I see lots of talk about how bad the story is.
You’re right, the story right now is a mess. But other than a dream or a reset. How could you take the currently set out lore, and have it make sense, or be enjoyable to you?
You can’t veto the events, what has happened has happened. And because of reasons, you can’t punish sylvanas. Because she has plot armour.
There is no way to make me take the current storylines seriously. So the way to get me to think positive about the story would either involve a kind of soft reset, so what comes after wouldn’t refer to the story we had at all, for one reason or another… or it would involve not taking the story seriously, and making it a self-aware parody of what came before. That’s really the only options I see that might work for me.
Give me a new cast and unrelated storylines, or at least make me laugh. Else my only enjoyment of the story will continue to come from mocking it.
Mostly what Wimbert said but Platinumwow put out a video recently that I think addresses the issue nicely, if they can’t softreset they should at least just try to treat Shadowlands like Me’dan. I think what would go a long way is if the developers just owned up to the fact that the expansion was a disaster for the narrative, part of the reason reddit and everyone else is going haywire is because these people are choosing to ignore reality. If Danuser and most of the writing team put out a blog post admitting the faults of the expansions story, asking for player feedback and trying to make an effort to right things people wouldn’t be so upset but they’re not they’re doubling down.
The writing team seems genuinally convinced that the ending to Shadowlands was acceptable, this whole expansion revolving around Sylvanas to them is fine, they don’t seem concerned with how disrespectfully they’ve handled Arthas, retconned the lore or the way they mistreated poor Tyrande and Elune. The attitude at Blizzard is all wrong. People like that obnoxious UI dev are a microcosm of the teams attitude, they seem to loathe their own players and revel in it.
Honestly I’m going to get a lot of hate for saying this but Medan is even more acceptable then the entirely of shadowlands. At least Medan story felt like Warcraft albeit a power fanficficton
Legitimate question here. But would it be possible to actually have a badguy that says “everything the jailer said was a lie”
As a way to memory hole everything, because as it stand. Nothing we actually know or speculate about the jailer is confirmed in any way just. He did a bad thing to do a good thing for reasons that we don’t know because we don’t know. And nobody is going to tell us what that thing is.
So we could easily have a guy come up and say “Oh yer, that was all just chance, he was lying through his teeth. And you idiots fell for it. Everything he said he had his hands in was just an failed attempt to get what he wanted, you idiots just helped him out this one time he got lucky.”
The dreadlords was just Sire dinathrieus or however you spelling it just being greedy for his own gains. I mean he didn’t get jailed up despite clearly being in kahoots with him, so he’s probably smarter than the jailer. Maybe it’s him we get the info from since he’s not dead. He just messed up his plan and the end results is what happened.
I think i’d be ok with that. Just a simple. “Lol he lied everything is still cool our bad”
For me the Jailer is really the least of it. The Jailer is baffling, because doing him that badly is an impressive feat of botched story-telling. But he doesn’t matter that much. No matter if he lied or not, Sylvanas’, Anduin’s and Tyrande’s arcs still exist, Teldrassil still burned for nothing and fundamental concepts like the afterlife, the azerothian creation myths and Elune were dismantled. “The Jailer lied” doesn’t take Zereth Mortis away, and doesn’t stop the dismantling of the Lich King concept. I’ve assumed that the Jailer was just an opportunist that threw stuff at the wall to see what sticks for a while, but that’s just another flavour of horrible, considering no one really seemed to notice it or react to it.
I kinda disagree with that. We can’t ignore it while still moving around at the level of gods… But we could certainly ignore it if we went back to the level of mere mortals solving mortal problems. If we don’t directly interact with Elune again,w e don’t need to understand her nature, and so on.
Easy, make it so that Denathrius is the one that duped Zovaal to take the fall 
and duped Sylvannas too through Varimathras
I would have tied Azeroth to the Shadowlands characters and created more lore that felt connected to Azeroth.
So, 1 idea could be - the big names who we meet like Vashj, Kael’thas, Draka, Alexandros, Uther etc - have them be given “something” that allows them to travel back to Azeroth, for a brief amount of time to places that mean something.
So, for example.
With Vashj, Necrolords players would go back to both the Ruins of Zin-Azshari, Serpentshrine Cavern and the Ruins of Vashj’ir (Quel’Dormir Gardens.) We’d hear more about Vashj’s take on how things went, but also hear more about her mother, Lestheria Vashj, Quel’Dormir’s High Priestess, Siralen and Vashj’ir High Ranger, Valarian.
Some might cross-locate such as Uther and Alexandros; but their stories would take different routes. For example Alexandros’ story would relate more to the Scarlet Crusade and hold more involvement with Northrend, whereas Uther’s story would be more about Lordaeron and reflections of Arthas.
The only requirement would be that you were level 60.
I know this might be quite short, and doesn’t cover the widespread issues surrounding the story, but it might help connect some dots.
First, I would equip a heavy flamer…
On a more serious note, I wouldn’t fix the story–I would simply abandon it and start anew. Sure, the idea of “fixing” this dumpster fire is tempting for the sake of continuity, but for me it’s just the sunk cost fallacy at work.
So that I would do is this: apologize to the playerbase for the garbage that was BFA+SL. Then give us some kind of “Oh no, what did the Jailer mean? Nobody knows! Oh no, but he’s actually not wrong about unity being stronger than division, so let’s work on that in preparation of Whatever Bad Jailer Talked About in case it arrives sometime in the future!” cinematic. Then, going forward, I would focus on smaller, zone-wide stories. The next future expansions would be introducing and expanding known lore locations such as Azjol-Nerub, Tel-Abim, the Undermine… yes, the Dragon Isles too. I would completely ditch the ‘we must save the world from the newest big big big big big bad’ nonsense. We’ve saved the world like half a dozen times in the last decade. It’s time to focus on local problems.
Would people complain? I have no doubt there would be plenty of crying about how unrealistic it is for literal god-killers to run around solving problems that feel mundane by comparison, but I’m gonna be blunt here: Blizzard’s current direction of constantly ramping up more and more powerful threats is not sustainable.
It’s not really possible to save the story, in the epilogue. In that the story barely existed and was drowned out by lore trivia quiz teases, which had no real impact upon the severely detatched technically speaking main narrative.
As for the epilogue itself. Use it to tie up whatever cosmic thread are hanging around, put them inside a box and don’t touch them for a very long time. (This goes for the Pelagos Arbiter and all other things confined to the Shadowlands)
The Sylvanas epilogue should elaborate on her reasonings. Nobody cares about the obviously evil embodiment of male pattern baldness lying to her. Put it forth in a clear straightforward manner so that the characters present and the audience can make up their own mind, with a broad range of often contrasting conclusins, which represent what they playerbase could think. Use this as a catalyst to redefine the lines of friction for future stories.
It’s impossible at this point. Nothing short of 100% retcon of everything that’s happened after Mists of Pandaria (Or at least after Legion) can fix this mess. It’s broken beyond repair.
If I played this game for the story, I’d have deleted my account at this point.
That has to be my biggest gripe with wow story telling right now.
Nobody will just explain what the hell is going on. And just expect you to care or want to help. I honestly didn’t care if the jailer won or not this expansion.
Writing your characters motivations in a book is not good storytelling. If I have to go buy a book to know basic reasons why your character does anything then you failed as a storyteller. I am still mad about garrosh and Kairozdormu’s excellent adventure being in a book instead of something we see in game.
Make all these stories, either in game cutscenes or memories we can explore through optional quests or something similar. I mean we have a faction called lore walkers, why not re-introduce them and give them a bunch of scenario dungeons that let us explore important story points in wow.
But Steve Da-loser will say:
“Wait and see!!”
Another major issue.
Who the hell is going to be around to wait and see?
If the current fans are advertising this game as trash. Then none of this build up will matter, because the miniscule amount of new players they are getting are going to just stick around for a patch or two, then sod off to something else. None of thise build up will even matter if you can’t get people to stick around to see the “wait and see.”
It’s only the lore fans you are actually hurting.
It’s literally the meme of the guy taking a dump on a plate and saying “How do you know it’s going to be crap it’s not even out yet.” Just stick Steve’s face on it and have it say “Wait and see!”
Find out which devs influencing the storyline have a Tumblr account, or had one in the past. Then I’d fire them and hire people less fixated with social media.
We simply never talk about it again. We never again refer to the Shadowlands or the people there. We never again refer to the events taken place there. It worked perfectly fine with Warlords. After the Addon was finished, no one in-world ever asked about the implications of time travel. Or one Legion across all timelines. Or meeting their parents (or themself). It simply never came up again, like it never existed. Even with the Mag´har quests in BFA, it was the same. So, there is suddenly Iron Horde here? And the Draenei went crazy? Well, not important. Never mentioned again. No one wondered about it. No one commented it. They simply reused cool Iron Horde art assets like Iron Star and Aircraft Carrier during the faction invasions and called it a day. And you know what? Simply ignoring the old, bad lore worked perfectly fine. No one cares about it anymore.
Oh, can we have Anduin do the Thrall and write himself out of the plot at the start of the next addon for personal reasons, since his arc is tied to the SL stuff now like Thrall’s was to WoD-stuff?
It seems someone is reading these threads because my second post that absolutely slated them was removed by Blizzard for seemingly no violation of the rules. A completely innocuous post, normally I wouldn’t comment but given the circumstances I have to wonder whether that was a coincidence or someone just lost their temper because it struck a nerve.
Well, this forum must be quite a depressing place for quite a few of the involved people… I mean, in the US forums there are at least still some positive threads to focus on instead of the meaner ones, but here it’s mostly all snark by now… Me included. And it doesn’t really matter if it is deserved, it makes it quite hard to actually engage with the criticism from their side.
But well… It’s not like we expected the devs to listen to the eu forums anyways, so heck them, this is more of a self-help group. 
Apart from that, deleting posts without even citing violations is quite childish, so when in doubt I’d hope for a genuine mistake instead.