How about blizz actually allows for character development to drive the story instead of shoe horning characters into a terrible plot

Lore Story
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Please blizz can you start thinking as your characters before you write from now on. I’ll focus in on one character/faction although there are many more example of this I’m sure.

Tyrande and the night elves:
She became vengeance for her people that were killed by an unprovoked attack by the horde. She went after the person who committed it to basically have the vengeance taken away and just be told to chill… Why would you listen, like genuinely why?

If someone who you were supposed to be chill with, turned up and burned down your house, killing your family. Then when you went after them, people tried to preach forgiveness, you would say, do one and kill that SoaB. Why have Tyrande and the night elves forgiven the undead? There’s no reason behind this.

They then poured the souls of their people into a seed, her husband and love of her life Malfurian sent himself to the afterlife for this seed and it’s basically been taken over by the dragons, their surviving people are told to again just chill with the fact we’re teaming up again with someone who was slaughtering their people aka Vyranoth and her primalist followers. Now that seed, that was made with the souls of their people is functionally a new town in the dragon isle aka under dragon rule. I’m sorry why are they not killing everyone involved in the genocide of their people right now, like seriously think for a second, this was not some long feud, this was less than a decade ago a genocide of you people occurred then more of your people were sacrificed and you’re just told to sit there and be a good girl.

Honestly since you’ve added in cross faction grouping and guilding, you’re open to split up the alliance, have the night elf and worgen tell the humans to do one and go after the forsaken, blood and fire. Have the scrambling alliance trying to reform with a gutted military force, the horde are then left with a weird choice, to fight the night elfs and worgan or leave the foresaken to them for their crimes. See this would be interesting, There’s development to the world that could happen instead of you pulling some next cosmic big bag out your rears.

Just want to add again, this isn’t just the night elves and worgen, there’s so many genuine grievances that characters and countries have that are just brushed under the carpet for the sake of fight cosmic bid bad let’s all hug. Why are the blood elves not still rioting over jaina’s murdering of their people in Dalaran? Why are the tauren still with the horde after the burning of teldrasil, because you can say o well that was just Slyvannas all you want but everyone else there followed the damn orders. It’s such a lazy cop out to try and push all the evils onto a character you side line just so you can have everyone be bestest friends.

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Because it was all Sylvanas’ fault, and the Forsaken were just victims of their totalitatian government, and the ancient Night Elves are wise enough to see that, once Elune forces them to stop their killing spree. Elune stopped Tyrande from killing Sylvanas, and shortly after we learn that Sylvanas herself was just a puppet manipulated by her fears. So Tyrande supposedly becomes the bigger person and breaks the cycle. She lets go of her focus on destruction and starts focussing on renewal instead. Her goddess hadn’t forsaken her, she personally intervened to give her a very clear mission. To rebuild.
That’s the story they wanted to tell. Don’t mind that they told us that story with Jaina more than once already, among others. They were actually going for a character arc here, they just weren’t doing it well enough to convince you or me.

And why did the writers choose that one? Because they don’t believe in war and vengeance and don’t want to propagate or defend them. Becsuse they work in a societal climate, where storytellers are told to think of their “social responsibilities” first. Because they don’t want wo hear how Garrosh is based, when he is supposed to be the personification of insecure and toxic masculinity, and they don’t want to hear about how this and that race on Azeroth should be wiped out, when they feel that the races are in large part allegories for real races.
And, maybe most importantly, because they want to actually please the players and social media supports them in believing that this could well be what the majority wants.

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So in other words, the writers are forcing their personal agendas into the story instead of allowing the story to flow naturally in a believable manner they strangle any development that doesn’t fit the agenda they’re pushing.

This is the most stupid and racist opinion I’ve heard, and I don’t mean from you, I’m aware you’re just mentioning the idea not saying it’s your opinion. I’ve seen this multiple places for example in DnD the twitter warriors claimed that orcs are an allegory of black people, which if you see and orc and think of a black person, well then you’re a racist not the content, especially in dnd when the concept art for fighter is literally a black man.

Which is clearly incorrect as they have been consistently haemorrhaging players. So in summary, you comment pretty much backs up my statement, instead of allowing the characters to drive the story and the world, they have a specific agenda they want to push and then force the narrative in that direction regardless of how it lands for the player experience or the story as a whole.

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That might be a part of it as well, but that’s not exactly what I was saying, no. I was saying that they were trying to create the flow that leads from hatred to peace and renewal naturally. They aren’t supposed to just make things flow wherever they will go in a series of "and then"s, they are supposed to create a narrative from the situation. And yes, that means they get to choose the narrative based on what they think is best. Which includes their weird californian thinking.

I actually don’t think that for most of them, including their leadership, it is an attempt to educate the player or to impress their vlrues on us. I don’t think this is a Disney or BBC or whichever franchise-destroyer you might be thinking of type situation. I don’t think Bobby was ok with less revenue, as long as the message shone through. I just think they were trying their best.And maybe it was because the management failed, maybe they failed to communicate the story they had in their head, maybe the implementation into the game became shoddy, when content was reordered or cut, maybe they are just plain incompetend. Whatever it was, their best wasn’t very good, and even the people who liked it in principle have to fill in the holes for themselves.

And people who aren’t poised to like it anyways like you and I? Well, we were further repelled.

I won’t disagree with that. But I do believe that even if the people there were to think so, they would be too afraid of the reaction if they disregarded it. We might call that cowardice, but I do think it’s real.

They’ve been haemorrhaging players since Wrath, and they have tried out quite a few different tones in the addons since. DF is the cuddliest, friendliest, banalest addon yet. And yet, they seem to retain the remaining players better than in the last 2 addons and might even be getting a number of them back. I don’t have the statistics. But they do, and I’m not certain that their pivot after Shadowlands isn’t working out for them. A big part of it is that a lot of WoW players just don’t really care that much about the story at all, and just don’t want to be annoyed by it. If peace and love in the lore mean they can get to play all the races with their friends and get a bigger variety of transmogg options that’s a win for them.

I’d like to believe that their current course is hurting them, but frakly, looking at commentators like T&E and their followings, I’m not really sure.

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You’re right I went abit full tin foil there on the propaganda angle, why blame malice when incompetence is almost always more likely. I’m actually fine with a happy story with peace and friendship as long as they keep to that tone. The issue is they have a story beat that has an instinctive reaction and they brute force the story in the opposite direction. That’s what I was alluding in the original message. Instead of letting the characters drive the world they have a place they want the world to be and then force the characters into it, which is bad story telling, it’s very jarring to anyone reading/playing it and also why they keep having these dumb cosmic big bads from the blue that makes the world story feel so detached from everything else, focusing on the human aspect of their world when it comes to story would allow far more people to engage with the story, having an entire expansion sorting out their worlds drama instead of cosmic big bads would be better narratively. I know it’s then easy to point at BFA and say but that’s what that tried to do and people didn’t like it, but people didn’t like BFA mainly for the features in the game and the Sylvannas stuff, the rest of the story was pretty decent. Same in dragonflight some of the side stories are decent, but the main story sucks because they have this place they want to be at and force the narrative there instead of letting it flow, DF’s story is like getting whiplash constantly

I don’t think streamers are any kind of useful metric as they all run on a cycle. They rag on blizz, then when a new piece of content is being announce they all claim how amazing blizz is omg they’ve changed they’re listening and the same malarkey, they make money from clickbait and rage is very good clickbait. While they had a downturn since wrath where they basically hit the market cap, they never lost fans the way they did with shadowlands, and those fans wont come back when they get clowned on for the ridiculous cinematics that are all over youtube, which is a shame because if they deliver on all the promised features for the next expac the game will be very fun on a technical level but the story, I know this is only a personal anecdote, but I truely believe there are alot of old fans like myself myself and all the people I’ve played with, that aren’t bothering with pre order simply because we know they keep being clowns with the story and I’m not getting sucked in again unless I see a serious shift.

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I agree 100%. Retail as an RPG is quite dead but I still like to imagine how my characters might think and what their opinions might be on certain things.

I mained a worgen for a while and there is no chance in hell that he or his people would ever forgive what the Horde did to them. They invaded when they were already low, they murdered countless Gilneans, they killed their beloved prince, they gassed the land with plague bombs and they even tried to prevent them retreating to Kalimdor.

His people were destitute, then his king betrayed them and made friends with Stormwind, cosying up to the people who constantly got in the way of justice. Who preached forgiveness for a genocide they weren’t the victims of. He turned from a wolf leading his pack to a dog on a leash. He is no king of mine.

And then he wasn’t even there when they came again. It wasn’t enough to destroy Gilneas. They sacked Darkshore and burned Teldrassil, the most horrible warcrime ever committed by a faction in the game’s runtime. Those who found shelter there, burned to death. Women, children, the elderly.

No forgiveness exists in the mind of any night elf or Gilean for that. The fact that this plot of vengeance went nowhere because of a moral lesson is reason enough to fire the whole writing team.

I am so, so tired of hearing this. Weakness of character does not excuse genocide. Sylvanas was freed from all control back in WCIII. Her actions and choices were her own. But even so, to blame just her for this is to pardon countless murderers and cowards for their part. It wasn’t Sylvanas who fired the plague catapults into Gilneas, it wasn’t Sylvanas who attacked Gilneas’ Capital and murdered its people in droves. It wasn’t Sylvanas whose hand pulled the lever that launched fire onto the innocent, nor just Sylvanas who stood by and let it happpen.

It was the horde. They did horrible things because they were too cowardly to refuse the order for murdering civilians. They’re ALL guilty, they ALL need to be served the cold hard justice that is due. In my character’s mind, there will be no peace until the score is settled. And the score will be settled when - to quote Garrosh - there are mountains of skulls and rivers of blood in Durotar.

There is no Blood and Honour here… just blood.

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You are hearing this, because the devs are saying it. The guys who write the story. So that’s what they wanted to tell, and clearly failed to get through to you. Sylvanas wasn’t mind controlled, but she was manipulated and gaslit, and just another pawn in a bigger cruel game (they just retroactivley invented for that purpose…).

Now there you mention something that I find far more annoying in WoW’s story-telling than their bending of characters: They reduce any conflict to the conflict between characters. Dealing with Sylvanas should not have been the conclusion to dealing with the Horde, just as dealing with the Incarnates shouldn’t solve the issues of the Primalists, and dealing with the Old Gods shouldn’t solve the problems with the Twilight Hammer, etc.

You’re right, the Horde’s part in the burning of Teldrassil was just ignored, because the Horde soldiers weren’t treated as characters, but as an extension of their warchief. And that’s just… well, as common as the phrase is, bad writing. You can’t just kill mustache man in WWII and then just leave the remaining NSDAP to govern. The very least they’d have to do is to throw out their old names logos and publicly distance themselves from everything the old regime stood for. More likely than not they would be occupied, with foreign officials watching and controlling everything they did for years. Things could never just stay the same. And that’s just for purely practical reasons, no vengeful drives required.

Now… that could quite easily have been done with the Scarlets, the Twilight Hammer, or the Primalists. They could have given us stories about our attempts to round them up, destroy the organization without destroying the people, and deradicalising them where possible, and incarerating or 4executing them where not. Sounds souspiciously like world-building plot to me.

With Horde and Alliance that’smuch harder, though. For branding reasons they can’t just disband and reform a faction. And even if they were trying to go for an occupation plot, with the Alliance as sometimes brutal and vengeful oocupiers and the good guys within the Horde trying to regain some freedoms. And would you have been happy with that? Playing the henchmen of the tyrannic empire, while the Horde players get to play the righteous rebels after burning the tree? I certainly wouldn’t have been.

And your comments don’t read like that, either. You argue that the Alliance should never be ok with anything less than “settling the score” with blood. And I think the only way to write the story like that without getting rid of one the factions (which just isn’t an option)… is by making the Alliance lose horribly, so the Horde gets to spare them. Yay, Alliance Pride and all that.

They should just never have let it get that far. At this point there are only bad options left. I genuinely think they didn’t expect the reaction to Teldrassil to be that big. It wasn’t for Theramore. And I think they shot themselves in the foot, when they accidentaly created one of the most emotional quests they ever did with the rescue of survivors while the tree was burning. They put the focus where they actually didn’t wnt it, and they have been trying to come up how to resolve that for 5 years now. And the best thing we can say about that resolution is that it ends the storyline. Finally.

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A good comment. I like it. Much of what you said it true. And yes, it always boils down to one simple fact. The writers are incredibly incompetent. The distilling of races, nations and people to a few faces and a hivemind under their command has damaged and shrunk the world. And in my opinion, kill all forms of immersion and realism.

This I don’t think so. I say give the Night Elves and Gilneans their day. Together, they storm the Undercity. Anduin warns them the other Alliance leaders might not agree. Genn tells him his own son would have been Anduin’s age, but never got that chance.

Turalyon serves the Light and takes the Argent Dawn along, and the Dwarves, who border Lordearon, agree to send troops as well. If fewer.

The horde offers the forsaken sanctuary on Kalimdor, to those willing and the battle for Undercity ends with the death of Nathanos, the wounding of Sylvanas - who flees to Quel’Thalas - and the reclamation of Lordearon for the Alliance.

Now the victors of this battle can decide what to do with the land. They choose to change it, heal it and despite protests of the rest of the Alliance, they settle it again, on the doorstep of the Blood Elves. Night Elves and Gileans working in tandem to restore themselves a homeland.

So much you can do with that. What about the blood elves who live so close? What about them sheltering Sylvanas? Will the night elves go back and reclaim their homes on Kalimdor? Will Genn rule Lordearon now? Or will other human nations re-emerge? What about the internal turmoil within the Alliance this caused? And so much more.
This is what actual writing is. Not the perpetuation of the eternal status quo.

You can’t just force the Alliance to seek justice and then lose either, that makes the problem worse. Give them justice. Make them wonder where justice ends and revenge begins. And dangle the sword of discord above their heads in the aftermath.

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That kind of writing isn’t meant for a franchise that isn’t meant to end for decades… or ever, really. The conquest or destruction of an enemy fortress can be a cool moment. Looking at the ruins after, and not being able to access your favourite places in the game just sucks, though.

And we’re not just dealing with written words, we are dealing with art assets and development times. And more importantly, a clearly stated “gameplay first” philosophy. Change can’t easily be made gradual, and a back and forth between factions would take ages to get anywhere at all, except towards ruins. At least if they don’t want to make eternal war between playable factions pretty much the only content - which would certainly annoy just as many people.

That’s why I’m generally just writing the actual war between playable races off as a failed concept that should never have been introduced, and anything they invest in it now at most throwing good money after bad. Border conflicts and scirmishes, and ongoing hostilities and competition between the factions weren’t a bad thing for the story, and it would be really nice, if something like that could come back. But after we turned it into an all-out extinction level conflict with cities being nuked? Might just be too much baggage to stick to any conflict between those two factions at all by now.
Not that just deleting all conflict with any complexety beyond “Smash the baddy!” is any better, mind you. That’s what they are doing, and it’s just so very, very, very, very boring… But looking towards new solutions instead of trying to stick to the concepts they accidentally killed, is where I’d see the only chance of real improvement.

I mean, in principle we don’t really need race-based factions to have conflicting factions.

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Imagine that LOL

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I disagree, you could do this in a number of ways and it can still work, look at GW2 for example, lions arch gets fully destroyed as part of the story and as the player you’re running round the ruins of a place you liked, it makes you the play more emotionally invested in the story.

When it comes to this they actually could, now that they have cross faction parties and guilds it would be a perfect time to do this with minimal impact on player agency in game. It would allow for an interesting world and would increase engagement. The largest issues wow has IMO is they keep as you pointed out boiling down all the evil to one character then shifting it over to a cosmic BBEG overlord. It’s as I’ve said in other places the writers are bad because they write in childish absolutes, the good guys are good and only do good things, instead of how Warcraft always used to be, everyone is kinda morally grey they look after their own faction and their world sometimes they do messed up stuff, sometimes they do good stuff.

Let’s say the Worgen and the Night elves splinter off from the alliance and go after the forsaken, they wouldn’t want to occupy the undercity they would want to destory it, you then would have a wrecked in ruins undercity that the horde players would use still as the thematically set it so you’re survivors returning after the destruction. It also wouldn’t impact the players that don’t care for lore because again you can cross faction guild and group.

Which ties into another issue blizzard seems to have, you do not have to tie up every storyline in the expac you started it in for christ sake. Again because they’re not using the characters to develop the world they have no actual payoff to any story beat simple because they have to wrap it up for the next cosmic big bad in next expac etc. It’s incredibly tedious. The only person that’s had a decent story arch is jaina she spanned expac of hating the horde.

Not changing things is not the answer to how to make a game survive long term. They don’t have to do the whole splintered faction either, I just wish for the love of christ they would stop with all the cosmic BS and just focus on their world, their characters. Sadly this wont happen as the next expac is another de humanised big bag un knowable cosmic force, way to churn out more of the same crap blizz, it’s genuinely like they don’t want a fan base.

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We have destroyed cities in WoW, no need to look for other games to comparisons. I hate them. And when I played GW2 they already remade the city for years, and until recently the story of its destruction wasn’t even replayable, so I can’t say that I can really relate to the feeling in this case.

What I can say is that this was damage explicitly done by NPC factions that you could and would actually get to smash to pieces afterwards, so I kinda doubt a WoW faction war scenario would ever feel comparible.

I said they can’t do so for branding reasons. Of course they have the technology to do it. But Horde and Alliance are among the concepts their players are most invested in, and which sell the most merch. So from a business standpoint they just can’t kill them without being very, very, very, very, very sure that they have something better to offer. And they aren’t, and probably won’t ever be. They can bench them, but they can’t outright kill them.

The players may not care much for the lore, but they certainly care for the setting and its graphics. Just because they think WoW’s story has been too stupid to take seriously in ages, and don’t much care for that to change anymore, doesn’t mean they’d be fine with the places that trigger those nice feelings of nostalgia in ruins.

Apart from that… I am certainly in favour of groups acting independently from Horde and Alliance, like the Worgen and Night Elves in your example. What I don’t think is that we should continue the badly written conflicts that led us here. The writing here won’t get better, if you just make it “fairer”. Certainly not if being “fair” just means more ruins. It’s just more investment into a failed storyline that should just be allowed to die, and it is as likely, or more likely to make things worse thn it is to make thing better.

Especially after the turn towards forgiveness is already done. Genn already accepted cooperation with Calia’s Forsaken and Tyrande already accepted the Horde’s help in saving the tree. It’s too late to change that. Arguing for more war from them now isn’t arguing against unnatural character development, it’s asking for another flip-flop in their characters. It’s over. Let it die.

And do better with the next story about other conflicts.

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The phrase reluctant needs to be used here, they weren’t happy or trusting with it. The problem is you can’t really have a story going forward until you do, it’s literally so they genocides your people, they killed you prince and functionally destroyed your entire nation? Yeah. And you’re all just chill now? Yeah.

You literally cannot have nay decent character narrative until you address that. I’m not saying get rid of horde or alliance, I’m saying splintered factions, So essentially a third faction. It only needs to exist for a few expacs but you need to resolve the issues with the forsaken, night elves and worgen without just saying they chill now.

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I disagree strongly that an MMO’s writing should be hamstrung in any way by its genre. It’s been done, it can be done better still. But it doesn’t matter anymore here. So that’s all I’ll say on the matter.

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But she always was a B., even towards Malfurion after his awakening. Its kind of telling, that the only way of nelf to act as they should (from WC 2-3) is to drink dark moon juices

That is BS, burning the Tree was right and just, and anyone who object to killing enemies in Warcraft should gtfo into MLP:MMO, or to have Olympic golden medal for mental gymnastic or selective blindness, because killing everyone who is ours enemies is what we do since level 1, quest-wise. The only difference that time, is that nelfs players is entitled. I did not saw same level of reaction about lost of Gilneas, back in Cata. I think all equal in Alliance, but nelfs is just a bit more equal.

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My dude wtf are you talking about. My entire point is that they should follow on the plot of killing enemies and not just flip the switch that everyone is hugs and loves, I also said that this aint just about the Nelf, Wrogen have legit beef with the forsaken. The horde have beef with alliance but for some reason they all just hug it out from no where. The reason the story sucks isn’t due to the lack of blood and killing it sucks because they rely on the build up of the revenge without the payoff, they instead 180 the characters personality from nowhere and now it’s hugs and love.

Also it doesn’t have to be about killing and violence, they just need to stop flipping the plot and characters on it’s head because some writer in the room has daddy issues they need to address and wants to project it all over the narrative. Let the characters drive the story of the world instead of having a cosmic big bad that you then have to shoehorn the characters into dealing with.

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