Pet peeves: The return (Part 12)

I didn’t choose to be alliance. I just wanted to find some RP and I was playing dracthyr anyway.

I miss my undead and my zandalari.

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Really though the only way to somehow fix the imbalance is for Horde to get a spike in RP interest. Which is only possible with a storyline people want to do. Which means we’re somewhat dependant on Blizzard stopping with whatever has plagued the Horde’s storyline the last couple of years.

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Nothing will change. Horde guilds will continue to exist, Horde events will continue to occur, they will just pale in comparison that the Alliance has to offer, as they always have.

If there is one particular change coming, I think that the Horde is on the verge of losing the critical mass required to make large-scale RP-PvP campaigns happen - which I would qualify as more than 40 people, more than a single raid’s worth. I think we all quietly realise this and this is why we’re seeing such a surge in RP-PvP campaigns lately. By the time that Midnight comes out, the Horde population will likely have shrunk to a point where it won’t be able to field the numbers necessary to make these campaigns work.

Of course RP-PvP events will still happen in private, in the form of skirmishes between guilds and smaller campaigns in communities like A³. But in terms of public RP-PvP spectacles, this is it, this is the last hurrah.

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Kinda hoping Midnight will at least give us back some Belf population.

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rather than feed the already corpulent mass of void elf players wheter their void or high elves ic

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Why would it?

Silvermoon City is most likely going to be a neutral hub or destroyed. I will be astonished if it shows up as a Horde-only settlement.
The reunification of the elven tribes demands a cessation of hostilities between the different varieties of elves.
There is increasingly little difference between the different varieties of Thalassian elf and the reunification will only make that worse.
The only thing that makes the blood elves stand out is their Horde membership, and elves clash thematically with the Horde in a huge way.
The Alliance will always remain the faction with the most ease of access to RP, plus they are thematically a much better fit for elves.

My current prediction is that Midnight will utterly annihilate any last vestige of Horde blood elf RP, with any remaining blood elves embracing the Thalassian label and going Alliance instead.

I’d probably have more of an introspective take if I’d had the time to RP regularly for literal years now. That’s right ladies and gentlemen - I’m one of the talking forum heads your local bloggers warn you about. The “don’t look him in the eye or he’ll start raving about the glory days of MoP, WoD and Legion” kind of role-player.

As is, I drop in on Orgrimmar or the Barrens every now and then, especially if there’s a gathering or some such going on. Sometimes when not, as my schedule is about as reliably predictable as a goblin parachute.

Despite that, or perhaps because of it, it’s often a stark reminder of the state of affairs, when I am able to count the number of participants on two hands or less. There absolutely are still public events that draw in a solid crowd, but my impression is, that those are increasingly the exception rather than the norm. This isn’t to say that the crowds need to be massive for the RP to be good, far from it, but regular numbers can serve as a means to gauge overall interest in the faction.

tl;dr - Even if I had the time to dive back into RP full time, I wouldn’t know where to start to help revive the community’s interest in the Horde. I suspect that short of some amazing narrative beats from Blizzard, we may have crossed the event horizon of faction imbalance. :dracthyr_shrug:

There’s been some discourse about that type of events of late, and given the relatively short notice of at least one of them, I think the organizers saw the potential, took the ball and ran with it. And honestly, good on them.

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Honestly a lot of what I saw on returning to active rp in legion wasn’t what I considered to be horde even then. It’s why this character went to a neutral merc guild that I could somewhat spin as keeping to her core.

The race themed troll guilds were zandakari (who are boring) or so isolated and questionable that going there was not viable. The days of the cult of the raptor and darkspear tribe etc were truely gone.

So in a way I’ve already come to terms with the notion of horde identify and population being resigned. Even the prominent orc guilds are… too fluffy to meet whst I find interesting about the horde I grew to have affection for.

When this character died I tried several new horde characters and the sane issues abound… now Im a female human paladin.

I am resigned to blandness. (Faints in dramatic wow)

I think the blood elf roleplayers that yearned for the Alliance already jumped ship when high elf customisation came to void elves. Saying that, Silvermoon is growing in activity.

I don’t really think it’s all doom and gloom. But yeah, I doubt Aerilen is going anywhere. :saluting_face:

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It’s funny in a way, because once upon a time, Night Elves were the “odd ones out” in the Alliance as well. Savage and reclusive, nocturnal and enigmatic, they were very much the thematic opposites of the medieval-fantasy genre the other Alliance races embodied.

Something was lost in their appeal, to me at least, as homogenization with the remaining faction gradually set in over the years. But I digress.

Short of Quel’Thalas being left in ruins and the Blood Elves having no choice but to scatter from their homeland, I don’t see this happening. Guess we’ll see how that “unification of the elven tribes” will work out though.

Character playlist prepared, kit double checked, food packed, anxiety spiking

Aw yeah, it’s LARPing time

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Hey our parachutes never killed no one!! Its the sudden stop that usually does it.

Well cept the times the parachute cords strangulate someone…

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if they didn’t insert the coin that’s on them, i couldn’t have been more clear

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There’s two things that were very different from how they usually are
Both of which have perfectly normal reasons to be different today
It still put brain on high alert catastrophising mode

we hate it

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my town is on fire

Did you invite him?

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What’s that old meme?

If the Horde has a million players, then I’m one of them.
If the Horde has one player, then I’m THAT ONE.
If the Horde has no players, that means I’m dead.

While there are some races I could be interested in roleplaying on the Alliance - Kul Tirans, Dark Irons, Worgen and Mechagnomes - The Horde feels more like home. When I moved away from Alliance mid-Wrath I fully bought in to the concept of disparate races banding together against a world that hates them and actively wants to see them destroyed, even if the Horde has somewhat stepped away from that archetype over the years. There’s something about these races and their stories that resonate with me on a stronger level than the Alliance ever did, and why despite civil wars, or contracted authors writing wildly different interpretations of characters presented in-game, or the continuous retconning of events with each Chronicle-esque book brought out, I’m still here, and I imagine I’ll still be.

So, in answer to your question - all three, I guess? I know it’s likely a losing prospect, but I don’t see myself jumping back to BLU, and as long as I have people to roleplay with around me I think I’ll just keep on until someone turns the lights off.

I think it also poses interesting questions to the Alliance mains on the server as well - as the Alliance continues to swell, especially so since “High Elf” (Blood Elf?) customisations were given to the void elves, what’s your take on a continuously-dwindling Horde RP population? I’m genuinely curious as to whether it’s a chest-beating moment of OOC triumph because you still have a spark of that adversarial fire Blizzard took enormous pains to help kindle in the early years of WoW (doubt)? Is it utterly inconsequential to you and your RP preferences? Is it concerning that you likely face increasing difficulty to get a good turnout at a cross-faction event? Are you rolling up Horde alts/guilds to NPC during events like doomsday preppers? :upside_down_face:

Much like great A’Tuin making slow but deliberate progress, Alliance hegemony continues to shuffle on, but persistently, towards its’ destination, as it always has. I’m not sure which’ll happen first - the heat death of the universe or arriving at this destination. Probably the servers going off first, in hindsight.

Here’s my peeve to stay on-topic: There’s not enough people at work today because of the upcoming bank holiday weekend. Always feels like work wants its pound of flesh from you before letting you rest. :weary:

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Peeve: Had to delete 3 years of art from the ESO rp server im in because ai bros wont act normal and its admins wont crack down on them or any image scraping. :expressionless: its insulting that creatives not wanting their art stolen have been reduced down to “just an opinion.”

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My honest thoughts on this would likely net me an unwanted forum vacation, so… :angry:

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Stairshed, I booped the cat’s nose until he licked it.

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