Why Battle for Azeroth will fail

[Dangg]

Legion was the last x-pack developed by the tier 1 blizzard dev team. From now on the B squad - who was also responsible for WoD - will take over.

More money to be made with OW and HS.

[ryanmahaffe]

Heh, I've been on blizz gen forums and reddit. I know that reactions aren't as true as you say :P

I have seen threads with "disappointment" that was met with a bunch of "no, seems cool to me" and the youtube comments have a lot of excited folks as well as Discord server.

[corebit]

Heh, I've been on blizz gen forums and reddit. I know that reactions aren't as true as you say :P

Why do you base reactions on internet forums? Don't you know that humans are more vocal when they are negative? Negativity is a staple given in any internet forum.

[Jainzar]

I really enjoy Legion, I think they did a fantastic job with it. I'm not randomly qqing, I just think the features which they are going with are bad. SoO was fucking bad, faction champions sucked, and it looks like we're getting more of those kind of things.

Plus the whole faction war things is really really lame. They should have gone the old gods route right from the beginning, with a strong theme right off the bat, with more features.

[corebit]

Plus the whole faction war things is really really lame. They should have gone the old gods route right from the beginning, with a strong theme right off the bat, with more features.

And after the old gods then what? Based on your speed, WoW would be dead within three expansions because you have basically killed off all the cosmic forces of the universe, and the PCs are now literal unstoppable gods.

[Mushkins]

Problem is not in Blizzard, the problem is in You.

[Dracullus]

I really enjoy Legion, I think they did a fantastic job with it. I'm not randomly qqing, I just think the features which they are going with are bad. SoO was fucking bad, faction champions sucked, and it looks like we're getting more of those kind of things.

Plus the whole faction war things is really really lame. They should have gone the old gods route right from the beginning, with a strong theme right off the bat, with more features.

What other features would you expect? All Legion new stuff was to answer really big problem in WoD: no post max level progression aka "nothing to do" aka "raid or die". That's why they introduced mythic+, world quests, AP and legendaries. In 8.0 they'll keep wq and mythic+, improve AP (so it's character based) and get rid of legendaries. Also seems like there will be more content - 6 zones vs 5 from Legion, 10 dungeons again (but likely no violet hold style - so we will have all 10 for m+).

I don't like no class quests, but it's opportunity to give more narrative content to your main. It will be faction based - so imagine that your faction campaign will be 6 times longer than class one (they have resources to do it).

Legion don't have so many problems as WoD, so they shouldn't fix what isn't broken.

[Cosmic Janitor]

People are just being negative for the sake of being negative. Waiting until alpha/beta to see more would be a much better way to form an opinion, jumping to conclusions is dumb.

People are negative, because the whole faction premise is boring as fuck to many people.

[Drekmar]

so everyone saw the reveal yesterday, and it looks like Blizzard is taking WoW back on a very, very bad path again.

An expansion without a major enemy that is only about Alliance vs. Horde? How is that going to work in a mainly PvE focused game? It's not gonna. Island hopping sounds boring and will get old really fast. Looks like MoP scenarios, which were horrible.

And this whole one continent for Alliance, one for Horde? Then where are the dungeons and raids are going to be? Which enemies are we going to fight?

Basically we got an expansion with subraces (oh, great, what an incredible feature!), boring island scenarios and no major enemy to fight but lots of bad PvP. Wow! Great job Blizzard! Sub numbers are gonna tank hard once the excitement for vanilla servers diminishes

The same way it worked in vanilla and mop.

People are negative, because the whole faction premise is boring as fuck to many people.

Which is subjective. For me big bad villain that will destroy the world every expansion is boring and cliche as fuck.

[Nokonda]

Opinion piece:

Why 'the Horde Vs. Alliance plot 'never work:
It boils down to design-choice. Blizzard aims to catch-all and please as many as possible regardless of faction choice (equal opportunities). There is an inherent problem with this design philosophy; because the two factions are so similar in end-goals and philosophy you end up having a shallow conflict where the plot and tension feels forced to the point where the real issue is a matter of a simple power-struggle.

Then on occasion you have this big villain/threat where both Alliance and Horde seem to be functioning fine alongside each other - even co-operating at times - to defeat said enemy. This works well because of the aforementioned similarities between the two factions. I'm aware there are still occasional conflicts between the factions but they always end up banding together to fight this over-arching threat.

Your choice largely doesn't matter.
Blizzard manages to create symmetrical game-play where the only real incentive to play one faction over the other is if you have a preferred race/city or if your friends play a specific faction. You get an almost identical questing/game-play experience and there are no restricted classes to factions any longer. The are an abundance of neutral factions that doesn't care if you're Horde or Alliance. This last part may be different with Battle for Azeroth, although they already revealed you'll be able to visit the other island once you're done with your own.


Both factions have the same fundamental goal/philosophy.
To survive and have the upper hand. There are no fundamental political differences or interesting philosophical divergences (utilitarianism vs deontology, for instance) to separate the two factions.

So why not remove factions all-together?
Well, because there are differences between the two factions. They do things differently, speak different languages and have different cultures. This doesn't mean that war is inevitable. Think of your own country - just because there are other countries and cultures doesn't mean that war is unavoidable.

How do you solve the issue?
In my opinion you have to create unequal conditions and/or contrast philosophies to spark the flame of conflict. The one time where Blizzard actually managed to get close to a real conflict was when the Horde was under Garroshs' rule. It was then that the Horde began to drastically diverge from the Alliance in terms of philosophy and goals, this of course due to Garroshs' violent/extremists view. It was also back then when the Horde was villainized and Blizzard forced Horde players to side with Alliance (again...) to dethrone Garrosh thereby reverting things back to status quo.

I'm personally also in favor of factions-restricted classes. This creates more incentive to choose one faction over the other and also provides the player an additional affiliation to the faction.

[Iseeyou]

Well we have to wait for next xpac mate.

Wich could be easy as we have vanilla coming

[Hubbl3]

Azshara is the endboss of the first raid tier.

She will be a raid boss in the expansion. But that was clearly not the focus of the presentation. The focus was Faction war.

[Deleted]

A total of 2 hours of info about expansion, people moaning again.

Man, wish these sour people would cancel sub and move on.

[Dmitro]

stupid thread, if class designs are good it will be a great expansion, if bad - bad one.

[TheHodedOne]

At this point is very clear that the Horde vs Alliance plot is going to be over by the time 8.1 arrives, maybe 8.2. We find out N´zoth was playing with Anduin and Sylvanas to make this war happen. Then we unite the Factions once again to defeat N´zoth and his plans(of course we are only going to kill Azshara , we can´t kill a boss that big in just one expansnion). Also, Sylvanas and Anduin are going to have sexual tension in some extent.

[Amstrup]

expansion looks amazing, keep up the good work blizz

[Iflash]

I am guessing the expansion will be great gameplay wise, but the lack of excitement will kill its popularity, just like MoP.

[Cosmic Janitor]

At this point is very clear that the Horde vs Alliance plot is going to be over by the time 8.1 arrives, maybe 8.2. We find out N´zoth was playing with Anduin and Sylvanas to make this war happen. Then we unite the Factions once again to defeat N´zoth and his plans(of course we are only going to kill Azshara , we can´t kill a boss that big in just one expansnion). Also, Sylvanas and Anduin are going to have sexual tension in some extent.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. The gameplay systems clearly show that they intend to keep this artifical conflict going for as long as possible, their new deal with all the pvp/ai battle thing will certainly not be a one-off for the first couple of weeks. That they mentioned ashara in the second panel was probably to not lose everyone who doesn't give a rats ass about the fake faction conflict entirely within the first 3 hours of the announcement. Did they even have a slide for her?

[Deleted]

You do realize that the expansion story changes during it's course and patches? There will be alot more content and additions in the future. Why the fuck should they reveal everything they have in store right at the beginning?

[Darkguyver2020]

Yes. Let's judge something which won't be out for another 6-12 months.
People on the internet are so fucking fickle.