Quel’dorei High Elves as an Alliance allied race

That would be swell.

Dark Iron dwarfs that revolt against Moira.

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The Dark Irons hate the Horde, and the ones that revolt against Moira are Twilight’s Hammer, so that doesn’t work very well.

It’s the same thing with ideas like adding Man’ari Eredar to the Horde: you’re just adding more absolute evil to the faction, to the point where it makes you wonder why the Darkspears and Tauren are even there if it’s just an Evil Faction of Evilness.

Personally, I stand by the idea of removing the Horde and Alliance as racial factions and replacing them with ideological factions. Have every race able to join the faction that suits their ideology.

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The way you’re saying makes it sound like a bad thing :frowning:

I might change the skin to a normal tone, but I’d still consider my character a Void Elf, as she should be!

Thing is they’d be even more similar than Helf and belf. Although helf and belf are extremely similar, some differences do exist, namely their historical differences and faction allegiance, and that Helf are presumebly more “humanised” in terms of their prolonged period with humans. Belf are more jingoistic for example. There’s also the well known color difference in their attire.

Revolting DIDs have none of such to distinguish them from regular DID, it’s literally a disagreement with Moira’s rule. There’s nothing to run off the make them at all different.

This is totally ignoring that DIDs who oppose Moira are in favour of Ragnaros instead, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” can be plausible in some cases but this one I don’t think so, the DID are notorious for having historical beef with the Alliance and horde. There’s no reasonable precedent to make them go horde, much less for the horde to seek to recruit them.

It’d literally be a hamfisted “oh suddenly we think you’re alright for no reason”. I’m not in favour of such for races. Some have had weak tenures, but there’s been something there to build on. In this case there isn’t, it would have to be invented Deus ex machina to make it work.

At least with helf there is a precedent that supports them on the alliance. There is no precedent for rogue DIDs or Leper/Undead Gnomes joining horde. Disliking alliance is not a good enough precedent. By that logic kobolds, defias, gnolls, Troggs, satyr, Naga, mogu and more besides have reason to join either faction based on their hatred of them, but obviously that makes no sense because disliking one faction doesn’t mean you like the other one.

It’s good to keep some groups as simple rogue agents outside of the faction politics. There are more plausible additions to factions that don’t require retconning/making up lore on the spot to justify them imo.

Not all of those who oppose Moira have to be TH. It’s highly plausible that a group of Dark Irons refuse to bow to Bonzebeard leadership, and revolt against her, allying with the Horde.

I’d keep my void elves as void elves, but I’ve already got a full high elf character planned out. I just need the final details on top of his head.

This bit from the Shadowlands Zones, Covenant Armor, and Character Customization Interview with Art Director Ely Cannon on Wowhead is interesting:
“It was an opportunity where we had a number of elven races, and we could tie it back to their roots, letting players choose where they want to align and what fantasy to play out.” Especially “choose where they want to align” speaks in favour of full high elf options for void elves. Because, as I read it, these options are added to represent some high elves choosing to come back to Silvermoon, and some choosing to stay with the Alliance, becoming playable as blood or void elves. For this to be the case, though, we’d need to be able to get hair that’s similar to what high elf NPCs currently have.

They wouldn’t need to be different. That’s actually the point.

If you get the point where you literally have exactly the same races on both factions, the easier thing to do would be simply remove factions.

If I’m being sold that picking a faction is meaningful, and forms an identity, I want it to feel like that beyond “I fight and can’t group with players with orange/red names” but otherwise we look pretty similar in most respects.

As said, elves, there’s precedent. It doesn’t need to open the floodgates to filling both factions with copies of the other as recompense. Not only does it dilute the faction mechanic, in my opinion it’s frankly uninspired. Unless they’re attending to an established lore need, I want new races to add something new, however small. Having a race added that services no established lore (in that lore is made up to support them) and doesn’t add anything at all new in terms of appearence to me adds extremely little to the game.

You accomplish exactly the same (letting players play what they want unhindered) by dissolving the factions. Keeping the factions under the illusion they represent something important and then diluting them to be similar to eachother so “nobody feels left out” is contradictory imo.

“This choice matters, but actually it doesn’t because you get to pick the races you like anyway”, it reduces the faction choice to “do you like castles or not?”. I’d rather they dissolve the factions with a plausible narrative for such, than let them turn into that and I’ve followed Warcraft since WC2.

Alliance and Horde are meant to represent differences. They mean nothing if they’re essentially composed of the same beings, but in faction A they have politics A, and in faction B they have politics B. As said just dissolve factions at that point and let any race choose their cause, who they quest with, who they fight.pretty much the same thing without the archaic faction limitation.

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Alliance and Horde already mean nothing…

It’s a video game, whether you play Team Blue or Team Red means nothing.

That doesn’t mean I want to dissolve them, but it literally means nothing. It doesn’t change my life in any way, shape or form if I play Blue or Red.

Sadly, there’s a lot of people who don’t agree with that Saeryn and think that because they’re on Team Red (and it’s always Team Red) that means it is central to their real-life identity as a player.

They crop up a lot in this thread.

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I don’t mean they mean something in RL significance, I mean in the narrative they’re written in, they mean something, they have purpose, regarding the two, often defined in opposition to each other.

To me it means nothing that I play alliance and a friend plays horde. That’s simple exercise of preferences. That does not mean within the Warcraft mythos the factions do not represent anything at all. That is an absolute nonsense statement. The entire franchise is based upon the factions and their conflict, they represent the fundementals of the Warcraft franchise.

Which one you play as doesn’t matter, but you can’t tell me a Stormwind Human Priest doesn’t represent anything significantly different from an Orc Warrior in terms of values, aesthetic, game history, etc. If you can I’d like to see how.

My statement was one of lore and narrative, not “outside the lore” player choices significance. Since you’ve been able to play both factions on one server, that no longer matters at all except in the minds of faction fanatics- which is not what my point was about.

There’s fanatics on Team Blue as well, there’s just fewer of them overall as there are more Horde players.

Well, I didn’t say that they didn’t have meaning within the lore.
And if you’re claiming I did, then arguing against it, it’s a strawman.

Up until Warcraft 2, then yes, I’d agree with you.

After that the story has mainly been about cooperation against a “greater evil”.
The “Faction War” i.e. “Race War” has mostly been kept alive through PvP.
Even when it props up in PvE stories, it’s there for a while before being pushed aside because the factions have to work together to defeat someone or something.
Even the NPCs we see that are blatantly pushing for more war are portrayed as either stupid, incompetent or malevolent.

I’m sick. to. death. of the Race War storylines, and the next time a “Faction War Expansion” rolls around (as it will, it’s inevitable), I’ll unsubscribe for the duration of the expansion. I have no interest in it. It breeds nothing good, as it just creates more hostility between the already split playerbase.
Unless they give me the option to take no part in the war.

I’m not for dissolving the factions completely, as they do serve a purpose. But I’m all for Cross-Faction play.
Not to the extent where a gnome can just walk into Orgrimmar without the guards reacting, but where those of opposing factions can play together if they so choose.
Cross-Faction LFG tools and Cross-Faction Guilds as optional features.

So no… I don’t see any “value” in the Factions as barriers drawn down the middle of the playerbase.
As storytelling tools? Sure, but nothing beyond that.

I’ve literally never seen one. There’s trolls like Daelinna who pretend to be, but frankly it’s so shallow it’s obvious that it’s bollocks.

People keep saying “both sides” but frankly, there’s nothing about the Alliance that invites the same level of fanaticism. “Alliance fans” are really just WarCraft fans, like the majority of “Horde” fans.

The extreme people always seem to be Horde… they also tend to have weird Right-wing political beliefs, probably for related reasons…

Honestly, I don’t think it has any value as a storytelling tool.

WarCraft 3 was all about how the arbitrary racial hatreds were wrong - the 2-faction system was always regressive, and restricts any ability the game story has to move forward in a meaningful sense.

As long as you keep the two-faction system you can’t have changing allegiances, political maneuvers, or even really meaningful military maneuvers because the war is never “We need to achieve this strategic goal”, it’s always “Waagh kill da humies!!”

The 2-faction system has crippled the story of WarCraft, and it needs to die.

It’s not really a straw man on my part, because you interpreted my post as talking about the factions having meaning as membership when I never specified that, in fact my initial post was clearly within the ballpark of them as narrative devices “they’re meant to represent differences” so if I strawmanned anything, it was the strawman of my initial post you crafted when you started talking about it in the vein of faction pride and changing the players lives, things I didn’t mention at all. My comments were based upon the factions representing something in the game world, not outside of it. But you responded to it along those lines. So I don’t think that’s a fair comment to level in my direction.

Written communication isn’t the greatest thing for clarity sometimes, but I’m pretty sure if I was talking about factions meaning something along the lines of changing players lives, I probably would have said something to that effect. I didn’t, because I think such a notion is dumb.

you have to be joking or straight up blind

I don’t think they realise they are one

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I’ve put that person on my ignore list.
I only talk to people who want to have constructive conversations.

Give an example of one.

Seriously, where are all these hardcore Alliance fans?

If you think the fact I don’t like the Horde makes me an “Alliance fanatic” you probably identify way, WAY too much with the Horde, buddy.

I don’t care about the Alliance. Nobody does.

you, literally you

I think i’ll follow suit and put you on ignore, you’re just trolling at this point

So you hate the horde, but also don’t like the alliance?
What do you like then? XD

Again: If you think the fact I don’t like the Horde makes me an “Alliance fanatic”, it’s because you can’t tolerate someone insulting your precious Horde.

Draenei and Night Elves, mainly. The fact they are Alliance is sort of coincidental.

I also like Zandalari and Ogres, though for very different reasons.

Also, I don’t “dislike” the Alliance. I just don’t care about it. I prefer the Alliance because it’s the faction that has fewer annoying children, and generally less awful writing, but if the factions got deleted tomorrow it wouldn’t bother me.

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Fine… My apologies.

Not in the mood to argue.