I think that the competitive two-faction nature of the faction war leads far too many players to black-and-white thinking - ‘I want my side to be good, therefore I will explain away anything that looks bad’ and its mirror counterpart ‘Your side did this bad thing so I’m going to ignore any nuance and justify anything I do against you’. Neither is faction-specific, though the composition of posters using them may ebb and flow over time.
These two arguments feed each other in a neverending cycle of forum drama - when one person sees the one flawed argument by their believed opponent, they all too often decide there’s no compromise to be had and thus jump into the opposite extreme argument. And then the next person comes in, sees the extreme response, decides there’s no compromise to be had, and the wheel turns again.
It’s human nature for people to be far more sensitive to seeing the extreme in their opponents and the best in their allies, so all it takes is one extremely partisan post ignoring their opponent’s nuance in order to drive their opponents (and then the people responding to those opponents’ reactions) back into the endless cycle of justifying their side.
To use my earlier example: Hawthorne and the burning of Camp Taurajo.
If someone starts by saying “See? The Alliance is evil and burns civilians alive”, then many Alliance players can feel compelled to jump in and say “He planned his attack specifically to limit civilian casualties and let them escape to safety - the quillboar were the real cause of their deaths”… and then Horde respondents can feel like Alliance are whitewashing the overt invasion and destruction of a tauren hunters’ camp, even if the Alliance responders’ goal was merely to say that it wasn’t entirely evil.
And then, if a Horde poster responds with “But the Alliance was still invading and destroying tauren towns, and still killed civilians even if that wasn’t their objective”, then many Alliance posters can read that one response as an attempt to reassert the “The Alliance is evil” narrative that started the argument, even if the Horde poster’s goal was just to say that the Alliance wasn’t entirely good.
After this kind of exchange, both sides can easily reach the conclusion that the other side is not interested in nuance and is just pushing a ‘other side bad’ angle, and both come away feeling like it’s the other side who’s being unreasonable.
It feels like the game goes out of its way to provide those arguments to Alliance players more than it does to Horde players, though. We don’t have ready-made defenses like that for far too many incidents, because the devs apparently think we don’t care about having them.
On the flip side, the Taurajo burning actually provides closure to that arc. Every single person who was involved directly with Taurajo gets killed as retribution by the end of the quest chain. Justifications or no, the Horde player is still able to go after the exact people who gave that order and wipe them out.
And the perennial issue with things, as I’ve said before, is that the writers tend to want reactions, and Alliance doing something bad against the Horde, whatever justifications the writers bake into it, gets the same reaction as the Horde doing something hugely over the top destructive. And that reaction is all they care about.
Lipservice by Blizzard isn’t worth anything if the alliance still has forces stationed all over the barrens. They should have left that place when MoP ended.
I’m sorry, I just don’t think this holds water. You have picked you one quote and ignored the comments about specifically killing Goblins even including racial slurs.
Nor do I think you are attempts to say how the killing of Horde non-combatants is OK (because they are “laborers”
I agree - I think the lack of deeper Horde stories/reasoning is one of the most major problems with the faction war storylines. In my posts, I was trying to speak more of what should exist rather than what does exist in the faction war storylines.
I get the feeling that, especially in that era, the devs/high-level writers thought that the only thing the Horde player needed in order to go fight the Alliance was a quest pointer to where the Alliance was. And thus they wrote the Horde faction to cater to that ‘Horde go brrrrrr’ mindset, ignoring the players who wanted better moral backing or more nuance.
This frustrates me so much because it is Blizzard’s own self-created issue. Horde players react that way because those events are the only thing to react to.
And then Alliance players (and Blizz? feels like it sometimes) see that reaction and decide “Oh, the Horde really is fine with killing swathes of innocents over a minor event, so I guess the writing just matches what the majority of the fanbase want” and makes the conversation so much worse.
It’s like giving a starving person a hunk of partly-moldy bread and then saying that the person likes mold because they ate the bread.
Or the comments of “If horde players freak out so hard / can’t stop talking about Taurajo, they can’t handle a REAL atrocity like we get” but yeah, that’s all you get to go on.
I am saying war has always been dirty business but that this particular line in the sand has always been “ok” to tread. That neither side has ever balked at the idea nor do either sides have rules explicitly preventing it. That as far as either faction is concerned they are “combatants” if your labor is directly done to benefit the military.
And I think you want to make a situation that was always grey into something black for the Alliance. There is a reason the death of these goblins have never been a rallying cry for Horde fans in the same way as Taurajo. Because ultimately it could be blamed on the Horde keeping their hatred for past events that lead to a chain reaction that causes casualties on both sides, and of people who may or may not have been involved in the greater conflict getting caught up in it.
And the irony of it all is its end with Gann dead/the goblin who planted the mines dead, and with both Twinbraid and Bloodhilt dead.
What peace treaty? At no point has the Alliance and Horde ever had a peace treaty. They’ve agreed to ceasefires/armistices, but they’ve always been temporary. Even the current peace between the factions is the result of a temporary armistice, not a treaty.
So the existence of either bastion is not a violation of any agreements, although the genocide of the Stonespire Tribe is 100% reprehensible and should be condemned.
Jaina absolutely aided the Alliance, but that was post-cataclysm. Prior to the Cataclysm her forces were limited to Northwatch and Dustwallow Marsh.
The Alliance assaulting Mulgore and occupying sections of South Barrens were coming out of Theramore. It was pretty clear when you looked in Dustwallow and saw that highway cutting through the swamp to the Barrens lined with Alliance troops and tanks, leading to South Barrens where you had Alliance outposts sitting opposed to Horde outposts and other camps, including the staging grounds for the attack on Taurajo.
As silly as Erevien can get, he’s right on this one. Jaina’s complaints about Theramore kind of ring pretty hollow given she made it into a prime military target from the start of Cata onward.
Listen to the story about how honor’s stand fell. Forces stormed out of Northwatch a day PRIOR to the cataclysm. If we go by this timeline the attack on Ashenvale hadn’t happened yet. Jaina stood against Garrosh from the minute Thrall apppointed him.
It was a clever ruse, . Alliance forces streamed out of Northwatch and marched up the gold road, besieging Crossroads as dusk fell. Then, in the heart of the night, they force-marched southward, leaving their campfires burning behind.
Our meager forces at Honor’s Stand were caught unawares as the Alliance poured through the pass at dawn’s first light. Many of our bravest warriors fell before their blades.
This was before the Cataclysm?
Yes. We regrouped east of the pass and prepared a counter-attack, but the next day, the skies reddened and the land was cleaved in two, as easily as a child might split open a cactus apple. See how the devastation stretches from horizon to horizon?
Our Alliance foes in their makeshift bunkers were as surprised and disorganized as we were by the disaster. It would’ve been the perfect time to strike! But Warlord Gar’dul insisted we pull back to the south to refortify.
Not all of us followed. I stood toe-to-toe with demons in the last war, . I’m not about to turn tail and let the Alliance plant roots on my soil.
Considering Jaina still hasn’t owned up to the damage done to the Barrens? I will not. The Tauren suffered alot and all Baine did since then was telling them to get lost. Without the rest of the Horde helping there would have been no Tauren anymore in that land and that is not an exeggeration.
Which is now no longer canon. Or at least is meaningless in the context of who started what first because it would still be the Horde:
After Thrall departed Garrosh, turned his gaze northwest, to the lush forst of Ashenvale. It was a land of plenty, and it was well within the Horde’s reach. Most of the region belonged to the night elves, but that did not stop Garrosh from sending troops into the woodlands. He was not interested in asking the Alliance for resources or trading for them. Why would he do that, when he could simply take what he wanted?
So yeah, it was all Garrosh and the Horde’s fault.