no matter what Blizzard does. Its been pretty much since Cataclysm. When people cry marry sue of when characters get the spot light, when in reality you just don’t like the character. You spend your time hating on a forum, what’s wrong with you people.
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We want to care about the story, and dislike Blizz’s clearly half-baked haphazard storytelling in BfA that caused so many issues that will last for years. Even on just a mechanical level BfA was a narrative mess. Too many plots. Too poor of resolutions. Too much focus on “Spectacle Moments”. Too little consideration on the consequences of those moments. That is not to say there weren’t good points within BfA, but overall it can only be described as “needlessly destructive”.
SLs tho, it ain’t bad. The biggest negatives it has so far are simply the baggage its dragged in from BfA.
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Hate and Love are two sides of the same coin, both require passion. 90% of Blizzard’s fanbase don’t even know the story forums exist.
We all care about the Warcraft IP and want to see it succeed.
Chris Metzen would tell you that he was his own biggest critic. And he was. He actually apologized to the Warcraft community once for retconning some of the lore about Sargeras and the Burning Legion in The Burning Crusade.
Most developers would kill to have an audience as passionate as Warcraft fans.
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Some of the characters feel forced into their roles for no apparent reason. Like they have no free will…all except Tyrande of course
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I may agree that these forums tend to lean more negative than the story deserves, but the fact that people are passionate enough to steadily criticize a narrative means that they care about the world and the story built.
There’s nothing wrong with showing you care about a story by pointing out it’s flaws (or at least what one construes as flaws). I’m sure there’s tons of stuff that people LIKE about the narrative. They’re just not talking about them here because making a thread about something that’s good would pretty much just be affirming it’s good. Satisfied customers don’t call the customer help line.
Get off your high horse.
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It’s probably because we’re the ones analyzing it - but the quality has seriously diminished since Cataclysm, and we’re not the only ones saying it. You can find similar commentary on other forums and in comments sections. There’s hardly anything unique about these boards in comparison to other forums for discussion.
You may think of us in that regard as the canaries in the coal mine. We’re telling you that there’s some serious gas in this mine. What you do with that information of course is up to you.
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The problem is that recently many of the charcters have not had due dilligence in writing. The writers have not given the time and care to the NPCs they deserve. Compared to earlier WoW novels like the Richard A Knaak ones surrounding Vareesa and Rhonin, whilst they were a little cheesy, the characters faced real odds.
The same as the entire war of the ancients (which made a mess of a few points including the emerald dream), there was real limitations to the characters. Starting around MoP some of the writing got sloppy. Ingame Tyrande became of a foolish and rash leader as opposed to a seasoned leader of 10 000 years. Some of the MoP stories were good though, including the Voljin novel.
Flash forward to now, and it feels like writers are playing fast and loose with characters. The changes to a characters nature (Uther is an example) is one. Mathias Shaw came across as a fool in many areas in the pre shadowlands novels. He went from being a master spy to being very careless (because Flynn smelled good). This came across as lame to many because rather than having solid foundations for their relationship, it made them seem like silly pre-teens.
I think the problem is that more and more people are writing from an agenda basis over a love for the characters,
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Why are any of you replying to this seriously?
I hate the story because Chris Metzen stole my place in the school play and I have vowed to destroy him ever since.
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You were playing a lamp. And lets be honest his head does look more like a lightbulb.
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I’m replying seriously because people understand that typically, only a small percentage of the customers for any product actually leave feedback about it. What they don’t understand is that such feedback nevertheless is important to consider as it represents a sample of the customer base.
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IT WAS MINE! HE DIDN’T EVEN GO TO MY SCHOOL!
I understand that, I’m just not inclined to take a post made by a single sub-60 Death Knight in all lowercase who only has this one solitary post in all his history as anything other than a trolling attempt to rile people up. We’ve been getting those a lot for the last while, some are more subtle than others… this is not one of the subtle ones.
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Well, that and the fact that a lot of it doesn’t really make sense if you think about it too hard. But that’s a flaw I’m willing to shut my eyes and not worry about too much. Compared to BfA, it’s positively charming.
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Coz most of the loons here expect the story to cater to them and what they want.
As a great sage once said, Delusion. Convince yourself.
Everybody has their own camps and preferences so no matter what Blizzard does its bound to piss somebody off.
The problem though is that the story told by blizzard, besides the zones, isn’t that nuanced and the payoff for all the waiting for each little patch to drop really isn’t worth it.
I don’t think anyone here envisioned Alliance and Horde holding hands and singing Azeroth Unity songs when Sylvanas burned the tree down as a great finale when the pre-patch concluded.
Putting it another way its like a story you are engaged with a character you are really vested in dies or is killed. Yeah it sucks that character died but it made the story so much better because it raised stakes, developed characters and gave the viewer a worthwhile payoff.
Blizzard doesn’t deliver an impactful payoff and so everyone gets pissed and debates for pages and pages to figure out what payoff would be best.
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No, not no matter hat Blizzard does.
MoP was pretty great…until Garrosh went crazy. It was the only good Addon for me.
Even WotLK was’t good and the LK was to cartoonish “I get you next time!” It’s simply because Blizzards writing and story telling for WoW is disastrously bad and we know they can do way better from WC3. It’s that simple. It is because we are passionate about Warcraft.
You’re spending your time wrong here wining about people disagreeing with you.
Disagree, SL is total trash with nothing good left from a story perspective. It opens a whole can of new bad, perhaps even for the future. I almost agree with your post. The problem for me, it did not start with BfA, it started with the beginning of WoW (or at the very least with BC).
Like what?
This is true… but hey sometimes Devs gets curious too and a concentrated single post of a bit of % info is good if your just trying to get a “tiny little bit” of specific feedback. (IMO not that I know anything about that) 
Then again it could be a troll… like you said who can say! 
Indeed. When I see a “1 post Alt” that mentions “the usual suspects”, I get the feeling they spent time trolling and posting on other characters.
Sure, there are new posters… but they would hardly discuss “the usual suspects”. It seems like a Troll Thread made purely to inflame.
I understand replying to such a thread. It can be silly fun. But yeah, I wouldn’t take it seriously.
I think Anduin is OK. I kind of like the kid. But he still is a Mary Sue and the whole story bends around his morality tales and philosophy. I don’t think Anduin is a bad Character and I like him fine enough - but the writers use him as a mallet to express their PoV, and that makes him lame sometimes. I think his brief appearance in Shadows Rising humanized him a bit. He is a dumb bratty kid trying to learn about life, and there are good stories in that.
I will say the opposite for Saurfang. I actually liked him until BfA. The “Mary Sue” thing has nothing to do with it. He gets beaten up, imprisoned, and killed. It isn’t his powers and knowledge that irks me… it is the actual character development given to him that made me go from liking him prior to BfA to just wishing someone would blow him away (tx Sylvie!)
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Oh, like why even a big war on Azeroth would make any noticeable difference to the anima flow of the Shadowlands when they’re connected to the entire multiverse. And the whole “strands of a rope” thing to explain how there’s only one version of a character in Shadowlands even though there may be huge numbers of very different alternate-universe versions of the character in life. And how so very many characters we know are showing up in the realms we just happen to be visiting, even though the Shadowlands are supposedly infinite and statistically, it would be amazing if we met even one. That’s just off the top of my head. (Most of these are related to a desire to have the Shadowlands be simultaneously infinite and about the size of a normal expansion.)
I’m sure it’s possible to come up with fan explanations for these things if you think about it hard enough, but I’m just shutting my eyes and rolling with it.
I started posting because I like BfA story.