The problem is that each faction complains when they lose. During BFA there was a lot of complaining because people felt the Horde was shown as too evil and the Alliance as too incompetent and so on.
You can’t have A vs B storylines like that without having to maintain a status quo, since neither can win.
Vanilla SWTOR was a way somewhat around it. Most parts of the class campaigns there happened at the neutral planets with both sides achieving some tactical victories, and the direct conflicts had more or less even victory rate without much care for the status quo in the specific instance. Here it might be the same-ish, with the quests and dungeons on both sides telling the same story from different angles with a clear understanding of who won what in a specific location like the whole Stonetalon Mountains arc. Or, for example, if we had been openly told that it was the Horde that conquered the Dire Maul and gained the upper hand in most of Feralas while the Alliance was busy getting the legacy of Shen’dralar out. After all, a victory can sometimes be achieved without eradicating the enemy to the last.
Also kinda helps from a mental loop that swotors stories and events take place over a decade if not more in some cases. Until the xpacs anyway when they went down the ‘lol one year lol’ route. But even then when your talking planets the numbers game matters a little less and helps keep things viable and fresh…ish. As opposed to fighting over the same farm in the middle of nowhere for 20 years because the devs can’t let anything change or move forward
City of Heroes/Villains made it work, because the whole point of comic style GvE is that the status quo is maintained. The Heroes win, then the Villains break out of jail (that was literally the og Villain tutorial lol), the Villains steal the Gizmo, then the Heroes swoop in to break it before it does any longer term damage. It worked, especially as there were plenty of other neutral or chaotic forces to punch in the face.
WoW has long, long since moved on from that. Arguably since WC3 went “Actually, it’s not just Evil Orcs and Good Humans”. So… clinging on to that dead horse will do more harm than good long term, I think.
after recently redoing the planetary stories as well as the class stories in base game, the victories i noticed were tangible, if short lived as both the empire and republic planetaries kept a back and forth going. easiest place to notice it rly is on Taris and Balmorra due to the fact, aside from the first two planets, their the only ones whose levelling order is out of sync with the others. Republic goes to Taris first before Balmorra while the Empire is the opposite and goes to Balmorra first and Taris after. From the republic PoV with Taris, the empire has yet to have a tangible presence so their planetary is securing the world. When the imperial player gets there, the republic is well entrenched and its a war effort to send them running off-world.
with balmorra the empire puts down the rebellion against them and routs their republic aid to claim full planetary control. When the republic player reaches it they again besiege territory the empire claimed to push them off-world. short lived victories and defeats but tangible as their witnessed from both sides.
Not quite.
Thrall brought this up to Tyrande to try and get some sort of reconcilliation going, and Tyrande was utterly unmoved and basically told Thrall to GTFO.
Can you source this? Because I cannot remeber this at all 
What lore historians?
There was a Reddit Q&A session with a supposed lore historian, an internal role at Blizzard was dedicated to overseeing the integrity of the setting and making sure that new content did not clash with what had been established by old content.
However, the Q&A session makes it clear that their feedback was often disregarded or overridden by quest designers and senior writers who figured that the integrity of the setting came second to whatever they thought was cool at the time.
And with the recent cuts, there are apparently only two of them left at Blizzard.
Might aswell have been none, because they always get overruled anyways lmao.
Why have a position like that in your company, and then always ignore them? Can’t fault the persons themselves, they probably became lore historians because of their love for the setting, but I wouldn’t want to be one if I knew my advice would be ignored all the time…
This just makes me want to cry, ngl
As an amateur (i.e. not-paid) writer, this frustrates the ever loving frik out o me.
Nah, or else how can they find that one obscure detail in a decade old quest that totally validates any and all future zany nonsense they wanna come up with.
Well, they’re not immune to making mistakes.
Q : Mentioning the Dragonflight Codex, I’ve got to ask. Alexstrasza’s page reiterated that the dragons lost their ability to reproduce after Dragon Soul. Was there any explanation on where all these Dragon Isle’s whelps came from?
A : So I’m going to refrain from going into what the current canon is because I don’t believe it had been properly decided (publicized) by the time I left and I don’t know if anything has changed, especially since basically anything that wasn’t said publicly can change any time.
What I will say is that I believe this to be a failure on my part. I believe I read the first draft very early after DF launch and my initial thought was “Yeah, they can’t lay eggs. That’s what Cata said.” Did some checking online and internally that said mostly the same and the community sentiment at the time was that “maybe these DF eggs were left from the before times?” and I guess I just internalized that and rolled with it. Didn’t realize the issue until much later, by which point I’d forgotten I okayed it in the draft.
All of this must be taken with a grain of salt though, as anyone can pretend to be anyone on Reddit.
This is unfortunate…they put less effort into than than we all do, and we’re doing it for free.
They could literally offer Shogganosh a consultant’s fee which would amount to nothing for them, order him to scour the lore for six hours a week for two weeks, and thus outsource the headache of enforcing accuracy. As silly as that sounds, it would still be a more accurate, cheaper, more efficient, and less disappointing system than what they have.
I’d genuinely rather they just let Metzen go back through with a pair of shears and a hammer, coming out the other side with at least something that was relatively consistent and, more importantly, handled by someone with the clout and who gave a damn.
The guy wasn’t perfect, but at least he could hold his hands up and say “Yeah, I messed up” when there were issues in the past. And, yes, I remember ‘Green Jesus era’, but it was still better than late BFa and all of SL…
People honestly wildly overinflated this whole situation in their heads imo, like Thrall shows up for the last Patch and a Half of Cataclysm because the entire plot of that patch is Deathwing and to bring him down they need a Shaman who can temporarily fill the void of Earth Aspect which Thrall TEMPORARILY decides to do. Yes, he does get a book at this same time but the book is used as secondary material just to give more context to why he’s choosing to do this + what his thoughts and feelings on the matter are (god forbid we have characterisation I guess).
I honestly cannot fathom how the Main Shaman Character showing up in the Shaman Expansion soured people so much, it was literally an expansion built for shamanism, of course the Main Shaman Character shows up for a patch-and-a-half near the end? People have been complaining all throughout Dragonflight that they want to see some Shamans doing stuff because this expansion has focused a lot on the Elements as well and lo-and-behold suddenly people are asking why Thrall hasn’t been involved with the elemental situation in DF.
Hypocrites, the lot of them.
Mind, they may not be the same people.
Green Jesus Thrall has a whole lot of problems, to name a few:
It betrayed the OG Thrall character. The Cataclysm Thrall has a lot of elements that come out of nowhere: him refusing the mantle of Warchief, him refusing to be called Thrall, he going on this shamanistic journey to save the world, him getting married with Aggra…
…like, what happened to the actual Thrall? It was such a sudden change.
Him being a messianic figure in Cataclysm did not work well with the other plots/his past. Him working side-by-side with dragons to teach, for example, the Timeless One what time is, or to teach Alexstrasza the beauty of life in her moments of crisis… Well, Thrall the warrior shaman that fights as a savage and honor just did not work very well alongside the armies of dragons.
But, mind. Thrall does infinitely less things than, say, Jaina. In the 5man dungeon when we fight alongside Thrall, often he gets defeated by a group of adventurers against 5man bosses. The expansion still made the player feel relevant when it came to central lore characters. Compare it to Jaina/Sylvanas, who often feels like they are on a whole other level, unbeatable, untouchable, capable of wiping the floor with the players or, think of Jaina: she saves the Alliance in the Undercity, the Hordies run away all scared from her, and later again in SL when we go to save her but she ragdolls the boss and solo’s the introduction quest to the SL.
I’ve complained about people unironically spouting “Green Jesus” stuff before and how it seems to have built up more out of cultural memes than actual events.
One thing I will add is that I believe a part of it was a direct continuation of Tirion’s involvement at the end of Wrath, in that both Tirion and Thrall get what is effectively the ‘killing blow’ against their respective expansion bosses.
And there is a fair argument that it does suck to have your raid play second fiddle to an NPC and that it might be cooler if we got to Kamehameha Deathwing instead of Thrall, or for us to be the ones who cleaved Frostmourne instead of Tirion.
On the other hand, Gamers throwing their toys (characters) out of the pram because they lost a moment of power fantasy is kind of on-brand and I don’t want to encourage that, so they should probably suck it up, buttercup, and get over it.
He wasn’t a central figure in Cataclysm.
He was a central figure in the Dragon Soul patch.
Didn’t show up to fight Ragnaros.
Didn’t show up to help Vol’jin.
Didn’t show up to help with Al’akir or Cho’Gall.
And the Eredar screw-up, and the “there must always be a Lich King,” and the disempowerment of dragons, and the premise of Warlords of Draenor, and…
I will always remain wary and try my best to dissuade people from hyping up Metzen in their minds as the saviour of the game.
This wouldn’t work either, I’m afraid. This relies on the quest designers and narrative writers caring enough to listen to the lore people, and they just don’t. When the choice is between telling the stories that they want to tell and reining in their own creation for the sake of not upsetting some nerds on their internet, they’re always going to go with the former.
As one of the hypocrites, my complaints about the Elemental Bonds part in particular can be found back here:
I can agree this is a peculiar quest but I also would just parrot Elenthas and say that it’s. . .1 questline at the end of the expansion (with almost no impact beyond the questline itself, in this specific case I don’t think that’s a bad thing, it was just meant to be a sweet little marriage reference questline) and its hardly a new concept for WoW either, splitting someone into their elemental emotions seems pretty Shaman-y actually.
So again, I just feel like it really overinflates the reality of the situation because it got meme’d to death by the 2010’s WoW community (which is also the same time where the WoW community still thought edgy humour was actually funny).
I know it’s somewhat false equivalence but. . .how many cringe non-Thrall questlines can you think of? I can name a few thousand at least that are easily well-and-above this questline in terms of actual cringe.