Does Blizzard Favor Alliance Now?

[Skytotem]

The old RPG stuff being cannon wouldn't be enough. There would have to be a store line in the game showing the relationship/conflict between the alliance and the pirates. When talking about the lore and stories in an individual expansion out side sources don't matter. A player of one faction shouldn't need to spend money past the subscription in order to see their factions story advance.

Once again you are going back to the whole "He use to be Alliance so he is still Alliance" argument. His story is no longer part of the Alliance story, it is his own. The book you are referencing takes place before World of Warcraft and doesn't change the fact that in the game he is 100% neutral, supporting neither faction over the other.

I would argue that people saying things like "Tirion was part of the Alliance so its Alliance lore" are the ones viewing this as in binary rather than a sliding scale. *shrug*

Tirion was part of the Alliance, is a human, is a paladin, leads an organization descended from survivors of Lordaeron an alliance kingdom and has statues of elves and dwarves everywhere at his bloody tournament means he is MORE RELEVANT to the Alliance than to the Horde.

That's not to say he has NO tie to the Horde, just that... a human or dwarf player is going to feel much more 'at home' in argent content or anything around Tirion than a Horde player or even a nelf player.

---------- Post added 2013-02-07 at 01:05 PM ----------

Plus there's the whole "Tirion was in the ALliance howling fjord starting quests" thing

[DeadmanWalking]

I love conversations about favoritism of factions. Heres how to tell if there is a biased favoritism toward a faction.

Do you play this Faction?
Yes - No favoritism exists
No - All signs point to 'Most likely', go to next Question;

Did something happen in lore to your faction that you personally didn't like?
Yes - Definite Bias! Scream and yell on the forums in hopes of causing an uprising to get Ghostcrawler fired.
No - No Bias exists.

[Wildtree]

I don't know about favoritism...

Let's do a few comparisons real quick, since Cata.

Auction house available... Orgrimmar 5 - Stormwind 2
Portals to Cata zones... Orgrimmar up on the cliff pretty much bedded into the city, easy and fast to reach from either valley. Stormwind, far from the center, quite a way to get there...

Portal to Jade Forest... Orgrimmar - right next to the AH in Valley of Honor.... Stormwind, by the other portals, far from the center.
Shrine in the Valley...... Horde side 2 Innkeepers, one right next to the portals to all cities.. Alliance, 1 innkeeper, on the opposite side of the portals main floor.

Starter zone Jade Forest:
Horde side, after some initial quests the zone becomes more and more safe, and the hozen will be exalted. Easy to farm herbs and ore for starters..
Alliance side, Hozen flooding the zone no matter what, farming herbs and ore rather difficult for starters ..

There is an imbalance on convenience and ease of play in favor of horde.
The story lines themselves are balanced. Sometimes the horde side ones are nicer, sometimes the alliance side.
But all in all, aside from the convenience things, I don't really expect Blizzard to balance the content 1:1.. That's really not important at all.

[Skytotem]

I love conversations about favoritism of factions. Heres how to tell if there is a biased favoritism toward a faction.

Do you play this Faction?
Yes - No favoritism exists
No - All signs point to 'Most likely', go to next Question;

Did something happen in lore to your faction that you personally didn't like?
Yes - Definite Bias! Scream and yell on the forums in hopes of causing an uprising to get Ghostcrawler fired.
No - No Bias exists.

I play Horde and even I say Cata was tremendously Horde favored, thing is, like the alliance bias in vanilla, or wotlk, it wasn't intentional. There are just themes that are more prominent in one expansion or the other, or writing that comes out more popular to one part of the playerbase, and heck, just places where they have more time to polish than others.

EDIT:

Well PLAYED Horde, I quit.

[Tehstool]

For pvp, yes.

[Wildtree]

For pvp, yes.

Just because there's one BG where Alliance has a slightly shorter way (AV) doesn't make it an overall favoritism.

[Fayolynn]

Tirion was part of the Alliance Which was before WoW, since WoW started he has not been Alliance in any way at all, is a human Human does not make him Alliance, is a paladinSo Blood Elf and Tauren Palladins are Alliance now?, leads an organization descended from survivors of Lordaeron an exalliance kingdom and has statues of elves and dwarves everywhere at his bloody tournament means he is MORE RELEVANT to the Alliance than to the Horde. Maybe this has to do with the majority of Paladin's under his command being Human and Dwarf, 2 of theother races that can be Paladin's are fairly new at it (BE and Tauren) and the 3rd has extremely limited numbers so few are deviating from the Alliance.

That's not to say he has NO tie to the Horde, just that... a human or dwarf player is going to feel much more 'at home' in argent content or anything around Tirion than a Horde player or even a nelf player. That has more to do with race than it does faction since as you point out yourself even a Night Elf won't feel as at home in Argent Content as a Human or Dwarf would. If it was so pro Alliance wouldn't every Alliance race feel at home?

Plus there's the whole "Tirion was in the Alliance howling fjord starting quests" thing True, but was there anything in that quest chain that would not have worked if you could run it as Horde? In hindsight they probably should have made that a neutral quest chain and given the Alliance a different starter area.

My reply is in bold.

[sykke]

I'd say that whether Blizzard "favors" one faction over another will be seen best in SoO. To the situation now I won't have a non-biased opinion. Glory to the Alliance!

[Gothicshark]

After years of treating the Alliance badly, and even making a part of the world a Horde Logo. Blizzard is finally giving the Alliance a little bit back.

Lets see, Destroyed Theramore Had the horde murder several prominent characters in Dalaran, had Jaina so mad that she asked the Horde to move out of Dalaran, when they refused she locked up a couple of them to show she meant business.

But the way they presented the events Jaina looks bad. So no still a ton of Horde Bias.

[Canderous1]

horde is just better. i feel sorry for the alliance players and their weak, lackluster story telling. you chose poorly.

[Gothicshark]

It just seems the quests are well written in the starting area of jade forest compared to the hordes quests. Also the story so far about Jaina has been excellent, and horde is the same ole boring: "I am Garrosh! I will crush you!" type semantics. Not thrilling at all.

I play both factions, ALL the horde leveling quests revolve around killing the Alliance. So if you think it's alliance favoritism that the Alliance gets nothing but go here save them quests and the Horde has go here and kill alliance quests. Than you misunderstand what Blizzard has done, they teach the Horde players to hate the Alliance and to Kill Alliance players, while teaching the Alliance players to do raids and nice things. this has been the not to subtle storyline for the last 8 years.

[Skytotem]

you can't just say that because it was before wow that he wasn't alliance, the past matters, the LORE matters.

Human makes him more RELEVANT to the Alliance

No, blood elf and tauren 'paladins' belong to different orders. Blood Knights and Sunwalkers (though the human/draenei overtones are nauseating)

Again, mostly Alliance, roots and history -in the alliance-, a dwarf or human or heck, even worgen player can go through the argent crusade and deal with Tirion and feel relatively at home. This is a guy tied to their themes and their past and they should 'care'. An orc or troll would feel kind of out of place and have a kind of 'wtf'? vibe.


Nelfs at least deal with argent stuff in their earlier zones, but again you're ignoring sliding scale and making this binary. Ultimately Tirion and the argents are far more relevant, more thematically consistent, and more historically, politically, and culturally -tied- to the Alliance than the Horde.


Could you explain what you mean here? I'm not sure I get it. You're saying that the fact that Tirion went with the Alliance and hung out in one of their towns doesn't suggest he has a closer tie to them than the Horde?



This isn't a 'bias' thing. Some content is just far more relevant to some races, and rather than Blizz shoving orcs and trolls into medieval european aesthetics and going "Oh this is just as relevant and fitting to you as the other guys that used to have a monopoly on these themes" when we flat out know it's not, they ought to give the Horde their own things, and the Alliance can keep their stuff instead of making us share and having this -weirdness- where Malfurion stands around while the Horde murders his wife or Cenarius never says an odd word to the orcs, and Tirion doesn't bat an eye at the forsaken.

[Fayolynn]

Wall of text

You are completely missing the point of everything I said. My whole point is that surface details like him being human doesn't mean he is Alliance lore and that him being in Wrath made the expansion centered around the Alliance. Not once did I ever say that was of equal relevant to the Horde, only that he was not completely irrelevant as people have implied time and time again. I make the argument that things aren't as one sided as people make them out to be and some how I am the one that is making a binary argument. o.O Every argument made for for how Tirion is all for the Alliance is looking at extremely insignificant surface facts and completely ignores the details of the story.

No more posts from me.

[Skytotem]

They're not surface facts they're the history that made the character...

[Zoldor]

First, everytime I come into one of this dude's threads he's always banned. Is he posting while banned, is this a necro, or does he just have that many accounts?

Anyways, I think the issue is the horde story so far this expansion is childish in writing and a story we all know OVERLY well. So its rather boring and predictable. The alliance side is more interesting and is a less often told story. The good guy loosing it and crossing the line mixed with who will take their place on the throne. While horde is Leader is crazy lets replace him. And that is really the horde story is the hellscream tale part two. While alliance has a little more pizzazzz this time around. Either way the story this time is pretty simple and dull even for warcraft, not their best writing to date. Wraithion is really the only quest chain I like this time and he's really more interesting than Garrosh, Anduin, Varian, or Jania.

---------- Post added 2013-02-08 at 12:13 AM ----------

After years of treating the Alliance badly, and even making a part of the world a Horde Logo. Blizzard is finally giving the Alliance a little bit back.

Lets see, Destroyed Theramore Had the horde murder several prominent characters in Dalaran, had Jaina so mad that she asked the Horde to move out of Dalaran, when they refused she locked up a couple of them to show she meant business.

But the way they presented the events Jaina looks bad. So no still a ton of Horde Bias.

That is a pretty expansive definition of ask you have there.

[Mormolyce]

Man, "Blizzard favours Horde/Alliance" is the second most stupid type of thread you regularly see on the forums. After bitching sessions over sub numbers.

---------- Post added 2013-02-08 at 12:32 AM ----------

Tirion was part of the Alliance, is a human, is a paladin, leads an organization descended from survivors of Lordaeron an alliance kingdom and has statues of elves and dwarves everywhere at his bloody tournament means he is MORE RELEVANT to the Alliance than to the Horde.

That's not to say he has NO tie to the Horde, just that... a human or dwarf player is going to feel much more 'at home' in argent content or anything around Tirion than a Horde player or even a nelf player.

---------- Post added 2013-02-07 at 01:05 PM ----------

Plus there's the whole "Tirion was in the ALliance howling fjord starting quests" thing

...

Tirion was neutral in the Plaguelands back in Vanilla, long before Wrath. And his quest chain makes a BIG POINT about how he's seen monsters and heroes on both sides. He has a whole backstory about going into exile from the Paladin order because he was sympathetic to an Orc.

Seriously you couldn't imagine a human more neutral and cross-faction than Tirion Fordring. He's been like that from the moment he was created. It's a major part of his character.

[Skytotem]

Yeah I remember I did the whole questchain, god THOSE were the days.

It doesn't change the fact that the light and paladins and his aesthetics and history -still- make him, and thus the argent crusade more relevant to the Alliance than the Horde, he's 'the alliance guy that's nice to the Horde' again, in his story he literally uttered the words "I'll be loyal to the alliance until my dying day."

It's not a 'bias' thing

You -literally- cannot make the Horde fit as well in the argent aesthetics and thematics as the Alliance.

[Thassarian]

My biggest gripe is that the Alliance has a good story in the books. There it's written well and actually doesn't make you feel like you're fighting a losing battle while you read it. Tides of War, Jaina goes batshit crazy and almost levels Orgrimmar with a flood of Water Elementals. We see Thrall fail for the first time when he can't stop her wave of Elementals. What did we see in-game? The Horde actually did something and the Alliance killed a few stragglers and we are told by a relatively calm and placid Jaina "Hey, thanks for helping. I need time to think". At which point in Cata you were mailed a Tabard with a thank you note.

Nothing else. No epic scene of someone from the Alliance taking it upon themselves to show that they're not all pushovers. Not even a glimmer of anything remotely resembling a character with a spine. Same thing happened with Varian and the Worgen. He leads them into battle, almost kills Garrosh and... None of it gets shown in-game. Hell, the Trolls even managed to take their homeland and the Gnomes were sent packing yet again. It's also a laugh that the Horde have more interaction with a proper faction of Worgen (Bloodfang Pack/Gilnean Liberation Front) than the Alliance do outside of Gilneas, the rest of the Worgen are either settlers (Blasted lands area) or random NPCs or throwbacks to Vanilla (Sven in Duskwood). Goblins don't fare much better, but hey at least you're mentioned somewhere for your own faction (Revamped Aszhara, Pre-TLHL Quests)

That's the biggest issue with the in-game story telling; it's generally only written into the game from a Horde's perspective.

For pvp, yes.

SSM wants a word with you