As long time player, by the time Battle for Azeroth rolled around I had already spilled enough blood of thinking feeling people to fill at least one of the great lakes. It was too late to start convincing me that mass genocide was bad when I had already done it dozens of times and been hailed as a hero for doing it by the very same characters that were now crying over Teldrassil.
Also I’m convinced that the writers would not have given Teldrassil the same narrative weight if the tree was populated with a less conventionally attractive race.
I have done SO many quests on both factions where I’m told to barge into a village of some “mongrel” race, kill everything that moves and loot their homes. Ffs, half the time we weren’t even in open conflict with the village in question, they just happened to have something we wanted. Hell sometimes we don’t even go in and instead we fly over the village and just do a fantasy bombing run with the quest objective requiring the player to hit a certain amount of buildings and people yet it’s given the same tonal weight as doing a Darkmoon Faire minigame.
How is Teldrassil any different? The scale? Is there some agreed upon number of how many children you can orphan before you’re officially a bad person that I’m not aware of?
I know for a fact that if Teldrassil was populated with murlocs instead of night elves the whole thing would have been played for laughs. How do I know? Because they already did it. The trailer for the Heroes of the Storm hero Murky literally draws attention to the double standard I’ve been talking about but plays it up for comedy. And it WAS funny back in the day when the tone of WoW was consistent with itself. But now that they want me to take things like Teldrassil seriously now I have to take that Murky trailer seriously. What that human adventurer did to that murloc village was Murky’s Teldrassil. Why is one funny but the other tragic?
I often think back to Warlords of Draenor where we would often kill orcs by the hundreds in single quest without a single guilt trip. Sure they were all combatants but but them being combatants doesn’t mean every single one of the hundreds of thousands of orcs we had mowed down by the end of that expansion was a bad person who had a comprehensive understanding of what was going on and understood the Azerothian perspective. And how many of them were just fighting because they were conscripted or because they didn’t want to abandon their clan? How about the well established fact that every day on Draenor is a fight for your life and the Iron Horde was promising a future where that would no longer be the case and they had the technology, resources and numbers to make that claim plausible. Again none of this was a problem for me until Battle for Azeroth made it a problem.
I’m not good at ending posts like these so I’m just going to say if Teldrassil was populated by trolls the quest would definitely be called something like “We be smokin’ dat tree mon.” or some equally phoned in sounding joke name.
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There are times when I am mowing down mobs, and one is skirting my aggro range… I am like “buddy… walk away…” but then they aggro on me.
I feel pity for them. But, the only way to drop aggro and eat my snacks is to slay them, along with their fellow mobs.
I feel more pity for a random scout on the field who bumbled into my war path than I do for Teldrassil.
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Always gotta feel bad for the poor saps who got stuck with guard duty the day the PC shows up.
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This is why unless your character is a serial killer, almost all of the quests should be looked at as non-canon. If we were to take WoW seriously for what it is, it would be a post-apocalyptic world filled with insane people. You really cant take it seriously because even by its own standards there is just a non-sensical amount of murder, hence the name, World of Warcraft.
Who said it was?
You are allowed to feel anyway you want about lore, if you thought Teldrassil was funny then you do you?
I am confused by this all really, personally I think all the quests are horrible but yes, the scale of Tildrissil takes the cake. You have untold amounts of people burning to death.
I dont think other bad things happening negates other things also being bad.
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What’s funny about you using trolls as an example is that in the same xpac we actually did have an attack on a troll city where (as far as I’m aware) no civilians died and it was with clearly identified participants in an active war and the story treated it very seriously and the playerbase got very angry about it.
Also if you’d changed this around and called the thread “Why I never felt bad about the Purge” you’d have gotten so many comments by now.
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My feelings about Teldrassil in-universe are kind of tainted by the three expansion long forum tanty The War of Thorns ignighted that only really petered out at the end of Dragon Flight.
The initial event was tragic and honestly well done. Definitely a bold choice, from a narrative perspective. The outrage from specific elements in the community and how they ultimatly resolved the issue (just make another tree, bro) was poorly handled.
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we were retaking troll land for the shatterspear. teldrassil was an illegal settlement
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I felt bad about Teldrassil.
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Sure. That’s Draenor. On Azeroth, at least from my understanding, since you run into a bunch of them from the other faction, “Yellow NPCs” are a thing. We more or less burned an entire tree/racial capital of Yellow NPCs, since the Horde was fighting the majority of their armed and trained NPCs on the field.
Your Murloc example isn’t horrible, and that could be oversight, but we spend almost no time in game actually trying to communicate or sue for peace with them, whatsoever. We’ve had 20 years of real life time communicating with the Night Elves as Horde, plus whatever number of years we’re at in-game. There have been peace talks, war talks, trade talks, all of that level of communication done with them, from the Horde side.
And we still burned down a mostly civilian, (again, Yellow NPC,) population. That’s why you’re supposed to feel bad, because that’s not a morally righteous position to take.
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People took the burning of Teldrassil so bad because they got attached to this tree. Sure players did bad things like exterminating the villages. (in quests like Murder the Murderers, Blow Up the Village, The Drakkari Do Not Need Water). But those were single rather rare quests. The destruction of Teldrassil had a huge focus on itself. We had BFA pre-patch, the beginning of BFA, many books, warbringers and CGI cinematics, with terrifyingly cruel details. All that was dragged on to Dragonflight. (Tortured souls in The Maw, later being burned by Fryakk in the raid)
Nostalgia was probably the most important role. It was one of the first cities players could see in the game. Many had great memories with this place. The shock factor was second important thing. For the first time ever we completely destroyed one of the oldest zones. Even when Orgrimmar or Stormwind were attacked, it was never on the scale of total destruction. Knowledge that only civilians remained on Teldrassil or the official use the word ‘Genocide’ causes a bad taste in the mouth. Also race/faction pride was on the table. Alliance then started counterattack but completely forgot to include the main victims (night elves) their absence for the rest of BFA was something I still don’t understand. Forcing Horde players to participate in this just added fuel to the fire.
You might not feel bad about Teldrassil. But that only means that you did not fall into the Blizzard trap who only wanted to arouse emotions in players. (which ultimately ended worst for Blizzard itself)
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I felt bad for the night elves and they deserved better. But everything after that including all the stuff in dragonflight was not needed considering the Horde was already beaten back by the time BFA was over.
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I’m pretty sure even then we don’t go around killing kids. Like presumably the reason this is different is because this was an unnecessary war driven by a mad woman bent on conquest.
Which one exactly are you talking about? Because usually we at least have some reason for what we do. Namely because they attacked us/are about to attack us and we cant just stand around doing nothing.
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Another Topic which is often forgoten that this was an entire land, not a single clan, an single village, even not a single town/city, this was an entire land, with everything on it, animals, plants, furbolgs, night elves, dryads, treepeople…everything went up in flames…and only ashes remained.
if the same would happen to orgrimmar+Durotar or any other land of the horde, the crying wouldn´t stop either.
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Despite their losses you got to admit Amidrassil looks like an actual tree. The only thing missing in that place is a temple for Elune.
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Unfortunately, he is on the wrong side of the world. I’m curious if Blizzard will really ever touch this story again that Teldrassil will recover. Let’s see, I’ll let myself be surprised.
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And it makes sense. Burning Teldrassil was a stupid decision, militarily. It made zero sense, because the Horde needed to sacrifice yet another of their champions on the altar of “Idiot, please villain bat me”, thanks to a creep that no longer works there, from my understanding. (From “We’ll hold Teldrassil like a bargaining chip”, to "This Night Elf defied me, BURN IT!’ like… What in the,)
How he ever got into that position in the first place with that level of pettiness is quite honestly beyond me, but it is what it is.
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I agree with you, but once it happened, there was no way out and it should have ended with Sylvanas’ death or at least with a permament solution that would have made a return impossible. You can’t separate Sylvanas from this event and that it doesn’t come up again, so I’m in favour of just leaving Sylvanas there and never touching her again.
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If I’m honest, I’d love to play the War of Thorns questline again with one of my alts.
Why, though? What was there about it that you want to experience again, that you can’t get from the quests mentioned by the OP?
Dead night elves? In specific locations?
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