The ingredients are all there so why isn’t there some inner faction conflict within the blue team?
I can see how some maybe skeptical of someone who is staunchly a red team supporter asking about some conflict on the opposite faction. However I believe no conflict has sucked out the personality of various races of the Alliance.
Conflict and certain cultural boundaries can add personality to a stale(by my perception) faction.
For example let’s take the Void Elves corrupting the children of Gonk. I imagine corrupting a wild god’s offspring would be some of the grandest heresy you could commit in the eyes of the Night Elves.
because there are always more important things to do for the alliance, by example, uniting to defeat the villains who commits atrocities and are enemies of life and hope.
that kinda takes away any kind of conflict of the main storyline.
the alliance had their internal conflicts but the threat of the horde is bigger. and most of that conflict takes place in books.
Same reason there wasn’t much intra-human conflict in Independence Day. President Bill Pullman had an easy job uniting the nations of the world because the enemy was pushing for their annihilation.
That is just dooming the Alliance to be stale forever. There is no personality. There are no lines to be crossed or not to be crossed when it comes with different cultures. There is only the Alliance.
Honestly, as a former member of Team Blue and current double agent for both sides, I’m struggling to think of a single time when the Alliance had real inner turmoil in-game. Maybe when Genn disobeyed orders and tried to take out Sylvannas? But that lasted a minute. Maybe when Jaina was the emo warmongering Jaina? But the conflict really amounted to little more than her throwing a couple fits and teleporting away.
And those two examples happened either because of or as prelude to fighting with the Horde. There’s really no room for an argument that fighting the Horde precludes Alliance inner turmoil.
Other than that, what in-game internal conflict has the Alliance gone through that I’m forgetting?
ingame? well we had a little argument when she purged dala about the sindorei about to join the alliance and then when she wanted to have “vengeance” for broken shore, where velen and anduin said “nope” because it was madness. and then she went MIA in legion.
i mean, she is literally the closest thing we had because then we had the books events like varian helping the dwarfs and nelfs. or she helping baine. but since varian is her friend, nothing really happened.
then… tyrande vs anduin in 8.1, i guess? and it was after the genocide.
like i said, there is no need to shatter unity when you had a bigger threat to take care of. in legion, it was the legion.
in cata,mop and bfa is the horde.
and the only ones to blame is blizzard with that high king nonsense. AND making the horde the villains, again.
I mean, yeah like I said other than Jaina’s spats which all get either resolved or forgiven very quickly, there doesn’t seem much conflict Ally-side. And you keep saying “but the larger threat”, yet… The only time they have internal disagreement is when that larger threat (the Horde) is threatening or Jaina believes they’re threatening.
That excuse lost all of its merit when the closest to unthreatened the Alliance ever were was during WoD. Still no real internal struggles going on. Hordeside seems to only have internal struggles, bigger threats looming or not.
I just wish the Alliance had some kind of drama the Alliance players could experience. Their problems shouldn’t amount to either “An apocalypse is happening, better work with the Horde to stop it!” or “the Horde is happening, better work with the Horde to stop them!”
One can hope that once Sylvanas is dealt with, the remaining Horde leaders might sue for peace. Obviously, Anduin would accept negotiations in order to stop the killing and fighting. Others, however, might not be so quick to forgive or forget and refuse to stop until the Horde’s completely dismantled. Would they go so far as rebelling against the High King to get what they desire?
Let’s not hold our breath though. Blizzard has had tons of chances to write the Alliance as having internal strife issues before now and time after time neglected them. Horde’s well on their way to their second civil war since WoW began?
i don’t know about you, but im glad that we don’t have the same internal conflicts like the horde does simply because they have the same internal conflicts over and over again.
Evil warchief does evil stuff, some part rebels, they split the horde in half and lose, it happened in wc2, in wc3, in mop, and now probably again.
“we are not evil this time i promise”
“the horde is complex! that is why… saurfang and baine didn’t stopped sylvanas, i guess, and that is why currently horde characters are acting like the third reich… because we are so different that we don’t do nothing until the plot demands that sylvanas is removed from power”
if the alliance had internal conflict with, lets say jaina in legion, what she could have done to really add fuel to the internal conflict that could be compelling to alliance players during the legion invasion?
most of the people would say “what the hell is she doing? the legion is INVADING!”
while anduin, the noble and wise would be in the right side of the fence.
but to be fair, it’s seems like now blizzard is finally building up that conflict with tyrande and anduin, or at least i hope so, that conflict would make sense even in war with the horde.
they had other chance for that with void elves and lightforged draenie but it seems like that ship already sailed.
Humans, Gnomes, Dwarves, Draenei, and Worgen have very little reason to be contentious with eachother atm. They have A LOT of shared cultural norms that assist in soothing inter-faction conflicts over; and to top it all off there is very little natural competition for resources and terrain due to where and the way each group lives.
While its hard to say what will happen with the Draenei moving forward, for the Alliance races of EK there are just a lot more reasons for cooperation than competition or conflict. I’m not saying there aren’t elements that could contribute to internal tensions, but there are a LOT of elements that suppress chances of infighting as well.
I dunno, maybe instead of teleporting away after Anduin said “no, the Horde are totes not a threat, the Legion’s the biggest threat”, she could have said something like “yeah, your father? Who just died? He thought Deathwing was the biggest threat and ignored the growing Horde problem. Then the Horde blew up my city right after Deathwing bit the dust. We need to do something now, or they’ll repeat that trick after we defeat the Legion.” Then when Anduin says no again, have Jaina and Genn recruit rando adventurer-champions to check on stuff behind Andy’s back.
Internal conflict that isn’t like the Horde’s take on it.
Because inner conflict goes against the “unity” mantra that Blizzard pushes onto the alliance with so much vigor that the Alliance appears to be a human-ran empire instead of an alliance of equals as it was advertised. There are definitely ingredients for Alliance inner-drama, but Blizzard intentionally suppresses it.
Also, much of the Alliance story line has never amounted to more than the blue team “reacting” to the Red team. The Horde is the narrative enabler, the Alliance the passive reaction. High King was created solely for Blizzard to spend less time writing an alliance story, because why bother writing for a council when you can have a Warchief equivalent to deliver all the exposition and not move the spotlight onto anyone else? Because of this, the alliance will never have more depth than a kiddie pool.
that is good, i don’t deny that.
can we still had that storyline after she abandon her position as leader of the kirin tor just to go rogue on the horde at the same time that the legion continues invading and they need to “SeT AsSiDe TheiR DiFferencEs” and be accepted by alliance players? i think that most people would send her to hell. and then can we go to kultiras with that character?
anyway, i do agree that blizzard have the tools to make internal conflict but they refuse to do it because they constantly feel like making the horde the villans is more compelling as a storyline and do a black vs white conflict instead of a #morallygraymane. like bfa could have been, if we had decent writing for both sides.
Blizzard’s been trying to convince the Horde player to be evil since Cataclysm. I guess they figured MoP was far enough away for people to forget the last time they tried it.
Like a lot of things, what Blizzard says they explicitly aren’t doing and what ends up going live in-game are two entirely different things. If Blizz didn’t want Horde players to feel like the bad guys, we wouldn’t be tasked with committing war crimes, followed by NPCs shouting what a horrible monster we are.