Yeah, but I’m not the one claiming I know better than those involved.
I’m fine criticizing Blizzard when I think it is warranted.
Then we’ll have to agree to disagree.
It is pretty dumb to say they’d make inherent flaws for no reason. Which is why it makes more sense there are aspects they can’t control.
because the ones involved are stupid. they need to let go of the stupid ball blizz gave them
its THEIR realm. we are told if the arbiter dies than everything the first ones made is lost. implying they made the shadowlands, and the eternal ones are the literal gods of death. the only reason any of this makes sense is if the script blizzard gave them told them do it this way.
because blizzard seem to operate on not what makes sense, but what gets the story they want to tell going
Well which are you arguing?
that it doesnt make sense because blizzard didnt think that deeply into their own story leading to plot holes forming, and expecting us to fill in the gaps when it really isnt our job to fix their plot holes
Since Warcraft is by definition a Crapsack World, such an option is not available.
Fairness is not an inherent element in the universe, it has to be imposed.
well that does explain why there is a world destroying threat every 3 weeks to the point where im not sure if everyone should be stressed about the world literally ending any moment, or be jaded since this is pretty much just tuesday for the average azerothian.
This argument doesn’t really work. The Shadowlands weren’t created by super genius immortal gods. They were made by Blizzard’s writing staff. Human beings. Ergo we, other human beings, are fully capable of looking at the system, comprehending what we are reading, and then noticing obvious issues with the set up. Aka plot holes.
So… Yah. We players have every right to walk into the Shadowlands, notice painfully obvious issues with the way the story has presented the main plot of the Shadowlands being broken, and coming to conclusions of how it could’ve been made in a way to avoid those problems.
In this situation? Yah. Not having any apparent contingency plan for if the Arbiter breaks is just very, very stupid. Everything breaks eventually based purely on the Law of Big Numbers. If the Shadowlands was designed to last literally forever then there is a 100% chance the Arbiter will break eventually. And any system designed without any sort of failsafe or backup plan is an inherently flawed system.
It’s a game of Red Vs Blue alternating with dungeon quests and raids. Story depth was never the highest of priorities.
If you want depth, that’s what your own roleplaying is for.
how can we get invested in the game, if the story is so distractingly stupid.
Quite frankly, the Kyrians have no reason to be doing their jobs if they’re just going to be carrying it out without thinking, and if that’s what is needed they should be replaced with Mnemis units to pass through the veil and pick up the souls. That would eliminate the need for mind conditioning any souls.
All I’ve taken from this thread is that the system is flawed and needs to be destroyed so a new one can take …
Bah Gawd! That’s Sylvanas’ music!
The plot is as smart as the people that writes it. In this case dumb as F
I can’t believe how unfun it can go a simple plot
People get invested in other aspects of the game, such as the challenge of developing your gaming skills. Compeitition against other players, or making your own roleplaying stories.
And as fractured as they are… I’m pretty much into the stories that Blizzard puts out. I don’t let the flaws dominate my perceptions.
Interesting I never see people posting ideas for preparing to replace Azeroth’s sun or extra safeguards on Sargeras.
Except they were created so in-universe. To insist upon shoehorning the Devs themselves into the story in this context is to demand that nobody should write about anything metaphysical and fantastical unless they are actually a god of some sort.
Selectively applying meta context here doesn’t change anything. In-lore, the Shadowlands as they exist were created by extremely powerful and metaphysically oriented beings whose understanding of these things exceeds our complete understanding and that of our in-game characters. Do you know better? How? Are you, the player sitting at your computer, a denizens of Azeroth? Of the WarCraft universe? Are you a divine being of that universe with a fundamental understanding of the cosmic gears of reality there exceeding mortal comprehension? I’m sure not, and I’m disinclined to think you are either.
Which means any alternative solution or contingency you or I could come up with can readily be filed under the possibility that it just plain isn’t possible. Perhaps the metaphysical laws of the WarCraft universe won’t allow for it, or trying would incite immediate disaster for reasons to which we aren’t privy. Perhaps there would be swift, dire consequences to dumping souls any which where without the Arbiter’s sorting, just leaving them to languish in the living world or trying to cram them all into some place where they’d wait around until the problem’s fixed. You’re assuming incompetence, neglect and malice on the part of the writers, First Ones and Eternal Ones without having any grounds for knowing why any of this was done the way it was done beyond a shallow and cynical presumption that you somehow singularly know how the Shadowlands work from top to bottom, including the limitations and consequences of changing things there, and that the Devs and in-lore deities are being stupid by not having done what you think they should do.
That doesn’t really work because Kyrians are souls, meaning they possess their own anima keeping them “alive” (in the sense that Shadowland denizens “live.”) Meaning their very existence isn’t a net drain on the most vital resource in the realm of Death.
Constructs in the Shadowlands burn anima just to function at all. They aren’t souls who brought their own anima in death, meaning that to utilize them instead would amount to replacing the Kyrians who are self-sustaining soul-ferriers with machines that are net consumers of anima.
Same reason it’s worth having venthyr around rather than using some Stoneborn equivalent instead. The maintenance, upkeep and regular defense of a realm is limited to that one realm’s size, so it can rely on anima-consuming sapient constructs to get the job done, while the task of ferrying souls to Oribos requires enough Kyrians operating to be spanning every living world and realm in the entire universe at any given moment. That’s a lot of souls to collect, and the sort of task that would probably burn out the Shadowlands’ anima reserves in a heartbeat if it were all being done by a bunch of constructs that burn anima just to remain active. For that matter, it’s likely why Maldraxxus is the primary defense mechanism for the Shadowlands. It can create insanely massive armies of formerly living souls who can persist in their duties of protecting the nigh infinite span of the realm of Death without guzzling anima like gasoline the whole time as a comparably sized army of constructs or stoneborn would.
Moreover, considering anima doesn’t even seem to properly manifest until at some point during or after the process of a soul crossing over to the Shadowlands, it’s uncertain that a construct powered by it would continue functioning if it crossed over into the living world. Just the act of passing through the veil might cause any anima it contains to turn back into whatever form anima has while it’s accumulating in a still-living soul.
Well no, what you’re doing is handwaving plot holes with “cosmic mumbo jumbo beyond our comprehension” even when the plot holes are massive, gaping, and obvious to anyone who bothers to think about it more than a couple of seconds.
It is, basically, saying “this story is beyond criticism of any kind” and that mentality just doesn’t jive with me. Especially when the issue in question is having the single most important system in the universe operate with a single point of failure.
There is no “beyond our understanding” that can fix that. It is pure mathematical logic. Anyone with a basic understanding of engineering would tell you this is a terrible way to build a machine that is supposed to never fail.
Therefore at the very least Blizzard should present us with reasons as to why the system is the way it is to try and fill the plot holes. But we the players should not be obligated to withhold our criticism on the grounds of “Well, the in-universe characters are just smarter than us.”
Applying that logic uniformly means anyone who doubted Sylvanas during the War of Thorns or BfA were being ridiculous because Sylvanas is a military genius with many years of experience and is privy to knowledge about the Horde’s military we do not.
I don’t think it’s a matter of either plot holes nor of players knowing better.
I think most realistically it’s that the Eternal Ones don’t know of a better way. What we do know is that the Eternal Ones created the system the Shadowlands currently runs on (Bastion collect souls, Maldraxxus protects the Shadowlands, Ardenweald rejuvenates Life spirits and locks the Maw, Revendreth gives souls a chance at atonement, and Oribos places souls in the various realms). It is most likely the best system that the Eternal Ones could come up with, and implemented it with flaws and potential break points and all. And they’ve simply never come up with a better system, which is not a plot hole in of itself.
Regardless of players being able to think of a better system than Blizzard has, it doesn’t really matter to the story given that players will never actually be able to present any proposals to the Eternal Ones or their replacements, who in the story would ultimately have to be the ones to implement a new system or improvements on the existing one.
The above it so say perhaps the opposite. It’s not that the Eternal Ones are smarter than us. It could just be that they just aren’t smart enough to make something better than what they did.
True. I don’t think the First Ones were lazy when making the Shadowlands. In-universe this is supposed to be a good system that has worked fine for millennia.
I am just saying that doesn’t mean we the players can’t criticize the system’s obvious flaws. It was, after all, conceptualized by other humans. Not higher beings.
It was also quite literally designed to fail because its failure was a part of the story. As a writer it can be tricky to design a system that is supposed to fail for the story to take place without leaving a massive, crippling flaw in it.
Hence the Deathstar’s now iconic weakness. This is the same as that.
Mostly I agree. If the system was perfectly reinforced then we don’t get a crisis and then there really isn’t urgency for action …
With that said, following the Death Star analogy, Darth Vader and a few TIEs go out to fight off the Rebel star fighters since they’re too small/fast/nimble for turbo lasers. Grand Moff Tarkin is warned by someone that they’ve analyzed the attack pattern and there is a danger.
We know the responses to the external threat were … lacking … but the narrative did acknowledge it and do something instead of just continuing on.
Right now, we are akin to never launching any TIEs and the analyst guy is snoring at his desk, while we wait for Yavin IV to come into view. It’s not even so much the presence of a single point of failure (though it is) it’s that it appears from the narrative that these folks can’t even see the relationship between what they’re doing and the current crisis. Not only are they incapable of handling any sort of change, they literally don’t even notice that the Arbiter being offline means they’re tossing more anima into the Maw than Denathrius ever did.
With this portrayal, it would seem that if a cosmic event occurred that shifted Oribos (and the Arbiter) 100 meters away from their normal “spot” the Kyrians likely would keep dropping souls at the original spot.
Then probably wave to the Arbiter before flying home.
The Kyrian have confused me for awhile now in what they actually do. They ferry souls, but do they ferry all of the souls? From everywhere in the universe? If they don’t, then souls must naturally go to the shadowlands when they die, so then why do they matter? If they do ferry every single soul, what happened before the eternals created them? What was the shadowlands before people went there when they died? And what about beings like the Loa of death? Why don’t the Kyrian have a problem that they are undermining the purpose, stealing souls out from under them, and circumventing the Arbiter?