I mean... Now that I think more on it, a portal just doesnt seem likely at all. Portals take power, sure... But Auberdine (and now the very small lordrenel or w/e the fuck its called) were miracles in their own right. The only two (if you can count the post Cata one) settlements to have been built in Darkshore due to its harsh climate, poor land, and shit. Which, while perfect for Forsaken, if a portal were that easy, it would honest to goodness probably take less resources to have a teleport pad instead of making a herculean effort that Auberdine was.

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Fucking Epic :X

Night Elf culture and arcane magic. I think you read my rant on that.

Especially when we have Suramar showing the highborne and their dominance over spacial magic and teleportation.

Because making you look incapable of doing that research by yourself is priceless.

Your self-advertising skills are showing.

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That's exactly the picture I am talking about. People see it and get their hopes up. Reading Grom's quote out of context makes it worse too.

I am not sure how sylvan elves are. Prior to WC3 I wasn't involved in a lot of fantasy genre. My only comparison was to that of WC3 high elves, which fits the human/dwarf/elf dynamic a lot more than night elves do. In WoW night elves could have provided a different dynamic but they didn't.

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http://www.formspring.me/TerrorhoofMayo

Doesnt work.

A) Thanks to quests in Teldrassil we know Druids use arcane magic.

B) Thanks to Rut'theran Village, we know constant Druidic teleportation is possible over long distances.

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Fucking Epic :X

See, when I read this all I see is "shit, I don't have anything to back up what I said. I know! I'll put the burden of proof on the con side of the argument, and insult their intelligence for not giving it!"

Well, that isn't original, or generally accepted. If you're making an assertion, which you are, it is your job to prove it.

In the meantime, I am not going to guess at what you relied upon to form your conclusion. Show your work, or I'm throwing your claim out.

So the real mystery is why said buildings on Darkshore required a massive effort, if Druidic teleportation is a thing.

I honestly doubt Blizzard will explain the situation with a portal of some kind, though. As powerful as it could be.

Kids, now we're going to teach Kyalin how to look on Reddit!



Let's see some of the results!



Oh my god! Two thousand upvotes! Four thousand upvotes! A hundred comments! People are totally into this idea!

I wonder if we did something more advanced!



--GASP-- SEVEN THOUSAND PEOPLE!



Why don't we take our time and show how it works on Facebook as well?




With this we conclude our demonstration! We hope our friend Kyalin is able to use social media technologies in the future!



Maybe she can even learn from this example and use a similar method on Twitter and Youtube!

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Krainz, I explained that I'm not looking for anecdotal examples, and I hope that this isn't how you advise your clients. At the moment, I am looking at a continued downward trend w.r.t. subscriptions under the current writing staff. If you are to make an argument that this trend will reverse, I will need much more than a handful of cherrypicked examples of enthusiasm.

Show me the analytics. If you're in digital marketing, can't you simply run the sentiment analysis as well as an analysis of its correlation with sales of video game properties in general?

Why would I work for free, again?

I already showed you plenty of examples that thousands of people are buying the idea of Teldrassil burning and are enthusiastic about it.

If you refuse to take that as evidence, then shame on you. You're only making yourself and your own arguments look even worse.

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Hell, ditching Teldrassil was supported when I suggested it years ago. Its kinda the antithesis of everything Night Elves went through in WC3, and just became an anchor for the "will they/wont they" immortality story hook

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Fucking Epic :X

The fact that there is people that genuinely think Genn is evil is sad and pathetic, and willfully ignores everything Sylvanas is and does, and all of Genns character development post-Second War.

Especially when there is artwork that shows a battle at Teldrassil and Horde ships around it.

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So many deluded people think their rotting Waifuchief cares for them and their faction, when every scrap of internalized narrative has made it clear for years that to Sylvanas, the entirety of the Horde - including her own people - is nothing more than a shitton of bodies to stack between herself and her final death.

And all it takes is a tactically calculated "for the Horde" rallying the troops to make them all think "OMG she really does care!"

This is the most glorious thing I have ever read.

Though reading this does make me wonder what Sylvanas is thinking kicking the war bucket instead of trying to make peace and maneuver the Alliance so that it will take the brunt of any future threats.

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Yeah no, Kya is exactly right. You're shoving cherrypicked bits up and acting like they're self evident truth and putting the onus on HER to make YOUR point

If you don't WANT to work to make your point then fine, but she's under no obligation to pay you or do YOUR research for you when it's pointedly lacking.

Moreover, Teldrassil burning does not 'sell' it's being talked about, there's a difference.

Saying Teldrassil burning 'sells' is like saying Sylvanas or Garrosh are well written because they're talked about a lot.

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Brought to you by Sanguine Enterprises.

My Worldbuilding:
http://bloodinkworlds.tumblr.com/

Between Genn, her being accused of abandoning the Horde, and any basic awareness of the Forsaken, how would she ever have peace?

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The Horde doesnt want to attack the Alliance, or so we are led to believe from the excerpt.

It would make more sense for her to try to not escalate things into a war, instead of 'Legions down, to Stormwind!' like it suggest she is doing in the book.

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To be frank, doing a through through research and evaluation of this magnitude would be incredibly time consuming for any single person (unless you've got Blizzard's data). You have different markets to evaluate, and as far as I can tell you, various European markets are very different in their perception than the US market (actually quite an interesting topic we were speaking about the other day), not to mention the Chinese market, different social bubbles (some more vocal, some less), and so on.

And while Krainz started this with an assertion that is not simple to prove, Kyalin did not help it by his/her use of the subscription graph, which is a self-defeating argument within the confines of this topic, as the graph clearly indicates the expansion premises/story decisions have little to almost none influence on the subscription numbers at large (despite what our RP/lore invested social bubbles would believe). I mean, you have Mists of Pandaria, which was pretty stable bar the usual spike while bringing in things like the High King, the destruction of Theramore, the Tyrande scenario, the siege of Orgrimmar, and so on, and you have Warlords of Draenor, which despite its wholly absurd premise featured an incredibly large spike, tanking only thanks to the shoddy/lacking endgame content/features/mechanics.

If the numbers shown in my post mean nothing to you, then nothing would.

I could present you the same information in the format of a well-written report with graphs, percentage of interaction and public reach. If you have no idea how my source data can have a positive impact on the product's value, then why would a well-written report matter at all?

The only exception is that you would look at the report and say "oh, these are numbers with hand-picked words! lots of words! this must make sense!" without even looking at the source data to validate my affirmation.

Now, if you're really saying that seven thousand people being excited about Teldrassil being burned down is meaningless to the affirmation that the idea sells (which means people are buying it), then absolutely no social media data would.

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The fact that wod had such a large initial spike shows one thing: killing orcs sells.

Obviously we need more dead orcs.

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Murder sells. One more reason to murder all dragons!

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It's a part of it. Throwing a part of it - any part of it in the bin is counterproductive to the whole of it. And yes, I happen to be biased in favor of this particular part and would likely only have half as much of a complaint if it was some other part being sacrificed for the convenience of the continental factions thing. That what you want to hear?

The only way what you said actually contradicts what I said is by assuming I literally wanted "nothing to ever die." Which is not what I'm saying, despite all baseless assumptions regarding what 'someone like me' would surely want.

Either that, or you set the bar very unnecessarily high for exactly how much slaughter constitutes this 'warcraft identity' as you see it, apparently based entirely on the RTS genre and it's tropes, a good decade and a half into the MMO we actually deal with nowadays.

I'd just like this war story - which is what we all, including me, know it is - to contain a war I actually care about, not counting stuff off screen.

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Saurfang warned her to not be like Garrosh. That can range from waging war, to not valuing the other races.

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With BFA we have the first time the designers are able to insert consequences of war (like those I listed) in WoW. I believe that justifies such a callback from a very long time staying apart from stark consequences like those we had in the RTS.

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@ Marthen

You're correct that the graph I posted does not isolate the story-based complaints from other, more general complaints. I am however looking at a general downward trend and so I have to ask why burning Teldrassil is going to buck it.

@ Krainz

As I mentioned, the examples you've given are cherrypicked. I mentioned a sentiment analysis because the digital marketers on my LinkedIn won't shut up about it. There are programs that can dump data from social media pages, crawl text and phrases to gauge sentiment, collect data like what the reactions are and how many of them there are.

Anyone can, for example, dump information out of Facebook with Microsoft Power Query for Excel, which Microsoft offers from their website for free. Here's an article on how that works. It even contains a link to Facebook's graph API.

https://www.kasperonbi.com/get-data-...d-power-query/

Something like that would provide an unbiased snapshot of the raw data, and preclude me from asking "how do I know that you're not just showing me posts that agree with you"?


Next, I am assuming that when you speak to a client, you have something that helps to convince them of the return on investment to doing X, Y, or Z. I'm not asking you to do a broad spectrum analysis examining the relationship between sales and social media reactions. That research probably already exists. I'm assuming that you relied on something like that to make the connection that you did.

Now, if you don't have access to those things or believe that providing your basis in this situation is too time consuming, that's fine. You can just say "I don't know what this will do to sales, but I personally like this". That's fine, I can accept that, and I don't know what it will do to sales either.

Of course, I'm not here to make an argument about sales. I'm simply here to remind Night Elf fans, when they make their purchasing decisions, that there is very little reason for hope and that their money will probably be better spent on more deserving franchises.

I'm saying I don't think seven thousand people are excited about Teldrassil burning because I am one of the people coming back for BFA but it's because of the Zandalari

you can't just take the numbers and assume the motivations for these people, your argument is hollow.

Exactly, you and Krainz are practically arguing two different things.

Regardless of whether it sells or not though it doesn't change that Teldrassil burning is a raw deal for the nelfs and things aren't likely to get better for them anytime soon.

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Brought to you by Sanguine Enterprises.

My Worldbuilding:
http://bloodinkworlds.tumblr.com/

Seven thousand people upvoting several different memes about Teldrassil surely shows that they like the idea. How can you not think that?

You can open the wow subreddit and any time to see how hard it is for a post to get over five thousand upvotes.

Your comparison would be valid if I showed the score and interactions of submissions that regarded the BFA reveal.

As for your second point, it's Warcraft. Imagine the fan backlash there would be from High Elf fans if Warcraft III was a MMO.

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