Because the idea was to fix them. The Tauren wanted to try and cure their state of undeath.
âŚno? Maybe that was a distant pipe dream or something but the Tauren foresaw a great destiny for the Forsaken and also saw their cause of destroying the Scourge as a worthy one.
Also what exactly are these conflicts of interest? Youâre being awfully vague here.
Well, I can see the issue; a lot of players (myself included) actually are tired of Faction conflict. And it has certainly kept the playerbase pretty segmented, particularly from characters you might ordinarily want to play, but youâre on the wrong faction to play with someone else.
I wouldnât mind seeing more of those tensions bubbling up a bit more, if players are being treated as âoutsideâ of those conflicts. The Horde and Alliance can be at war, as long as I can play with my friends that are Orcs or Tauren.
But I think thatâs an area where theyâre letting players take the lead. After all, WC3 very much ended with the factions all working together. But that is a separate issue really that the content being as watered-down as itâs felt lately.
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The Tauren are preservationists and keepers of the natural world. The Forsaken defile everything they touch and develop weapons to obliterate life on a spiritual level, something the entire Horde should look at with a huge amount of concern. Meanwhile, the Night Elves being xenophobic and reclusive means Alliance never sees a Night Elf NPC again past level 20 because ainât nothinâ happening in a NE sphere of influence 'till Cataclysm.
Having âisolationistâ as your racial descriptor means your race doesnât do anything. Wow, so exciting.
I could agree with this; the Alliance and Horde can go at each othersâ throats as hard as they like as long as Iâm not forced into the conflict myself and made to kill people that would otherwise be my allies for an NPCâs stupidity. Decouple racial selection from faction membership and you lot can go insane.
Not exactly. You are trying to marry gameplay to narrative and say that itâs a problem when they donât match when it really doesnât matter and isnât a problem. This is just an extremely long winded, round about thread like the other hundred calling blizzard soft, Disney, woke and a bunch of other stuff because while the game and some of us have grown over the years, others are forever stuck in middle school as far as their mentality is concerned.
Here is an example. In the narrative, the horde and alliance are strictly forbidden from fighting each other on the dragon isles. In the game however, there is warmode and pvp quests there. You can kill and be killed by the other faction all day long.
It doesnât matter if the gameplay and story narrative are not perfectly aligned with each other.
Put emâ in a room together for 45min they could write better stories.
Rumor has it that Flea designed Zangarmarsh. 
Since Desnoozer.
The end.
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Killing other people is not something to glorify. We in Azeroth are killing our enemies so we can survive. Given the option we would like to not kill anyone however we have to for survival. But we donât have glorify it
It all emanates from the same place. This insipid idea that all is one or that unity is the answer to everything.
To the contrary. Look at our own world for proof it is the opposite. Properly written Alliance would do what was necessary to preserve the Alliance at the expense of the Horde.
Little different than why I point to GRRMâs writing here. Throughout Westeros you had many leaders and kingdoms warring with one another over who would be in control. GRRM was less interested in the âwhat could beâ and more interested in cementing his world in the real. Hence why everything is so contested. That is what is natural. That is real.
If they wrote characters this way the Warcraft lore would be incredibly more fascinating than it currently is.
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It works in writing because you can destroy a faction there. An entire kingdom can die and be permanently dead.
This does not work in MMOs. Since both sides are player factions, the conflict would need to perpetuate pointlessly, with either side deus-ex-machinaing their way out of certain extinction just to keep the game available for both halves of the playerbase.
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How do you mean it doesnât work in MMOs? Didnât Garrosh destroy an entire kingdom with a mana bomb? Didnât Sylvanas destroy the NE capitol?
It works. The problem is willpower to make serious consequential outcomes to the story. The net effect of the last two mega villains has been 0. Meaning taking them out of the story would have no conceivable outcome on the greater narrative. Thatâs just bad writing there.
So keep destroying cities until thereâs nothing but Orgrimmar and Stormwind left? Because thatâs what happened, the other side didnât âwinâ, everyone just lost.
Taurajo? Destroyed. Theramore? Destroyed. Teldrassil? Destroyed. Undercity? Destroyed.
Not a one of these are victories where the other side gained anything, we all just keep losing. More to the point, everyone has to lose because otherwise the factions go out of parity, and that isnât acceptable from a gameplay standpoint.
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Well no. You destroy something for the benefit of yours to survive. It doesnât mean the other is gone. The Alliance arenât gone because Theramore was destroyed.
Just like the Lannisters werenât destroyed by the poisoning of Joff. It was a good narrative twist but it didnât end the Lannister story arc.
Having competitive and consequential plots within the larger story makes it more fascinating than repeating the same trope of everyone and everything needing to unify to save the world, or Azeroth in this case.
You are missing the point. We never gain anything from war. Itâs always just loss. We canât ever take territory, because that throws the factions out of parity gameplay-wise. Why go to war if youâre not going to gain anything? Thatâs the question that needs to be answered, and the answer keeps being 'because we need to keep this conflict going somehow.â
A battle for the sake of battle is stupid and pointless noise.
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We do gain from war. The problem is the writing of this game makes it so war is never beneficial to the victor when it clearly is.
Itâs a problem within the writing of this game which makes it implausible, incoherent and childlike.
I should be clearer. I am talking about the more recent expansion arcs when I say this. In the older story arcs you can see net gain from war for the victors. For instance the Titans conquered the Old Gods and locked them away for thousands of years to prevent their meddling with the nascent titan.
War cannot be beneficial to the victor because gameplay parity matters.
If Alliance suddenly got a boost in resources because âthe story demanded itâ while the Horde got a penalty in resources, that would draw rightful outcry because neither side can control this.
Since both sides have to offer reasonably similar experiences mechanically, both sides have to be on roughly equal standing with each other story-wise. So we can never take territory, it can only be lost in tandem. A Horde victory must always be answered with an Alliance victory somewhere.
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Cataclysm actually had the old-world revamp where ground was taken for one faction or the other. Hillsbrad Foothills, for example, was actually a Horde and Alliance zone, though was turned into a primary Horde zone.
As for the primary topic, we probably stopped putting heads on sticks because we either ran out of sticks or the heads couldnât be found.
Control what? What does parity mean to you here?
The Alliance could be pushed back to one territory on the continent and the story could feasibly go on for multiple expansion arcs before more territory was retaken.
It doesnât matter gameplay wise if 90% of the continent is Horde and 10% is Alliance. Nor vice versa. This is how you tell stories where they matter. People will know Theramore was destroyed because of its literal existence in the game in this state. Nobody will remember Zovaal or Fyrakk for their flash in the pan existence.
And Cataclysm drew incredible criticism because it altered old and beloved zones so heavily. And even then, Horde and Alliance were kept in parity with each other, so while it wasnât a positive event, it was an equal event, which is my point. You canât have an event that benefits one side and penalizes another because thatâs hurting the player experience on one side with no input from them. âOh, this city is no longer accessible to me for ~reasons~ so I guess Iâm screwed now. Welp, empty the quest log for this zone, I guess.â
Whoâs going to join a faction that offers less of the world than its counterpart? Why join the Alliance to only see that 10% of the world when you could join Horde and play in the 90% of the world and its dungeons and its raids? Not only that, but the wider world means more Horde content and storylines and perspectives can be told, versus the constant claustrophobic atmosphere the Alliance would have? What would Alliance players have done to deserve the diminishing of their world? What would Horde players have done to deserve the expanding of it? Arbitrarily just redrawing lines again and again means nobody cares because nothing, not victory or defeat, is earned.
I donât think that goes through the mind of players. I couldnât care less how much of Azeroth the Horde controlled. Iâm far more interested in what defines the Horde and what sets it apart from the Alliance.
The contrast is what matters here. Parity is not a useful metric for story telling and so far as Iâm aware inconsequential to gameplay.