I dunno, maybe make up your dang mind about what the Horde even is now, and maybe medicate the leadership. And really, you just can’t do both without extending this narrative for another expansion or two.
Which leads to the third reason; Blizzard honestly believes the best way to handle unsatisfying narratives is to just drop them, and maybe address them later. They are the epitome of “maybe if we ignore it, it’ll go away”. Because that’s exactly how the gameplay works. We hate Garrisons because there’s nothing to do outside of them? Boom, no Garrisons next expac. We are tired of forevcer grinds for borrowed power? Bang, that’s done forever now. Island Expeditions and Warfronts are boring slogs? Never gonna see them again!! Faction conflict is making players leave the game? Well, it’s done now, we’re friends now, moving on!!
Which of course doesn’t work when it comes to story. So they give their idea of the next best thing. They try to have their cake and force-feed it to us too.
“If we can’t have the Alliance act logically and dismantle the Horde… What about if we gave them satisfaction by removing the person responsible?? But if we kill one of the last remaining big deals from WCIII Hordeside, the Horde will feel bad, so… What if we shift the goal post and introduce some brand new soul-splitting shenanigan, have the new Voltron Sylvanas feel some sads, and then we ultimately make a Zovaal to be ultimate responsibility for all Alliance woes??”
Obviously I don’t have to tell you how that went. And anyone should have seen how it’d go from miles away.
And then there’s the final bit. The post-war narrative as it stands.
Horde players get reminders that they’re just the worst. That they’re awful. “You personally murdered me, and now I’m a ghost in ghost world and you should rescue me, jerk!! And then whenever you talk to me again, I shall remind you what a jerk you are, jerkfaced jerky jerk!!”
I’m just waiting for the quest where a nun with a bell appears behind me and for all of my equipment to be removed while I stand in front of the gates of Stormwind for my walk of penance through the streets. The shaming is real.
Meanwhile, the Alliance gets… Tyrande wants to kill a banshee until she doesn’t.
Blizzard paints themselves into a spot where they’ve already gone ahead to make Horde players feel bad about being Horde players during BfA. Alliance players have a renewal thing?
Where the hell do you even go on from there?
Are Alliance players supposed to feel some satisfaction knowing that Blizzard has annoyed Horde players with guilt reminders? Are they supposed to be happy that Tyrande just shrugged and said “I guess Sylvanas has to do Maw dailies for a while and we’ll be square and that’s why Elune wanted me to not kill the Butcher of Teldrassil”?
How do you satisfy Alliance players properly (as they should do), without going for even more Walk of Shame stuff for Horde players who’ve already walked five thousand miles down the roads of Feelsbadistan? Have them walk five thousand more? Make big-deal content that only gives closure to one side? What could that closure even look like at this point?
And none of this is to say the Alliance players don’t deserve closure. Absolutely they do. No doubt, 500%, the Alliance playerbase should get some narrative bow to tie up the pile of crap Blizzard gave them for Christmas, so they can at least say they got a bow out of the deal.
I dunno. I’m going off track here. Blizzard should absolutely give some closure to blue team. But Blizzard should also stop guilt tripping red team. And you can’t do either properly anyway, so maybe just do nothing.
That seems to be the best solution in their minds.
Are you implying that Southshore, Theramore, and Teldrassil are somehow forgotten?
Are you saying that every time a Horde player mentions missing Taurajo, they should follow it with “But I guess we did destroy Southshore, which is equivalent to Taurajo, so really the score is even and I shouldn’t miss it”?
It feels accurate to me. BfA was one long guiltfest when playing Horde.
So if I feel like there was a lot of guilt and you don’t, who gets to decide when the Horde players have had an appropriate amount of guilt? (And you still didn’t answer my question about how much that might actually be.)
So, every time a character who suffered the loss of a city appears is a diminishment of play experience for you …
But characters standing around and telling Horde players that the Horde are the bad guys and we should feel bad is not truly a diminishment of play for us …
Do you see the irony here?
I want to see a source for that, otherwise I’m calling bullcrap.
Yeah. As I’ve said elsewhere, there unfortunately is no solution to this mess that is going to make both sides happy. We’ve been collectively trying to think of one since July 31, 2018 (the day I stopped enjoying WoW’s story), and if such a solution existed, I think we would have figured it out by now.
Just give the purple fellows their tree back. Or grow a new one / move to Nordrassil.
Forgotten in the sense the people responsible (Horde) are right there but we are still going to attend weddings and get along for no good reason.
In Zone questing Teldrassil is mentioned once.
In the Warcampaign its all go go go lets kill alliance and get the mcguffin
And the warfronts we have good lady Liadrin yelling at Alliance about the Light.
Yeah so much shaming. Besides some incredibly rare and specific instances there was no shaming and it was primarily a “omg look what did the goth lady do? we would never do that! /s”
The irony is that the Alliance player’s experience has been diminished for almost a decade every time an Alliance character that lost something to the Horde is on the screen. Why? Because not only the loss happened but they keep bringing it up, don’t do anything about it and then lose again.
Rinse and repeat the process for multiple expansions, including this one.
What is being discussed is that you put up with it ONCE for a conciliation of the issue but that price is too high I guess.
I am surprised you don’t see the irony of this.
Malfurion is getting killed off to go to shadowlands for Ysera to come back. look it up.
Its the same dead character equation, when someone on one faction dies someone else has to die on the other side like Varian and Voljin.
And some players here, honestly. See above.
Alliance players, the couple that still remain want all this to be addressed and the Horde players that can not imagine going through what the Alliance players have been going through for the past decade just once.
What does that have to do with players discussing the story on the board?
You left out the night elf NPCs sadly moaning about their homes as they die, Saurfang telling off the PC in the stockades, Valtrois saying the Horde was acting like the Legion, Jaina Proudmoore righteously yelling at the PCs in Stormwind, the neutral Pandaren medic who tells the Horde PC we “need healing,” Saurfang saying the Horde was founded on a lie, and a good chunk of the Ardenweald campaign in Shadowlands. There is more, but those are low-hanging fruit.
And you still haven’t answered my question about what constitutes an appropriate level of guilt for Horde players to experience before you’ll be satisfied. I’m not going to let this go; I want you to be specific about it and not just “I’ll know it when I see it.”
We’ve already put up with it many more times than once (see above), but that doesn’t make you happy.
So you have no source to quote proving that the reason they’re killing Malfurion is because they killed Nathanos. I call bullcrap on this one.
You asked how the story has forgotten and I gave you an example.
The appropriate amount?
Some stay a while and listen instance in the gaming or… maybe even free novellas about specific Horde characters in leadership positions who dropped the ball. Like the wedding story should have been followed by a reconciliation short story.
In the waking shore we have Alliance and Horde characters getting along, maybe they can talk about the war and their screw ups.
So far we have almost nothing. Yeah Jaina yells at you and Saurfang says “we suck” but that doesn’t explain why these characters followed Sylvanas for yet another war crime and why they won’t do it again or even explain why they did it in the first place. Either have the Alliance treating the Horde as monsters or do the tough job and reconcile the factions.
The best they have managed is “I knew Sylvanas before” and “we did it for the Horde” aren’t good enough. I have a good friend too, doesn’t mean I am going to murder for him because he asked.
As for Malfurion, whether you believe it or not the math checks out.
Tyrande kills Sylvanas’ significant other and now she lost hers. Cosmic balance by the writers.
I will note it isnt that they simply forget features like garrisons and warfronts. From our side because they don’t communicate well enough, it seems as if they were abandoned, but they have a modular design philosophy were they never designed these things to exist past a single expansion. From their view even if it was unpopular they can use technology developed for feature X to make feature Y which might be better received, and if it is a single expansion feature it is a waste of resources to try to make it better. For example, pandarian farming became garrisons, which became class order halls, which became covenants. It is iterative tech development.
Likewise they historically write expansions in a modular fashion. Each expansion begins, ends, and exists as a self contained module of content that isn’t designed to interact with other expansion modules really. the fourth war stopped existing for them once BFA finished, because that was a past content module. Now, they are saying they have changed gears to aim to write larger arcs over multiple expansions. We will have to see how they do as this is the first expansion they are taking that mindset to.
This is another prime example of you yet again being immature. Grow up, I am not interested in your petty attacks.
If you want a discussion, than put on your big boy pants
Yes yes, we know you broke up with me first honey. No worries. 
I find sometimes his comments are far more amusing if you imagine them actually being said in a gnome’s voice.
Something something nonsensical immature reaction
When you grow up and want to have a meaningful conversation, let me know
Otherwise I am not interested in your childish behavior