Don’t forget that we’ll lose even if we win! Oh and it’ll be what…2 or 3 new given territories in the ‘defeat’ terms. So my personal prediction is that means Ashenvale is gone, and possibly Arathi. Cos the Alliance committed so many massacres and war crimes in the EKs and they felt bad 
Always a third choice; I quit the game 
The saddest thing for me is that BFA could have been a real good expansion if the promised “faction war” weren’t synonymous with a “Alliance good- Horde bad” sledgehammer.
I mean, okay it has always been like this but never before in such extremes and I just don’t get the motivation behind this.
It is as if the writers see Horde players as wayward children who need this message beaten into them all over again.
And no, it’s nowhere near balanced or even “morally grey”. The Horde is always the aggressor who commits unspeakable atrocities while everything the Alliance does is"justified retaliation".
Our warchief burns the tree with all those poor Nelf women and children, and in return the Alliance gets the UC siege ( where it is of course again Sylvanas who blights her own city and people because she’s oh so bad and we might have forgotten about that. )
Then Jaina comes and saves the day and Alliance PCs get her really heartbreaking family drama story, just in case they didn’t know already what a wonderful and tragic character she is.
The Alliance attacks Dazar Alor and kills Rastakhan, but that’s kinda okay because the Zandalari chose the wrong side and don’t deserve better and anyway, the Alliance PC is advised to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible ( because remember kids: Alliance good- Horde bad! )
Next heartbreaking story: poor Derek Proudmoore. Sylvanas again planning a real bad, atrocious crime here! Okay, it could have worked and Jaina would be dead by now - a life for a life, fair balance- but no, it’s too evil, we have to stop it. ( even Talanji who has just had her dad murdered by the Alliance thinks it’s too evil! )
And by “we” I mean the Horde PC because hey we don’t have to be the bad guys, we can of course choose to be the honorable traitors! Thank the Light, all is not lost!
And that’s where we are now. “Team crazy -evil- genocide- committing-banshee” or " Team Traitors" with Baine representing the best of the Horde, Thrall, a very sad, very rueful Saurfang and now Lorthemar, too.
And we’re so sorry and please Alliance forgive us we’ll never do it again! ( For real, this time. We swear on our honor.)
I mean, really Blizzard, what has the average Horde PC ever done to you to deserve such a choice? We’re people, too! Some of us are even nice people! ( hard to believe I know ). And we pay our subscription, too, you know?
That all said, the expansion is not yet over and I still haven’t given up hope for a halfway satisfying conclusion of this mess. As for now, it’s just really frustrating.
/end rant
I suspect it may have something to do with asking to get rid of Garrosh. Got no evidence for anything sinister other than them admitting that it was a mistake to get rid of him. That and it’s canon now that the Garrosh timeline was the greatest outcome the Horde could have had with him being a true Warchief.
I too was hooked on the whole war premise: From the announcement and the showing of the cinematic all the way to the War of the Thorns. I had hoped that we would get a second Mists of Pandaria but in better: In Legion we finally saw the Alliance taking the initiative for once, and then again in Silithus. Maybe finally it was time for a real war.
Well, that was gone as soon as the pre-patch began, where the Horde soldiers were portrayed as bloodthirsty savages, while the night elves were degraded to absolute crybabies. At least ingame the pre-patch was one of the most one-sided conflicts in the entirety of Warcraft.
And then came the Burning and the Siege of Lordaeron. Completely gone was the magic of the first cinematic. Gone was every feeling of hype for a great conflict and war with the potential to build up new characters similar to Taylor and Nazgrim.
I’ve said it numerous times, and I will say it again: Watching the BfA-Cinematic makes you want to play THAT Battle for Azeroth. Not the complete s***show that is the actual current expansion.
Sooo much…
Can’t even watch it anymore. Mixed rage and sadness at what could’ve been.
Could it, though? I’m genuinely unsure. Let me think out loud, for a bit.
I think it is a big conceptual problem with the faction war that one side can only gain something by taking it from other players. You can’t destroy Teldrassil or Undercity without making Night Elf or Forsaken players lose a place they all love. Permanently. I think if it is justified or not isn’t the most important thing here. The loss is real either way. And, as many stories tell us, as much as we might be motivated by revenge, any joy we derive from it is usually short-lived, while our grief and loss isn’t.
Even worse, to some degree our yearning for revenge will always stay unfulfilled. We can never root out or even dissolve the other faction, can never kill all the characters we might want to kill.
So it seems that in balance everyone loses out, doesn’t it?
I guess there are possible ways around that.
One way might be to conquer instead of destroying. The Horde takes Teldrassil, the Alliance takes Undercity. Both factions can simultaneously gain and lose stuff. Even better, the loss doesn’t have to feel permanent, since an obvious goal would be to free your stuff from their hands.
This method would have the problem of substancially lowering the stakes, though. Avoiding afflicting losses makes for the feeling of a children’s story, and the people who would prefer a faction war story would usually also prefer something more “real”. They can always throw out casualty numbers, but as long as they don’t really make them relevant to the story they really don’t mean anything…
But at least putting the option of conquest out there and not just all-out destruction might mitigate some problems.
Another way they could go about it would be to give the factions victories at places where the player of the defeated faction never played and thus have no real relation to. There could have been some great victory of the Horde, with great characters on both sides involved, at some Kul Tiran fortress the Alliance player never visited for questing or anything else, for example. The Alliance player would only hear that some fortress fell, while the Horde player would have some real victory on their hands. Remember how the Alliance player rooted out the vampires that were trying to ally themselves to the Horde that the Horde player never got to hear about? It would be just like that. They even tried to give us a personal reason to hate the vampire boss.
…but it also had no impact on the greater story whatsoever. And that is a problem with this way of doing things. You have to give both factions two fully independent storylines that still fit together perfectly. You also can never copy+paste the same quests for the same areas for both sides while doing this. Both certainly shouldn’r be impossible for Blizzard, but it wouldn’t be easy. And in the end… while both factions get the triumphs without feeling the losses… neither faction would get triumphs over the players of the other faction. I am quite certain not everyone would like that (though I might).
Well, nothing is perfect. So how does a classic PvE scenario compare? Some baddie shows up and we somehow gather power and fight it. While the threat often is played as enormous, actual losses in characters or cities aren’t that common (I think WoD’s blasted lands are quite unique in that a NPC-army actually took long-standing factio fortresses - and minor ones at that). Our long-term absolute victory is guaranteed, though we might lose some battles along the way.
So… in-universe the stakes are unimaginably high, but since we know we can’t lose they actually feel pretty low. And while losses still hurt, at least we take every loss with the almost certainty that we will make the culprit pay in full. So… I guess this ranks somewhere between the “real” faction war and the conquest idea in terms of feel. We do have losses, but we get full revenge, and it does lack real weight, but not as much as a kind of amicable faction conflict would. The more you try to make the fight against the NPC matter, the more you will have to dial up the losses.
I guess as a result the NPC-conflict is more of a compromise solution than a clear winner against the faction conflict ideas… depending on your tastes.
Combined this means that they really can’t just let things happen as they realistically would. They always have to have a hand on the scales. They always have to throw out plot devices to prevent one catastophe or the other. So I’m not sure we can get very far by arguing what would happen between the factions if WoW were real.
If we are talking about realism… I would think both factions have become too large and too diverse to survive very long without internal fighting and rebellions. There is no unity of purpose, not even in opposing the other faction. And after 35 years filled with war after war after war there shouldn’t be any ressources for anyone to fight anyone else, really.
So that’s why I wasn’t talking about a realistic story, but about how the story would make players feel. Because realism in the story isn’t possible, in my eyes, and player reactions are so much more real.
The story will always be forced, bound by gameplay restraints, and a faction war story will be more forced than most.
Enough ranting. Good Night.
You are clearly alliance biased and clearly an alliance player, im talking about the HORDE and i want to see alliance destroyed. You talk about peace and flowers along with unicorn leaders.
You are not convincing by logging with a low level horde toon and answering me.
Take a look what the forum warrior nelf answered to your unicorn peace nonsense and may this be a lesson to your thrall/saurfang alliance lapdog policies.
For Sylvanas
For the HORDE.
BURN IT.
I think we all agree that war is bad in principle and in a realistic scenario, no side should still have the capacities and ressources to continue it.
But it’s what this game is about, basically. Without the constant looming threat of an attack by the other, neither Horde nor Alliance would still exist, and we would all take up arms only when the next big baddie threatens to destroy our world.
But that would be- boring. The faction war is what makes this game interesting imo, my complaint is only that it should have been written more balanced for BFA and yes- less bloody too, for all I care.
Teldrassil was pushing things too far. We can practically never complain about anything the Alliance does now without getting GENOCIDE! thrown back in our faces.
Undercity wasn’t a fair compensation because Undead “lives” don’t matter to most ( not even to their queen anymore, obviously ) and they don’t have children so it’s all way less tragic.
Dazar’Alor as payback made no sense either since the Zandalari had absolutely nothing to do with Darkshore and the Night Elves weren’t even involved.
But as it has been said before, all of this would have made sense if the writers had the Alliance strike first.
But no, it happens as it always does: Horde attacks first, Alliance is forced to react and every action after Teldrassil will be considered rightous. Internal conflict happens only on Horde side, team red is divided once more.
Okay, Anduin refusing to aid the Night Elves was a good approach, but the opportunity to make things more interesting with the Night Warrior thing and them acting on their own account was squandered because obviously, they do nothing. And will probably fight side by side with Saurfang in the final raid…
And in this story finanly some player choice in story for once, nope doesnt matter what side you pick have to go traitor to warchief/rebelion path anyway.
Like first part id understand as was changed rather late to add it but future shouldve had actual differences atleats not just play along.
IF you choose to side with sylvannas why you have to work consatntly against her, (and for any that says its good,imagine if you choose saurfangs side but had to work against him the whole time).
Even without changing story a ton and just swapping teldrasil adn undercity the story still wouldnt have been great or fantastic but already been lot better(and i feel like ogrinally was gonna be undercity first but changed later) the cinematic, saying anduin was gonna do whats right for Alliance or something and putting on man pants or so.
I understand, and I argued the same for quite a while. And I certainly agree that the faction war could have been sooooooo much less bad, if they strayed from the “blue good, red bad” formula. So forgive me for not commenting on most of your post and instead focussing on the question where I am at now: If the faction war actually is a good and important part of the game at all, or if it might always be doomed to fail.
I can certainly agree that world peace would be boring.
But I don’t really think one united faction is the only alternative to two factions, at least not lorewise. Every political group being able to act in its own interests and being able to fight without sanction from SW/OG and without making every conflict a world war might actually give us more conflict instead of less.
But apart from that… I am really not sure if NPCs couldn’t be just as constant a threat as a player faction? Why couldn’t there be a permanent NPC faction of power that was vying for control of Azeroth and was neither unthinking, nor unable to be reasoned with, but always a looming threat? If the Horde never was playable, but was just an NPC antagonist to the character from the start, would it make the threat feel less real to you?
Or another example, that migth be possible in the future: If Yrel came with an NPC faction of Light-fanatics, set up shop in a cleansed eastern Lordaeron (supplanting the Argents, I guess), had long-term plans to conquer and convert everyone in Azeroth, but didn’t have the power to force it through at the start and would be quite willing to ally with Azeroth’s peoples to fend of Void and Legion… Couldn’t that be just as much of a permanent looming threat?
I’m genuinely interested and not trying to suggest anything here. I personally feel that the factions are increasingly hurtful to the game, and though I can give quite a few justifications for that feeling, I really don’t know if any of those reasons triggered it. So I am very interested in any utility the factions have that I might have overlooked.
Not really, they don’t matter because the Undercity civilians got evacuated.
Like, Sylvanas orders Saurfang to do it two seconds after Teldrassil, the Horde siege of Lordaeron scenario begins by repelling Alliance Druids and evacuating the civilians.
You’re right, I forgot about that. I still daresay that even if every Forsaken in UC had died in the siege, there wouldn’t have been the same outcry as about Teldrassil. And anyway it’s just one more proof for the biased writing.
I am pretty sure that a retcon with most night elven civilians escaping would be welcomed by both factions.
Too late! This trainwreck is too far gone unless they retcon the entire war.
We still don’t know what happened to most of Brill’s inhabitants.
Actually, we do know, as some of the former Brill Citizens appear in Orgrimmar.
And the ones that aren’t in orgrimmar?
Probably brutally impaled on Alliance Spears because the Alliance is evil and racist.
Despite all the sources pointing to the contrary. I guess these particular citizens just ran faster then the others, there was no evacuation ordered on the very eve of Teldrassil’s burning.
Maybe they did survive. But Brill’s destruction is completely off-screen. There’s no short story like a good war, and nothing was shown in game. It’s already gone by the start of the battle for lordaeron scenario on both sides. Blizzard give it zero attention.