11/04/2018 01:23 AMPosted by
Hnetu
But they're not friendly jabs.
Poking fun at someone in a position of power is a friendly jab. Poking fun at someone who's not is just cruelty.
Everyone already knows the Alliance is the struggling underdog faction with racials that aren't up to par and a community that's hemorrhaging almost daily as guilds who want to progress further need warm bodies to recruit and the only place to find them are on Horde-side. Blizzard consistently adds fuel to this fire by brazenly insulting half their playerbase themselves. You yourself gave a few examples of it. They, as developers, perpetuate the hatred.
Hypothetically:
When you make fun of some rich fatcat who has everything and doesn't have to work, teasing that he's probably inept at whatever mundane task because he just pays someone to do it for him... we can all chuckle because hey, that guy's already in a good position. He's well off financially, has everything sorted for him, and our teasing won't hurt him at all.
Finding the homeless guy in your town and kicking him, telling him he's a loser for smelling bad cause y'know, he's homeless? That's just... mean. You don't get to say "It's just a joke, grow a thicker skin." because his feelings hurt and you don't want to feel guilty about mocking the guy.
Now yes, these are hyperbolic examples but that's effectively what Blizzard has done and pretty consistently encourages. They go out of their way to insult the Alliance, and more specifically, Alliance players. That has a trickle down knock on effect where Horde players learn that it's acceptable to also be jerks to Alliance players because hey, Blizz has their back on it. And when we Alliance players call people out on it, Horde players defend it. And you know damn well if the shoe were on the other foot things would be a lot different. But because you're the insulter and not the insultee it's cool.
But it's not. How healthy is the game if they need to make PvP a PvE sport by giving NPCs for Horde players to play against. Even if we ignore things like racials (because small bonuses are insignificant, whatever) that still means there's such a massive disparity in faction size that one side can't realistically access a portion of the game. So what does Blizzard do? Attempt to actually fix the problem?
No, they blame the players and insult us. How the !@#$ is that acceptable, at all, for a company to insult their paying customers?
I think you may be missing the subtle point of my post.
Let's also say "many Horde players learn..." and "many Horde players defend..." because it is not any more fair to lump all Horde players together based on a few less savory examples, perceived or actual, than it is to do likewise with Alliance. I would not wish my own personal opinion, good or bad, to be foisted upon those with whom I disagree. But on to my point....
For the sake of argument, I am willing to call these "friendly jabs," even if I think some or all are not necessarily "friendly", whatever the intention may have been. That's why I left out the more egregious examples that just don't belong: I want to give the greatest benefit of the doubt possible to give the most chance of union (between players) as possible.
Poking fun at someone "on your level" is a friendly jab. Friends give eachother a hard time all the time, and if they're really a friend don't mean any cruelty by it.
The assumption is that the Horde vs. Alliance (player) banter should be looked at and appreciated in the same way as people cheering for their favorite sports teams. "Trash is talked", so to speak, (i.e. "Your team is going down" and all that) but at the end of the day, both sides should appreciate and understand they share a love of the game.
It is quite possible for Blizzard to help stoke this "friendly rivalry" between Alliance players and Horde players, even getting in the fun together with the players, because they too are gamers... or have been, depending on your opinion in that regard. But if they are going to be involved in the "friendly rivalry", it does help if it's something they
demonstrate to the playerbase, and that requires seeing both sides within Blizzard going back and forth in a friendly fashion.
So let's say these are friendly jabs from the Horde perspective in Blizzard. There are bound to be Alliance players at Blizzard too. Certainly there have been some friendly jabs levied at the Horde? Because I don't believe I've heard them spoken of, either good or ill, I want to hear them. There has to have been some Alliance-based jabs toward the Horde from or between Blizzard employees in that same spirit, either at Blizzcon, or on the Forums, or on Twitter, or in an interview. Examples of this would show that it's not just the Alliance Blizzard is taking aim at, so I think it would be a very good thing for all of us on both teams if we could hear some of those. We all know how much many players love to throw memes at eachother :)
If there are no examples, and this
is friendly banter, then the question to be dispassionately considered from the Alliance player and the Horde player perspective is: Why is Blizzard willing to have this banter with the Alliance but not the Horde?
It is a delicate balance between being "aloof and on high" and being "down in the trenches," and if they do mix it up, they run the risk of players grasping onto that as a reason everything goes wrong for them: "The quest guy was Alliance that's why the Alliance story is awesome and Horde story sucks" or "The Encounters guy was a Hordie that's why Horde dominates raids."
Though, they're already facing that now, and there's no way to convince some people there's not
some sort of bias, Alliance or Horde, so maybe
the most people would feel better if they felt they had someone who was "on their side" in at least
some aspect of the game. But your mileage may vary on that, and trying to live up to that on a corporate level creates a whole new level of potential nightmares that we need not list. I believe there was a joke way back when of a certain CM being forced to roll a Paladin on a PvP server in order to appease Paladins, for a lighter-hearted example.
So that brings us back to my request in my original post: Can we find any examples of Blizzard taking "friendly jabs" at the Horde that we can share and show it's not just the Alliance they're bantering with?