Ha Ha Ha, No..

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Figured this might be of interest:


On one hand the music, voice acting, and general presentation seem to present Tyrande as pretty blatantly villain-foreshadowing, but on the other hand it frames Genn almost as the voice of reason in how he says Tyrande is right and Anduin is wrong, but then its focus on Anduin's hope so I have no idea where they're going with this.

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To me it seems they are switching up the faction thematics. The Horde are now the confederated ones who yet seem to get alone well while the Alliance are in theory unified behind Stormwind but in practice they are a mess of competing wants and ideals.

So pretty much unpleasant overall.

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Thank you for posting that!

I had a couple of shower thoughts about this. Why didn't Anduin and Tryande speak prior to this? If Baine is committed to peace, wouldn't he at least have tried to reach out to Tyrande? If the writers are so interested about giving us a breadcrumb about the undead Night Elves that no one asked for, couldn't they have done better with explaining the state of the Night Elves now that the war is supposedly over? Is Tyrande going to attack something? What's next? Why did all of these people who golf clapped for the armistice suddenly leaving with Tyrande without so much as a word or a reaction?

Oh who am I kidding, the answer is probably that Blizzard didn't care.

Anduin sounds like he's lecturing Tyrande and comes off as being completely unsympathetic to why she's upset in the first place, but he's still framed as being "right". Will Tyrande be a villain? Will a company deploy as the message of their video game that it's wrong to pacify a state that has multiple times demonstrated that they're only interested in taking civilians for use as target practice, and otherwise will happily engage in genocide on the basis of blood and honor because some whacked out strongman told them to?

Probably. In the meantime, they already told us what Night Elf fans can reasonably expect: a nice pile of ashes.

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Again... Krainz, have you considered that Skoll and the lot of them are the outliers?

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Hey Kyalin, I guess they decided to showcase the Night Elves' victory over Darkshore through in-game content:

https://www.wowhead.com/news=309830/...rande-cutscene

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Admittedly, I'm getting less and less motivated to do this. Back when BfA was in flight, there was hope that the team might do something to restore the lost confidence and pride in the Night Elves - pivotally against the Horde. I've said it before that the marketing team did get one thing right "It matters" - which is why I'm not as motivated. Shadowlands all but kills the possibility of a meaningful comeback, especially with Blizzard's strange hesitance both to show the Night Elves in a victorious position, and to clarify the status of what might be the most important zone in Warcraft: Ashenvale.

This could blow up into a billion complaints though, so I would just like to focus on one: the state of Warcraft's rivalry.

There are some who claim that the faction war is a universal evil, but I disagree. I think that a faction war can be engaging and enjoyable for both sides. Rivalries work in team sports and in fiction all of the time, so why doesn't it work here? As usual, I tried to find my answer in third party research, but Google didn't give up the goods. Instead, I found a couple of blog posts - hardly authoritative, but I'm going to present them for your consideration anyway. So first, let's talk about rivalries in general:

https://www.thecut.com/2014/06/why-t...cer-rival.html

The good:

- Rivalry increases effort, performance, and group cohesion because it increases motivation.

The bad:

- Rivalries increase unethical behavior.
- People tend to accept worse outcomes for themselves if it means the rival will achieve an even worse outcome.
- Rivalries can make us overlook non-rivals.

I wouldn't say that we're observing the pros in the Warcraft rivalry, but we're absolutely seeing the cons. Alliance players want to burn down Orgrimmar, despite that this would destroy the game - and Horde players are out justifying genocide as a concept. World threats just don't seem to matter anymore, and universal spite is the order of the day, and no one respects each other. #Notall of course, people are people and people are different, if you're not doing this personally, then I'm not talking about you - and your results may vary. These are general trends, but they are observable trends, nonetheless.

What might be a reason for all of this? How did we get here? Well, why don't we start with the Alliance?

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/...a-good-rivalry

A few years ago, as a joke at Blizzcon, Blizzard held up slogans for the Alliance including "Not the face", and "We'll keep trying". They trotted out a metal frontman to berate the Alliance for not letting him farm motes of air, and they have in general failed to present a real alternative to the high-octane themes of the Horde. Lore heavy Horde fans may complain here, turning to quest text, developer statements, and other written materials that suggest that the Horde isn't actually that powerful, but as we discussed last time, visuals are more memorable, and video more effective than audio and text by a factor of almost ten - with visuals alone being more memorable by a factor of five. Those visuals display the Horde as strong and powerful.

The Alliance by contrast isn't. They do not look powerful, they are not menacing, and they're not particularly memorable either. That's why people thought those statements were funny - they were true. Few people are going to take a flower-laden Night Elf seriously, especially after the War of the Thorns. Anduin is a nonthreatening blonde kid who would make Neville Chamberlain and Mr. Rogers look like the Doom guy. What's left then? Good boy Genn? Jaina? There isn't anyone who is going to have the appeal of a Garrosh or a Sylvanas. That's because Blizzard isn't interested in giving the Alliance that kind of thing. As a result: the faction sucks - regardless of what they may say to the contrary in a developer tweet or on page 47 of some obscure book that no more than a twenty-fifth of the population is ever going to read. This isn't enough - payback has be shown onscreen, and it has to be meaningful - but Blizzard has serially denied this, and will into the foreseeable future.

Two problems arise as a result of this. One: onscreen victories against the Alliance are expected, and therefore mean little. Two: the Alliance can't trash talk, and otherwise has little motivation to even participate.

They're not the only losers in this relationship of course. So let's talk about the Horde.

Some of the problem I've discussed already. People play video games for reasons of competence, relatedness, and autonomy, and lying to the Horde about what they were signing up - selling the faction for years as more than a slavering pack of Lord of the Rings villains, only to pull the rug out from under those people because the writers now needed a villain for "the story they wanted to tell" attacks the latter two of those elements - hard, and Horde players have been right to complain about it. As far as it goes for the rivalry however, a quote from this passage stuck with me:

http://www.gregkroleski.com/2016/11/...great-rivalry/

Is deep respect even possible here?

Due to the nature of the narrative, the Horde doesn't even earn any of its victories - they're handed to them by fiat, and the lack of motivation that comes in as a result on the part of their normative rivals fills in the rest. Many in the Horde don't even want what's happening while others bend over backwards to justify and defend increasingly evil acts to either accept this new role, or to deny that the role has been handed to them - all the while denying that the other faction should get a thing to resolve their longstanding issues. Which is fair enough. They're often treated the same way.

In short, there's a reason why this rivalry so toxic. One side didn't choose to be evil for the most part, but was made into that anyway. The other meanwhile is not allowed to have any sort of recourse that matters, and no one takes them seriously.

So where do we go from here?

We don't. The writers are moving on to Shadowlands and leaving all of these problems to rot. Sylvanas is no longer part of the Horde and therefore, she only has so much relevance to the rivalry - the only thing that matters, and even that only matters in a Schadenfreude sort of way - against the Forsaken playerbase in particular who just had most of their lore hallowed out for this mess. It won't resolve this issue - and it seems that Blizzard's current leadership doesn't care. The writers are too high on their own egos to consider that they're writing a story for a video game with living players who want to have fun, the developers are short staffed and are rushing product out the door without regard to quality, Ion's on some really good drugs, and Activision is probably wondering if it's time to Guitar-Hero this franchise. I'm not motivated to write these anymore because every tea leaf in front of me says that this isn't getting better, and that it's never going to.

I guess I just had some free time and wanted to take my frustrations out on the last major topic that was buzzing around in my head.

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In reply to this - we did speak some time ago. The timing of this is interesting, but I think this falls into the category of necessary but not sufficient for reasons that I have gone into previously.

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Strange update I just found out. This quest was only ever available on EU servers, never for any other region, and they've since disabled it on EU servers too. Its possible, since it was originally part of the 8.1 PTR, that it was never meant to go live and its appearance was a glitch for some reason.

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I mean, the cinematic isn't very good, so I can see it being cut on those grounds - but just to confirm: it's once again struck from the game?

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I can confirm it was never enabled on NA servers, and when I asked on twitter I was told it had been removed from EU servers recently.

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Unfortunate. I didn't think the cinematic was very good, but it was still something of an in-game representation. I wonder why it got axed?

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Is Valeera a part of the Horde now?

Nah, she's still a "free agent" so to speak. Not politically aligned to either faction. Her personal loyalty to Anduin coupled with her race just makes her a suitable envoy who can deliver messages from him to the Horde leadership and vice-versa without being threatened or attacked on sight.

Playing an Alliance characters means you deserve what you get. It's a faction of cowardice and shame (hence aiding their enemies who hate them anyway).

An interview with Steve Danuser about Shadowlands, here are some parts that may be of interest to this thread.







Update,

Eugh, Night elves in the Horde...

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I do have to say, Danuser has proven to me to be an interesting figure - and I can't say that I have him quite figured out yet. I'm obviously skeptical of him - as I am of all WoW developers, but I have to take him with a more careful stance than I would have than say, Kosak.

"The needs of gameplay sometimes require us to hold off on resolving those plot points until later in the expansion."

Regarding the first comment you linked, IGOD - a little over a year ago I changed jobs. I was working in a small public accounting firm back then, working with small and medium sized businesses. Now I work in internal audit for one of the largest banks in the world. Being exposed to that environment has also exposed me to a truckload of corporate jargon that I laughed at previously, and now am horrified to find creeping into my vocabulary. One of those terms is "competing priorities".

"Competing priorities" is the nice way of saying that something wasn't important enough to be worked on right at that moment - and this often is subjective, or based on whether someone wants to do something right now. The outcome of that competition shows you what that person cares about and finds important. So if internal audit repeatedly gets "competing priorities" as its answer - you can understand that we might get a bit agitated.

Night Elves of course, have gotten competing priorities as its answer quite often. The outcome of the competing priorities when it came to the War of the Thorns was obvious - the Horde appeared to be powerful and in charge. There were multiple cinematics detailing the devastation and how their characters felt about it. Blizzard sponsored and churned out artwork of how devastating it was to the Night Elves, and the quests focused mostly on Darkshore and Night Elven defeats. That was the priority that won that particular competition - as opposed to portraying the pitched and exiting battles that we might have seen if the focus was balanced to include the good moments of "A Good War" and "Elegy" - the moments that were supposed to mitigate that awful, devastating, and comprehensive defeats. It was important to Blizzard to show that the Horde was powerful, and to play up the sense of tragedy. It was not important enough to make the experience in any way enjoyable to customers with an actual sense of investment in the playable race that was being destroyed.

Unfortunately, it's just like this for the Night Elves. We routinely lose out in that competition of priorities - and it's been this way since Cataclysm. Even in the case of the exception - Darkshore - the intent seemed to be focused around standing up this storyline about undead Night Elves - one that very few people seem to have wanted in the first place. These repeated outcomes should tell us all we need to know - and so when Mr. Danuser tries to mollify us with "competing priorities" - we should again look to the history.

Put simply: if you can find the resources to wreck the Night Elves for ten years running, then you can find the resources to fix them. If you won't, then I as a consumer will consider that as an intentional choice when it comes to MY "competing priorities".

The untimely passing of Vol'jin and a bit of manipulation in the aftermath of his death were all it took for the pattern to begin repeating.

I run a discord channel which is dedicated to discussing Night Elven issues - in an attempt to refine the arguments into something that members can turn around into more measured arguments. For that purpose - I've intentionally invited a fair number of what I consider to be reasonable Horde fans in so that I can get their perspective on things. One of our members is a Troll fan who told me starkly when he read this that it appears that they just swept Vol'jin aside so that they could repeat a plot that the Horde already went through, where this exact matter should have been resolved. It evidently wasn't - and I'm more than aware that many if not most Horde fans are absolutely pissed about this.

This isn't the first time Danuser has said something like this. I quoted a statement of his earlier when I was arguing that the Horde was Fascist - and I still believe they are. But I do want to reference what I said at the end of the piece before: Blizzard should not be saying the Horde "you're fascists and we need to fix you" - they should be providing the experience that they promised to people at the end of Warcraft 3 - with provision for the more aggressive side, certainly - but not so much that it rips out and invalidates other peoples' choices within the faction.

"In hindsight, having a level-up experience that was more agnostic to the expansion timeline would have been a benefit down the road."

Danuser says this just before he says that he doesn't want to do this because it would involve ripping out Cataclysm content and because it would be a lot of work. I see that to an extent, and certain zones (like the badlands), frankly do not need to see updates. Other zones do, and not just because they need to be updated to reflect the current state.

Elsewhere in the interview, for example, Danuser states that Tyrande hasn't forgiven Sylvanas or the Horde - and of course we know that she rejected the peace treaty. With the Night Elves continuing to be in a state of crisis in regard to their ability to be taken seriously - this is a good opportunity to introduce new questing for Darkshore, Ashenvale, and possibly Moonglade to reflect the new reality. Moonglade should be converted into the Night Elf 1-10 zone, with questing progressing through Darkshore and Ashenvale, reflecting a) the post-Teldrassil world, and b) particularly in Ashenvale - a LOT of content showing the effectiveness of the Night Elves that developers talk about and shove into books, but never put into the game. It's been ten years, we need a big moment to rehabilitate confidence in the playable race now. Updated questing in this region to show the Night Elves pushing the Horde out of the territory in the wake of the Darkshore warfront would be a huge step in doing that.

On the other side of the world, the Forsaken similarly are in crisis. Much of their identity was centered around Sylvanas Windrunner, who is gone now. The Undercity is destroyed, and the state of their territory is uncertain. Tirisfal, Silverpine, and Hillsbrad, including the Alterac mountains - at minimum, need to be updated to make it clear that a) the Forsaken aren't going anywhere - and this should include countervailing victories against the Alliance to achieve balance in presentation, and b) what their society looks like now that Sylvanas isn't the central core of it. I would leave the ideas as to what that society should look like to Forsaken fans - but they need something, instead of being hung out to dry for the sake of Blizzard's desperate search for a bad guy.

So, maybe not all of the zones need to be updated - but some do - not just because they're dated and they make no sense in the current narrative, but because the races attached to those zones are, again, in a state of crisis and need to be fixed now.

"Forsaken Night Elves"

Just get rid of these. Very few people wanted them in the first place - the remainder are pretty upset. For Night Elf fans, it's another take. For Forsaken fans, it's further eroding what they once had in terms of any societal pillars. The best place for Undead Night Elves isn't in the Alliance or the Horde. The best place for them is a wastebasket.

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In my experience, most of the time, it takes a bit of conversation to properly articulate the various, unending deluge of issues with Night Elf content, from commentary about the length and escalating nature of the deluge itself, to conversations about player motivations in video games, to discussions about the all important distinction between the facts of a story and how those facts are presented - and how the latter frequently has more of an impact than the former. But sometimes something comes in over the scanners that is just so egregious that it doesn't require very much explanation.

Today I present to you - one such thing. This Hordeside Cataclysm-era quest is already something I've raised long-ignored complaints about. Here is some two-year old quest footage showing that quest.


This isn't great. I took issue with stuff like this for a reason. Recently though, there was apparently a bug that was preventing it from being completed. Here is the new BfA-era cutscene that was added to fix said bug:


New angles! New sound effects! I don't think I've seen a Kodo make that move before, and of course the sequencing is changed to really remove the feeling that you or Gorka were ever really in danger. At the end I'm like "oh yeah, she dies in this quest - I wonder when that happened?"

But I won't belabor that point. This one is more important: We're coming up on the new expansion and the interviews are out. We're being promised meaningful content in Shadowlands, Danuser is out trying to say encouraging things, there were the Darkshore damage control sessions, and this is of course because there is an incentive to maintain what is still one of WoW's larger player communities.

But, Blizzard has also told us hopeful things before - hopeful things that didn't match at all with what they actually dished out. What they do as opposed to what they say gives you a true sense about how they feel - and with this now in the game - we can see that whatever hopeful things they're trying to get you to believe? Blizzard doesn't actually mean it. Nothing's changed.

Demand better.

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Wow... why the hell would they change it that way? That's so much worse.

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For me the question really isn't "why" anymore. They're still doing it - and those actions speak far louder than any interview or misleading promise ever will.

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Datamining for Shadowland's alpha has begun. Of relevance to this thread:

There's a scenario where Tyrande assaults Torghast and another one about the history of the Night Warrior.

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So, there's no way to say this that's not going to make it sound ungrateful - which is an impression I don't want to give off because I do appreciate you taking the time to find this information and to share it for the benefit of this thread - and I appreciate that you've done that this time.

But I still am going to have to say that looking at that information - I don't care.

Does it return Ashenvale to me? Does it rehabilitate the image of the Night Elves as being something other than a "free kill" in the faction rivalry? Yes, the faction war is "over", but that never really goes away - therefore it matters. Do I get that? No?

Then I don't care. It won't get me interested, it won't get me to pay for the game. I am as interested in Tyrande's spirit journey as I was in saving Ashenvale's resident terminal-cancer child for the second time during Cataclysm, while as I was forced to gather berries and mundane artifacts, I could see Horde in the forest that the game wasn't giving me quests to go fight. Which isn't just to say "not at all", but also that I'm annoyed by the distraction, and what it's keeping me from.

The fire, ladies and gentlemen, is over there. It is the abysmal state of the factional system, and its rivalry - a system that has existed and has defined this franchise for a quarter of a century - and I am of course interested in the health of that system because it's hit the part of the franchise that I care about on a scale that you can only measure in megatons. I'm not the only person who can say this. Night Elf fans are not the only people who can say this - the Forsaken for example have a hole blown so wide in their foundational lore and reason to exist that it's hard to conclude upon inspection of the crater that there is even anything left at all. 'How we got here' is a question for historians, and 'who is worst off' is a question for trivialists. 'How we fix it' though, is not something that can simply be ignored, delayed, or swept under the rug. There is not a large enough set of shiny keys that Blizzard can wave in front of me that will distract me from this.

If Blizzard does something about the fire, then I will care.

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