I think tarring a whole group of players is unfair. There are a few blood elf players who wouldn’t mind high elves.
That said, watching them being implemented and watching the world not end, would probably change their minds
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they already were implemented, your request is to make them neutral. if we cant be honest with development how can we expect to be taken seriously
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I just ponder why it’s necessary to have a “good”-aligned blonde, blue-eyed, fair-skinned elf that are rugged and wholesome. It seems to me that the Helfers want to be superior to the Belfs and the Hoard. It’s like they want to be a master of some type.
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aye. They act like everything about being a blood elf would be taken away from them but they can’t comprehend that in fact high elves being made playable would reinforce and fuel both of them. They have a strong opposition to each other and despite what some think they have a lot things they are opposites on.
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or you know we just want what we see.
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And physically altered drastically from the original. A visible physical distinction in both structure, AND animations. While the Void elf model is an exact replica of the Blood Elf model. So essentially you want both the blood elf model, AND it’s exact visual themes, and for some reason can’t understand why some people against this.
And yet the Void elf model is far superior to the Nightborne model with almost double the amount of customization. The Nightborne players are loaded with visual complaints over the Nightborne model, faulty animation loops, buggy eyes etc. So please spare me on the complaints of how you got the short end of the stick.
Because you’re comparing two completely different games that are balanced around a completely different set of rules. The theme of the High elves was introduced into WoW in the form of Blood Elves, it was that moment their visuals were immediately trademarked to that playable race. Ion himself listed off these vary physical traits as crucial, defining physical themes to their race, which was the very reason void elves were changed in THOSE specific ways.
It’s not about what “my” argument is, it’s what Ion, and the devs have said straight to your faces. Disagree? Cool! But please spare me all the “My opinion is right, because!” spam.
Because for some reason context isn’t relevant? That Night elves have a multitude of different skin colors (12 to be exact) that allow them to remain unique, and distinct from Nightborne? While High elves look identical to Blood Elves in every capacity? Are we just going to ignore that? That you want the EXACT MODEL, while blizzard went lengths to differentiate the Nightborn from Night elves? Any solution that ends in thin ultimatums are typically bad ones, and like this one, not very practical.
In regards to “hair” and skin, the Blood elves do not have the level of variation that Night elves have, therefore whichever characteristics they do have more crucial in defining their physical appearance. This is why void elves were changed in this very specific way. There’s no hypocrisy, there’s really just you not being able to see beyond your faction rage.
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There’s a couple of ways High Elves could be implemented without looking too much like Blood Elves.
Valeera has a bulkier model now. It’s unique, sure like Calia’s but still something that could be used. As for voices, the Highborne have different voices and I don’t see why they couldn’t be used for high elves. This is, of course, assuming they don’t create entirely new assets for them
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I absolutely understand why people are against it. And that is ok that people are against it. I also don’t want the Blood Elf model, never did. I want the HIGH ELVES to be playable, if that means a different model…fine. If that means a distinct group of skin colors that are tan and a specific non-Blood Elf color of white fine, if that means mandatory tatoo’s akin to Night Elves but exclusive to High Elves…fine.
It’s not about the model, never was. It is about the HIGH ELVES AND THEIR LORE. I want to play HIGH ELVES. Not Blizzard written terribly to fix player population imbalance light stealing arcane addicted Elves but the GOOD Aligned High Elves.
This is your opinion and you are entitled to have it, i guess when they copy paste a model and only have to change the hair do…they can do more with the hair to give more choices.
Still doesn’t change the reality of what i wrote.
This means nothing and has no bearing on the conversation.
And yet High Elves are still a thing…all over the place.
Yep and they can keep all of their red visuals, good riddance.
Yea, the guy responsible for the state the game is in, let’s go with his take on things…good call. The guy who says racial identity is important then hands the Night Elves to the Horde because Tyrande was rude to Thalyssra no matter how ridiculous the story was. The guy who spent years saying no to playable High Elves because there wasn’t enough of them to be playable…then created 2 “races” (FOR THE ALLIANCE i might add) out of thin air that are nothing but pretty art assets that amount to a few dozen individuals in total. The guy that said we can’t have High Elves because they are too close to the same thing…and then went and made Panda’s a thing? Yea, good call, lets go with what he says as good for the game, now i can see where your hypocrisy comes from, ION is full of hypocrisy almost everywhere you look where High Elves are concerned.
Right back at you, just because you have an opinion doesn’t make you right, it just means you have an opinion, as for ION, he is working his way out of a job as fast as he can.
The context of what? You going to tell me more about “visual lore”? Your hypocrisy no matter how much you try to spin it one way or the other that it was ok to hand the Night Elves to the Horde while trying as hard as you can to hide behind ION about Blood Elves?
Blah blah blah, you aren’t hypocritical because you say so and i’m a bad guy for wanting High Elves blah blah. Read above to be proven wrong.
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I’d accept them joining the Horde.
Also the topic here seems addressed to the ‘antis’. Who’s really derailing the topic? Certainly not you or me.
Setting the terms of the discussion so that it excludes disagreement is dishonest.
One of the most common complaints I’ve seen is that Blood Elves are bad because they’ve been tainted in some way. I’ve also begun to have some concern about those who insist that they can only be white and have blue eyes.
I wonder how many would settle for a toy. There is one already that lets them be a Blood Elf for 10 minutes, but maybe one that meets their needs more and for longer.
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This.
And before someone say “but look at the pandaren” I would suggest having them be on both factions was probably a mistake.
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It was also a symptom of the time and what they were trying to do. That has all passed.
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They don’t have to accept anything because they’re wrong and have Stockholm syndrome. When High Elves happen, they’ll all roll Alliance and stop being deluded.
Come home Elf man.
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You can’t really be wrong in how you feel about something, that is subjective.
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It means that you’re likely not going to get fair-skinned, blonde haired elves any time soon. If by some means the high elves undergo some transformation that addresses these similarities in the same way the void elves did, cool beans. Until then I wouldn’t hold my breath.
That’s awesome, but if you understand why people are against it surely you must also understand why Blizzard might not want to implement it solely for lore purposes. Balancing the game take precedence over indulging on every potential theme, especially with something as delicate as faction identity.
I mean they have lots of hairstyles, faces, skin colors, hair colors, twice as much as the Nightborne got. A new model is nice, but when you only have 3 shades of skin to choose from, a few hairs, and two hair colors you got the short end of the stick. In fact Nightborne have the fewest customization options out of every race in the game, even the allied races. Ruminate on that.
It does though, as it’s clear the void elve’s model had a lot of work put into it, and the Nightborne model was just a dulled down version of the Suramar citizens model with barely any physical variations.
Yes it does because you’re suggesting that Blizzard should balance World of Warcraft around an entirely different game? Despite the fact that both games are vastly different from each other and operate under entirely different rules and restrictions? I can’t even find a way to begin taking this argument seriously.
Too bad we’re not talking about what clothes they wear, or what their culture is, we’re talking about their physical aesthetic themes.
I know that it’s easier to believe that Ion alone is standing between you and playable High elves, but he’s really not. Ion is the mouth piece for the devs, he’s not solely speaking from his personal perspective, but merely reflecting the choices and decisions made by the dev team, and rationalizing it to the players. When he’s speaking about those individual themes being crucial, and central to the blood elves he even says that’s where “we” stand on the matter.
I wasn’t the one who started off this conversation with “You don’t have an argument!” and a bunch of hand-waves over how you were right simply because you said so. And unless the whole dev team is out of a job, I don’t think Ion has anything to worry about.
This isn’t even an actual response? You’ve completely avoided acknowledging any point, and have resulted to using broad, vague insults that don’t even make sense.
Right not like I explained the distinctions, and different context in great detail while all of your points have seem to always end with “No u” or “No ur wrong!” without ever actually rationalizing exactly how.
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There’s also a lot of Lore areas to focus on, more with all of allied races. Alliance high elves don’t really add anything to the story. If anything they serve to make the Alliance more boring, more generic. I think more-other-horse syndrome is something that hurts the Alliance a great deal.
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Honestly, that’s really a matter of subjectivity. There’s reasons why people may like it, and there’s reason why people may not, but from a gameplay perspective it does present some problems not only to the devs, but the players as well. And game balancing should always have a precedence over simply wanting to express some potential lore.
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To an extent it’s subjective, like whether you find it boring, but an Alliance of dwarfs, humans and high elves is a trope. As far as the lore, Blood Elves are the continuity of the high elf story and the Alliance high elf story is mostly there as a proxy for the Alliance to interact with the Blood Elves. For all the lengthy digging over the past year, there isn’t much high elf story past the formation of Blood Elves which isn’t still about the Blood Elves. With Void Elves, it would really seem that Alliance high elves have run their course. Void Elves aren’t so generic and are more relevant to where the story is going.
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This is true.
I’m not. But at the end of the day i have been in threads for almost 15 years about this. I have the long ball in mind, if i had the short game in mind i would have given up a long time ago, to be honest i think Blizzard could be keeping something like this in their back pocket for when things get desperate…and then it will happen, but maybe not. Maybe they will come to their senses about fan service and realize the player base is smarter than they are giving them credit for as i pointed out with ION and all the other reasons before.
I think at this point, the game is in a crucially bad moment and this along with some other things (playable Ogres for the Horde and other things for the game) can help. High Elves in particular could help the population imbalance.
I think that is part of what makes me mad in the first place…it was ok 13 years ago to hand the Blood Elves to the Horde to help with the population imbalance but it is not ok now to help the Alliance out. At some point the health of the Alliance as a faction has to come into play for the games health overall.
Keep in mind LFD got the same treatment, 3 skins a few hairs etc. etc. etc…
This isn’t a thing for me. The idea of Nightborne is who they are from a lore perspective, not an aesthetic perspective. They fit in with the Horde in some ways, they ran and hid selfishly when the time came and they saved themselves and let the world fend for themselves. They fit the idea of a group of individuals who could be power players over time.
It doesn’t, the ONLY thing that was done to the Void Elves was the hairstyles, that is IT. They have the same faces, they have everything else except for skin color copy and pasted down to the dance.
That is NOT what i am suggesting, that was in response to you saying that High Elves had never been playable…and they were as an Alliance race in WC3, which while it is a different game, they share the same lore/timeline.
The gameplay is different, but the game lore is the same. Just because you don’t like that doesn’t mean it is not true. The same players who have played both games, have played High Elves, regardless of the game mechanics.
They can keep all of it, although i would mention that they have taken on the Horde aesthetics and colors while the High Elves still have and wear the Alliance colors but have no city, in fact i think it would be great if the playerbase had to quest to find an area and create a “capital” to play in, something that could set them apart from the Blood Elves in a very big way. Give High Elves a new aesthetic, i am fine with that.
That is not what i believe but he is the guy at the top making the call, so the choices get laid bare at his feet. He is the GAME DIRECTOR, they don’t run the game as a democracy, he literally is the guy making the call at the end of the day. Even if he was the mouthpiece he gets credit as the messenger and he would be the messenger of the players unhappiness at something like this. Of course he is going to say “we” and to be honest it doesn’t matter whether it is him or they, he gets to take the hit.
But you were the one who said High Elves have never been playable and so they never should be…that’s not an argument, that is an opinion that anyone could say about anything that doesn’t exist now…because it never has.
I don’t want ION out of a job (or any of the devs for that matter (i think that would be a ridiculous position to have and i don’t wish that on anyone), i am simply stating the reality of the game and where it is at and whether or not you want to say it is HIM as game director or he as part of the dev team…he is going to get credit for the state of the game, which is NOT GOOD at the moment.
I am not rehashing old responses because you say something is out of context or has none. Hypocrisy is hypocrisy no matter how you or anyone else wants to spin it or minimize it.
I don’t ever remember saying this…ever, probably shouldn’t quote that. But hey you do you.
It being playable in another game is NOT A rational argument to make them playing on WoW. Especially when the concern around balancing is a valid, and reasonable one.
Any amount of customization in this game is a huge deal, and the void elves came out with a pretty hefty amount of options compared to most races in-game, with the Nightborne sitting at the very least. It’s clear some amount of effort went into them.
Yes, but it’s also a one-player game, meaning it doesn’t face many the restrictions of having to please two different crowds. It’s not fair to use a game that operates under completely different rules as an an argument for ignoring valid identity issues in an mmo. The problem was never the “high elves” themselves, but rather the similarity they pose to Blood elves, and why in an mmo it’s a concern to the players and devs.
This still doesn’t suggest that he’s the only one who feels this way, as he almost always specifies that it is where he and the devs stand on the issues. Yes, not “everyone” agrees on everything, but I doubt he’d go out and say that was where “they” stood on the issue if it were mainly just him who felt that way.
The point is it’s the stance Blizzard has taken in response to the High elf request, from both Ion’s comments, to the clear distinction between the void elves and the blood elves. I also don’t care much for tinfoil theories.
No, I said that they weren’t made playable first, the blood elves were, and to fulfill that very High elf fantasy to the players mind you. Since then they’ve been not only the most popular race, but a core horde race from a gameplay perspective. but who knows, if the High elves undergo some transformation you might someday get to play them.
Or we can all be rational adults and understand that these decisions are made by a team of developers and not to blindly assume that its just him, and that he’s using his position to pursue his own personal vision for WoW against the advice of the whole dev team.
Am I speaking to a fortune cookie now?
Pretty sure the very first thing you said to me was “This is a made up argument. It means nothing” but okay
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