…interesting idea. Yeah, using the story forums to discuss my opinions on the story, and why I think they matter, instead of discussing other players and what kinds of personality deficits they have sounds about right. The discussion might feel a bit toxic otherwise.
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Reply was for Plexipump, not you mate 
So… we learned who crafted the Helm and Frostmourne, but they already told us we would, when they announced the expansion back then. Is it satisfying that they didn’t lie to us? 
That’s a very low bar.
We barely have enough information to speculate that the Jailer wanted to use the Lich King’s army to get to the world soul of Azeroth. Regarding the origins / the purpose of the Lich King, we’ve basically “learned” nothing new,
That said, there’s still a ton of plotholes:
Why was Zovaal called “The Jailer”, when he was imprisoned in the Maw and even chained in the cinematics?
Who freed him and how?
Why did we need to explore ZM to counter Domination Magic, when the inventor of this type of magic was with us? (If anyone should know how to counter it, it’s the Primus, he created this rune language.)
Why did Azeroth’s anima go to Zereth Mortis when it was channelled through Icecrown Citadel and Torghast?
How did the Eternal Ones create the Arbiter from Zovaal’s sigil back then, when you clearly need to enter Zereth Mortis to do that (something that is forbidden to the Eternal Ones, as we are told by them)?
Unless they go with the “It’s been the Primus all along!”-theory from wowhead, all this doesn’t make sense.
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This should clear most of your missing plot holes. Rest are found around Zovaal, during his encounter 
if you know what i mean.
You “explain” most of it with “As the Arbiter, he had acumulated knowledge”, but that’s not the point. Maybe he saw monstrous things as Arbiter, maybe this lead to his behaviour, but…
… why did they call him “Jailer”, when he was banished and imprisoned? It still doesn’t make sense to put the JAILER in chains.
How could he even get his hands on a tainted Titan soul when it is supposed to return to the cosmic force of Order and not the Shadowlands?
If they learned how to restore used up souls - so we could basically remake Arthas - that would undo the little impact the Anduin raid cinematic had left.
“Begone then, Arthas Menethil. May the last whisper of your name fade and be forgo… aaaaand he’s back.”
Very unlikely.
Still, you text does not explain how a new Arbiter could be created without visiting Zereth Mortis.
Or how the Azerite came to ZM after it was channeled into Torghast.
In case you missed it, the Maw was in chaos, giants and other power beings ruled it and they were all put in submision, tortured, jailed, broken and made his servants. Once Zovaal turned the domination rune magic in a weapon, something he could weild and use, he then became the Jailer of the Damned. Much like the Helm of Domination reflected his will on the Undead, he broke into submission the most foul souls that were dumped in the Maw since its existance. The hand mount puzzles and quests, are a testament to that.
I’m pretty sure the dreadlords did some unspeakable things to Argus, forcing his fall into the Shadowlands.
When he was born, the very forests of Lordaeron whispered the name, Arthas … remember, his line has always ruled with wisdom, and strength… twisted, perverted into a heartless killer by a mournblade, that was his curse. He was best friend with Varyan Wrynn, he was a kind, brave knight and prince. I have no doubt a part of his soul is under Icecrown, where he banished the last vestiges of his humanity to embrace his Lich King transformation.
Funny you quoted Sylvannas Windrunner, since when anyone cares about what she has to say? She’s a broken woman now, burdened by the realization of her own sins.
How the Arbitrer was created? That’s pretty simple the way to Zereth mortis was sealed after the creation of the new Arbitrer, its sigil was used to open or close that gate.
How the Azerite came to ZM after it was channeled into Torghast? That’s something only the designer of Torghast could answer, it’s creator Zovaal. A portal i guess?
Well… maybe stated a bit less negatively: The writers have been extremely ambitious in the scope of the project they chose to take on. Not only did they try to introduce an universal afterlife for all of Warcraft, including other planets and dimensions, they also tried to tie it to a best-off of the grand arcs od the game. They wanted everything to feel connected, and to give the players the sense that most of the vagueness and little plot holes that existed were closed. They tried to tie up the ending of the Scourge, the “there must always be a Lich King”-stuff, Sylvanas’ character arc, and tried to drag the “cosmic war” that was mostly a meta concept until now to the screen. They wanted to explore the nature of personal identity, redemption and forgiveness, free will and destiny in a nuanced way. They wanted to wrap up a lot of the stuff that had been left open in the last addons, like Vol’jin’s fate, and the Drust story. They even wanted to awe us by facing us with the gods of our gods and make us feel that everything was so much bigger than we ever could have imagined.
Not even FF could do all that stuff in 3 patches, and WoW’s story tools are worse than theirs. We can assume that a lot more story details ended up on the cutting room floor than ever made it to the game, including at least one full patch worth of content. We can assume that every character they chose to drag into the Shadowlands was supposed to have an important role, else they wouldn’t be there, scratching their butt (did you remember that we actually took Arthas’ sister there? No?) . So yeah… I guess we can assume that what we actually got on screen was a horribly mangled and cut version of what they were trying to do. Which is why they need stuff like the Sylvanas novel to at least get some bit of clear narrative in there. And that must be horribly demotivating. Hard to really care about what you put out, if you already know that the version that makes it on our screens will be a bad acrricature of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they, like many players, essentially gave up on the story halfway through, did the minimum amount of work on it, and focussed on other stories that could still be saved instead.
Now… does that mean the writers did nothing wrong? Heck no. They aren’t paid just as novelists, they are the writing team of a game studio. If they choose a story of a scope the game can’t match that’s their fault. If they can’t make dialogue that makes the players actually understand what’s going on that’s their fault. If they don’t make lemonades out of the lemons the game devs gave them, that’s their fault. If they choose themes that don’t resonate with the audience that’s their fault.
But this isn’t just the product of the story team, it’s an enormous production. And that makes it much, much more reasonable to assume that they reached too high and failed spectacularly than to assume that there was any malice here.
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I think that was their problem since at least Warlords of Draenor. They were always far too ambitious and shooting far higher than they could realistically reach, and they failed each time. Maybe they should realize that sometime a story told on a less grand and cosmic scale, with tried and true elements, is enough.
The issue with the story to me is that it made everything that we were used to meaningless and pointless. Horde and Alliance, local enemies, even old gods…None of that matters anymore, because the story has now reached such grand level that aside from everyone wanting Azeroth for some still unknown reason anything happening on it feels small and insignificant.
I don’t know if they can return to more grounded stories anymore. They’ve written themselves into a corner here. And since I doubt that they’ll just sweep the last two expansion’s story under the rug completely, they’ll have to find a way to balance things out a bit. But in my opinion, that’s even harder and more ambitious than what they tried to do by simply raising the story to cosmic levels, so I honestly doubt that they’re capable of doing it right. But we’ll see on 19th of April.
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That’s the part where I disagree. I think they absolutely could. They could just go and do other, smaller stories, and though there would be a lot of mockery, I don’t think there would be much hate, and over time, maybe some more love.
I agree with this, though. It doesn’t really matter if it would work, if they don’t do it, does it?
Yeah… And I think a big problem that WoW has in comparison to many story-focused games is that the main character most people really care about is the world, and not their cast of heroes. You could just delete all the main characters from the game and replace them with random new characters and I wouldn’t care one bit. Indeed, Anduin, Jaina, Baine and co have brought me much more headaches than happy moments. But having us invested in the characters is really what they would have to do, if they keep moving the world too fast for the game to keep up, because we need something to be invested in.
So if they wanted to keep this up, I think they’d need to step up their characterization game a lot. We wouldn’t need lords and rulers that we watch and follow around, we would need characters that feel like personal friends to us. That’s not impossible with WoW… but it does seem damn hard to me. The game is just not designed for that, and well… transitioning the players that stuck around for the world to that, or attracting players to a 17 year old game with that seems like a bit too much of a gamble… Especially since you’ll invite even more direct comparisons to other story-heavy games.
Indeed, I think that Guild Wars 2 handled this far better. If Blizzard wants to continue with the main characters cast instead of focusing on the world and the races at large, then they need to make our relationship to those characters more personal and…well, give them actual development. What development did most of the main cast receive in Shadowlands?
GW2 mostly does it the MCU-way, with constant banter, no matter how dire or tragic the situation actually is. Blizz could certainly do worse than that. It’s easy to bond with the people you laugh with, and Blizz has done things like that on smaller scales well enough before, like with the Gob Squad or some of the Forsaken stuff…
But elsewise Blizz seemed to be much more into the “bonding through shared suffering” idea, and that can work too, I guess, though I don’t think it’s my cup of tea. As I understand it FF14 is good with that, I never got that deep into it. But for many people it seems to work. Full-steam emotions-on-your-sleeve anime drama, I guess. I think that one is even harder to put in retroactively than the GW-style, though… And invites the direct comparison you don’t really want to invite…
I don’t disagree, of course I’ve been overly harsh with my criticism but my major problem is that obviously that I dislike the fact the people writing for the universe no longer seem to really care about it. Just glancing at their public twitter profiles makes them seem like caricatures of people that not so long ago imageboards used as a strawman to justify their hatred for the company. I feel like the medium has been hijacked by people that have never sat down to play a game of 2.5E, ran their own campaign or moreso even played the game. I don’t expect WoW to be a master piece just a passable campaign like it used to be.
As for the problems their studio might have had? Corona etc? Production problems? I know Bobby Kotick is a terrible person, American corporate culture is odious etc but the reality is the people we’re criticizing are some of the most privileged, upper echelons of Blizzard. They appear to be walking, talking, stereotypes of California’s bourgeois upper class culture. They act as if they wouldn’t know a days hard work if it beat them over the head.
Obviously I’m repeating myself but really it all boils down to is them not even showing the smallest amount of humility, the ability to self reflect, gauge player reaction or take any criticism on board. They just double down constantly because they live in a privileged bubble. It feels like the relationship the players have with Blizzard is an abusive one, like Blizzard’s devs resent and hate their own playerbase. I’m not (neither are the majority of people I would wager) asking them to beg for forgiveness or write a best selling novel. A small amount of professionalism, or more over doing the job they are actually paid to do somewhat competently might actually be a start.
In one of the Primus’ messages Maldraxxus, he says that “they banished Zovaal into the Maw to be its Jailer”. It wasn’t his choice, the Eternal Ones sentenced him to do it. That’s why the chains were weird from the very beginning, if the Primus dominated him, there would have been no need to chain him.
So in short, we don’t know and it doesn’t make sense. 
That he liked Varian Wrynn should have been the first red flag. 
Seriously, when they would go back to the “Matthias Lehner”-thing and restored Arthas’ soul somehow, it would undermine any impact that Raid cinematic had.
But… yout want them to restore Arthas, did I get that right? 
Then who created this new Arbiter? It was stated that the Eternal Ones banished Zovaal. We also know that the Eternal Ones are not allowed to enter Zereth Mortis - which is a requirement to create a new Arbiter. You think they opened the portal, just threw Zovaal’s sigil in there and hoped for the best, until a new Arbiter came through it?
So again, we don’t know. And the only portal to Zereth Mortis was in the chamber of the Arbiter, where Zovaal first opened it.
You’re being a bit obtuse in your thinking. The Maw was already there, Zovaal by default being the most powerful beeing there, it was a bit logical it will become its Jailor. No chains are meant to last forever.
“His power rising… his chains broken. The remaking has begun! The hour draws near when the Banished One shall reclaim what is his. Death comes for the soul of this world. Make ready! Feed the lives of the unworthy to the hungering Maw!”
— Herald Dalora’s sermon to the Cult of the Damned
“I was used by him. The Jailer, they call him. Used to make… to make… Hmm. My memories. Did you take them? No. He took them. Used me for his purpose. Then left me here. Bereft of memory for… how long?”
— The Runecarver
It has been long since I’ve seen the living expanse of Maldraxxus. While the denizens are prone to chaos, the land has stayed the same.
Domination was never meant to cause the devastation that Zovaal has wrought. We suffer the price of my hubris.
— The Primus
Regards the dreadlords we do know everything, from the boss description in the dungeon journal, to the story campaign on the planet itself. You as many others must’ve not paid attention. They tortured the titan and used him to accelerate the rebirth of dead demons.
No one says anything about requirements on how to create a new Arbitrer, you’re just making speculations. The eternal ones and Oribos have plenty of servants that can go in ZM, and the Broker presence is a testament to it being within reach. The fact that ZM has contingencies to recreate the Arbitrer when there is disonance, indicates by default one would be remade and send to Oribos, or have you not paid attention to what the Oracles say / do ?
The veil between Azeroth and Shadowlands goes through the Maw, connecting two points between two different sides of the known Wow Reality. That itself is a feat of strength.
Remember how Zovaal reached out to Zereth Mortis earlier? To rip the Cyphers vault with the Guardian of the First ones in it, that was before he restored his sigil, and his powers. So it’s not outside of his reach as you think, its actually very plausible he can in fact reach / connect his Torghast engine to the ZM core.
“Ages ago, the Eternal Ones punished our brother Zovaal for his treachery. He was bound within the inescapable Maw, to be forevermore its Jailer.” (The Primus)
So they said: “Okay, we will dominate you, then chain you up in the Maw. You’ll be an inmate, since you can’t move, but you also have to be its Jailor and let none escape, ok?”
Seems legit.
And thereby contradicted the Chronicles and their own interviews once again. In chronicles, they said “Titans can’t be corrupted” and explained in an interview, that a dying being of order would return to the plane of order, just as a dying being of the void would return to the void to take a new form. But of course, the Chronicles are “from the Titans POV”, why care about establishing anything objective, now we have Demons who torture a being of Order with Fel magic(!) and… send it to the Shadowlands. If you don’t see how this is flawed, I’m sorry, then you are not paying attention.
Don’t get me wrong - things like these can work, but then you need to explain, how they work.
No, I’m not making speculations, I draw conclusions from what we have been presented ingame. The Primus says:
“It is a sacred place, forbidden to outsiders - even the Pantheon of Death.”
He doesn’t mention any “servants” or “usual protocols” for contacting anyone there or entering it. He doesn’t even tell us what to do, except stopping Zovaal.
Until you can’t show or explain to me, how the Eternals Ones created the Arbiter from Zovaal’s Sigil, it’s also just speculation and continues to be… a plothole.
“When Azerite enters another Dimension, it just happens to flow directly into the workshop of that dimension, no portals needed. Don’t think too hard about it.”
Like that?
How could I remember something that we were never shown, hell, that wasn’t even told to us? (Which is the biggest overall problem of this entire expansion imho)
The most probable explanation for the Guardian is that Zovaal was almost successfull to enter ZM in his “original crime” and managed to pull him into the Sanctum, before they stopped him. But once again, we can only speculate, because just like with Sylvanas’ deal with Zovaal, they didn’t show us anything, instead let NPCs tell us the bare minimum.
Zovaals nature was to order things, him being an Arbitrer, so it just makes sense that Jailer would be an appropiate term to call him? Yes, he was bound, but being an eternal being with still tremendous power, whos essence was cosmic and would not be fragmented or tormented by the destructive nature of the Maw, he’d thus logically be its Jailer, the most powerful entity who’d be in charge of the prisoners in it, to sort them as he sees fit, since none escapes the Maw. (according to known history)
You’re failing to notice that all the lore we get is from a NPCs perspective, what we knew before Shadowlands came from the point of view of the arcane magic users ( order magic ) that studied the complexity of the Cosmos and Arcana. What we got from Shadowlands was from Fenrirs point of view and the Broker cartels. Argus wasn’t born yet, it’s why he was exploited for so long, just like Azeroth is lately. You can hear her screams when Zovaal activates his soul forge engine.
Until you can’t show or explain to me, how the Eternals Ones created the Arbiter from Zovaal’s Sigil, it’s also just speculation and continues to be… a plothole.
You have other entities in charge of that within Zereth Mortis, which have a clear purpouse of keeping the Shadowlands functional, plenty Oracles, jiiro and automaa. There seems to be many vessels prepared for such a task, and procedures for re-creating the Arbitrer, as you saw in the final quest chain of the 9.2 story. Using dominiation magic the banished one was deposed of his sigil, which is just a very powerful crux mantle that can be remade at great cost, as you saw in the reforging of the sigils quests chains for the other covenants.
How could I remember something that we were never shown, hell, that wasn’t even told to us? (Which is the biggest overall problem of this entire expansion imho)
The story has been told through character dialogues a lot, sadly you and sometimes even I, like many have ignored them while engaing in boss fights. Go in LFR toggle sound/ music on, and focus on whats actually happening around you, instead of just preping for downing a boss.
Just like in life my friend, you can’t understand and know everything, you have to work for it, make sense of it 
it’s what being part of a world is all about. Patience is a virtue that not many young ones have. We’ll see soon what was up with Sylvannas, as the book revealing this will be released in April 2022
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