Players Must Reject Blizzard Divisiveness

[LordVargK]

The back and forth we're stronger together if we team up to fight whatever and then once that is over let's just fight! Is kinda illogical and repetitive.
Blizzard really needs to figure out how to mix up that cycle. I'm not sure if it's breaking the factions apart and re-forming them. Adding another faction but allowing you to team up with anyone and everyone if you want.

inb4 Sylvanas pulls a Dr Manhattan and she her intentions are to "break the cycle" by becoming the common enemy.

[Scottyjscizzle]

WC2 Horde players shouldn't even exist. It was made clear in WC3 that the Horde is trying to improve after decades spent doing the Legion's dirty work. That's the very core of the faction. Blizzard should stop trying to cater to these people who still live in 1995. Hopefully there will never be a Garrosh 3.0 in the future.

If blizz does do Garrosh 3.0 be it horde, or alliance they better make it fucking count. This "welp all is good now we are firends!!" needs to stop. either have the factions hate eachother or let it end already.

[Neuroticaine]

Writing has never been Blizzards forte, even back in the old school days. Warcraft's always been poorly written. Fortunately, I do not play it for the story.

[Varodoc]

If blizz does do Garrosh 3.0 be it horde, or alliance they better make it fucking count. This "welp all is good now we are firends!!" needs to stop. either have the factions hate eachother or let it end already.

They will never do that. Major villains are written in a way that they require both factions to unite each others to be stopped. That's why nothing meaningful will ever come from a faction war in that regard. Tyrande and Talanji seem to be the only ones still interested in pursuing vengeance, and they will either end up as villains or will abandon their revenge.

[Mirishka]

Is there any data (like poll or a megathread) on where I can read up and get up to date what "the playerbase" (whatever the f... that is) wants? Other than some sort of vague vibe you get from the few ppl that agree with your own sentiments on forums or youtube.

What are the concerns in concrete terms?

Now now, it has been established on these forums that the couple hundred people complaining here clearly constitutes 'the playerbase'.

lol

[dunkl]

I do think the writers and us players don't have to be so active constantly with the start of each expansion. in wod we stormed the portal, in legion we stormed the broken shore, in bfa we stormed stormwind, etc. not every story needs to start with a reaction. the shadowlands exist as a plane and that alone could have been an awesome opportunity to let the expansion come to us instead of us plunging into it yet again.

us traveling to the shadowlands doesn't have to be so hyper-involved and active, it doesn't have to have lore characters yet again meeting up in one place and them/us plowing forward into the next adventure. I would have written in with us exploring smaller aspects of the shadowlands being connected to our plane of life; seeking the council with three wise arakkoa, checking out the local flora and fauna around northrend, the tuskarr, speaking to elders and oracles within our own cultures before sprinting into another adventure so quickly. I get it's a fantasy world and they have to react to huge disruptions such as this new situation, but I think there were smaller more intimate ways to make this situation more meaningful and to truly appreciate it's scope and scale.

I'm fine with how they get from one expansion to the next but even ash doesn't lunge into each new land or dilemma, sometimes they appear before him, and I think the shadowlands appearing before us could have been a good time to allow this expansion to present itself to us instead of us presenting ourselves to it - at least we don't have to tackle each new obstacle as if it were a disaster zone needing everyone involved.

it's like with lame marvel or lame latest seasons of stranger things where everyone is constantly speaking so exasperated and dashing onward instead of reflecting and moving appropriately - which in dosing so would create a greater sense of meaning and wonder and significance concerning the situation regarding the shadowlands existing and it's connection to our world and the situation we're in now which is we're about to enter a truly unknown realm.

older ff games used to take time to reflect on current situation and pour over options and consequences, and characters would check in on one another and visit places before continuing. it wasn't all go hurry marvel cheese unnecessary dialogue inappropriate scene that ruins the moment of what's trying to be achieved and detracts from the emotion. craft scenes or scenarios with care and concern so the weight of this new situation is grand yet personal. like sam and frodo and smeagol nearing their destination and the sheer impossibility of reaching it, it added weight to their burden and goal, or the nexus appearing in star trek,not in anyone's control yet it had to be dealt with logically as possible, or in harry potter where there kids would spend much time researching and discovering things and meeting with characters who could help in their mysteries before they tackled the threat/plot.

[Zentail]

I can never understand why Blizzard's writing is so "bad." I've read a lot of books. I've watched a lot of movies/TV shows. I'm played a lot of games. And Warcraft's story is one of my all-time favorites.

Genuine question, those of you who don't like the writing, what is an example of something that you would consider good and why? Warcraft has story holes, but so does everything else I've seen. There's lots of back and forth non-sensible stuff, but so does everything else that is a long-running story. I just honestly don't understand why Warcraft is allegedly "so bad" despite it doing exactly what everyone else does, but in my personal opinion, better. I can count on one hand the number of things I didn't really like whereas it far exceeds that with other stories.

[oplawlz]

What if you don't think the writing is bad

Then you should probably stop playing video games and go read some books. Hell, even watch a decent movie or two. Maybe find someone doing a puppet show.

[Ardenaso]

I can never understand why Blizzard's writing is so "bad." I've read a lot of books. I've watched a lot of movies/TV shows. I'm played a lot of games. And Warcraft's story is one of my all-time favorites.

Genuine question, those of you who don't like the writing, what is an example of something that you would consider good and why? Warcraft has story holes, but so does everything else I've seen. There's lots of back and forth non-sensible stuff, but so does everything else that is a long-running story. I just honestly don't understand why Warcraft is allegedly "so bad" despite it doing exactly what everyone else does, but in my personal opinion, better. I can count on one hand the number of things I didn't really like whereas it far exceeds that with other stories.

lemme start a "WoW that satisfies Warcraft 3 or MoP purists" if you don't mind

[Ezyah]

Should make a twit longer about how you feel abused by the writting and this way u insta win

[Hubbl3]

I'm automatically dismissed as an Alliance zealot, but I've been saying for a long time:

- WC3 Horde players are pissed at their faction being dragged through the mud
- WC2 Horde players are pissed at their faction being forced to be peaceful
- Alliance players are pissed for their faction being treated as passive, irrelevant, and a plot device for the Horde

The core problem is Metzen set up an impossible division in the Horde and then refused to pull the trigger. Thus, we keep swinging back and forth between the two Horde factions, with Blizz trying to cater to each. So much time is spent on the Horde that there's nothing left for the Alliance (aside from the writers openly stating they have no interest in the Alliance). Result, everyone is pissed, everyone feels they were done dirty and the other guy has it better.

It wouldn't be half a problem for me if Blizz just decided which way the Horde goes now and then stick with it. But forcing me to kill my own faction time and time again in more and more silly plots is very annoying. I would've been okay with Thrall being Warchief for all eternity. Thrall and Jaina being buddies, and the main plot driver being random evil guy #43 doing evil stuff.

I agree on the other stuff as well. No one is happy with the story. Not Alliance, not Horde, no one.

[Mirishka]

What if I have also read books and watch films as well as play WoW? Maybe lose this weird ass superiority complex you have about disliking something

Damn, I wish I could upvote this post.

I'm quite tired of people who dislike something/disagree with something, and then head to a forum like this for no other reason than to scream and bellyache about how that thing is BAD BAD LOLFAIL BAD TERRIBLE. While attacking/insulting anyone that disagrees. Its as if at some point, people forgot how opinions work.

I think BFA was full of narrative misfires (like giving Alliance players next to no info on the first raid), but I still love WoW's lore/story as a whole. Is it a tour de force of fantasy writing? Probably not, but it isn't meant to be: its background information to inform the stuff we do in a video game. And for me it serves that purpose fine.

And if people want to 'reject' that? Cancel your subs and go play something else. It isn't hard.

- - - Updated - - -

I agree on the other stuff as well. No one is happy with the story. Not Alliance, not Horde, no one.

Posts like this, I swear. Stop projecting how you feel onto others - you do not speak for everyone that plays this game. It might seem that way to you on forums like this one, where most topics are of the 'REEEEEE WOW SUX' variety - but the amount of players posting here compared to the amount of people actually playing the game is like a drop of water in a hot tub.

[Jastall]

The War in Warcraft thing is a meme now, but it was verbatim the reasoning given by Blizzard to amp up the faction war in Wrath and going into Cataclysm. Thrall himself was extremely popular at the time, and Garrosh very unpopular, but the overall direction of the Horde away from Noblesavage Incorporated was the result of a popular push. One that has panned out, Thrall and Garrosh consistently tie on polls and in terms of player reaction on basically every platform the game is discussed.

On the latter point I agree, but the argument made about Warcraft 3 being the definitive version of the factions is nonsense and most of the people championing it don't actually believe it, they're just trying to score points against an opposing fanbase, since they themselves don't touch the noblesavage playable races with a ten foot pole. Case in point, the only element of the playable Alliance to feature in WC3 are the Night Elves - none of the human kingdoms that are playable even up to Wrath appear at any point, the dwarves have one character with little exploration and both Quel'thalas and Lordaeron, mainstays of the WC2 Alliance, are used only as Horde. Yet to this day, people quite rightly claim a connection to these things because when they were introduced, that was who they were catered for.

I do think Thrall's descent in popularity has a lot more to do with his Cata treatment than the noblesavage business. Back in Wrath I remember one or two polls where he crushed Garrosh, and any other Horde character, Sylvanas was the only one even close. Granted my memory may be faulty, but Thrall absolutely did not start becoming unpopular until Blizzard themselves decided to both shit on his legacy and prop up his character at the same time. Meanwhile they also propped up Garrosh at times and were out to make him look like a meatheaded moron at others. Ah, the memories of Cataclysm. I still can't stress enough how terrible that expansion's storytelling was.

I think WC3 is the most popular piece of lore in part because it makes sense and works on its own. WC2 basically requires you to read Rise of the Horde and a couple other books to make it anything more than a basic story of bad Orcs and good humans with absent characters and poor storytelling (and Light knows that even among Warcraft lore enthusiasts these books aren't commonly read, let alone the general populace). WoW's lore and story woes are far too well documented to even begin listing them here. WC3, taken at face value and without requiring any external reading or extrapolation just works most of the time as a complete story with a beginning, a middle and an end, plus an epilogue in the form of the Rexxar campaign, and compelling (if not very deep) characters doing their thing.

To say nothing of the fact than an MMO isn't a very good medium for storytelling in the first place for various reasons, and an endless story is doomed to sink into mediocrity at best as it repeats the same plot beats again and again, see WoW, post-vanilla SWTOR and, in another medium, comic books which are of the origin point of so many of the flaws of WoW it's not even funny.

[qwerty123456]

You can't keep a faction war going when you constantly have to come together to save the world. Nor can you keep it going with a good story when you have players in both factions. Nobody wants to be on the losing side and you end up needing asspulls to explain why the weaker faction can suddenly take on super powered mechs and spaceships. You also have to come up with reasons why the more powerful faction doesn't just wipe out the other.

[oplawlz]

What if I have also read books and watch films as well as play WoW? Maybe lose this weird ass superiority complex you have about disliking something

You're allowed to like bad writing - but that's not what you said. You said you don't think the writing is bad.

Since the writing it objectively bad, the correct response is to expose yourself to better writing so you can make an educated comparison. Maybe drop the hyper defensive inferiority complex you have about learning to be better rounded in your intellectual pursuits.

[Magnagarde]

The Alliance is a reactionary punching bag since the Warcraft 3 story came out and the Horde is the residual bad guy whose skull-adorned metal urges arise every now and then. Combine this kind of treatment with a MMO setting where they are scared to write a story at the level of the RTS games and you get what we're getting.

[Powerogue]

I've listened to the people on this forum put up their ideas for an """improved""" story, that is a horrible idea. See sig.

Their writing has not gotten worse. People have shined a brighter light on it, scrutinizing its details more heavily, actively looking for things to hate on, even resorting to warping characters into insane caricatures and strawmen to do so.

I would argue that the only mistake Blizzard have made is writing a story that the players have a deep personal investment in. That was an enormous gamble, and was "successful" in the same way the scientists creating Mewtwo in the Pokemon Movie were "successful." An enormous backfire effect as the players, now actually paying attention to their role in the story instead of just feeling like anonymous murder-hobos-for-hire, relentlessly picked it apart, as everyone wanted something different to be satisfied by it.

[Mirishka]

I'm just genuinely curious what, if it actually exists, makes one person's opinion worth more than anothers when it comes to entertainment? How arrogant, self-righeteous and frankly rude must you be to imply someone clearly hasn't taken in enough art and therefore isn't 'cultured' just because they like something you don't.

Posts like that are what my Avatar is for

Amen. There's tons of things I dislike that other people enjoy... like Fortnite. I wouldn't play Fortnite if Epic paid me to* but I wouldn't insult someone that enjoys it, or argue with them about it or imply 'well u need to play REAL video games if u think Fortnite is good'.

And anyone that would do that is a fucking idiot as far as I'm concerned.







*That's a lie, I would totally play it if they paid me.

[GreenJesus]

No, something like that is more BLIZZARDS job, no poll here would be able to be broad enough to cover the issues. You'd need multiple polls on multiple subjects over a long period of time if you only used MMO Champ.

I sincerely hope that no writer ever uses polls to determine a story. One of the worst ideas I have ever heard. A story should be made from passion by the writer. I think the problem with wow is that there are so many cooks in the kitchen with the manager pulling them in different ways based on marketing.

For example: sylvanas in BFA and legion cinematic versus Sylvanas in game.

[Super Dickmann]

I do think Thrall's descent in popularity has a lot more to do with his Cata treatment than the noblesavage business. Back in Wrath I remember one or two polls where he crushed Garrosh, and any other Horde character, Sylvanas was the only one even close. Granted my memory may be faulty, but Thrall absolutely did not start becoming unpopular until Blizzard themselves decided to both shit on his legacy and prop up his character at the same time. Meanwhile they also propped up Garrosh at times and were out to make him look like a meatheaded moron at others. Ah, the memories of Cataclysm. I still can't stress enough how terrible that expansion's storytelling was.

My post wasn't clear enough maybe - I agree with what you've written here, it's what I was getting at - that even while Thrall was personally still extremely popular, probably the height of his popularity since the game had the widest audience at that stage, there was still an overall interest in more inter-faction conflict independent of that. Wrathgate was the original Burning in terms of the sheer amount of text written about it and the aftermath regarding factions. Garrosh himself was almost universally disliked in Wrath, and was a crapshoot in Cataclysm at best. I think nothing did more to rehabilitate him than the first rebellion story and everything that came after, followed by a reappraisal of what was earlier. As it regards Cataclysm, I maintain that the faction focused stories were decent to excellent (if you were Horde), whereas the main story was abysmal. I wouldn't say the worst since we still have TBC, but truly dire.

I think WC3 is the most popular piece of lore in part because it makes sense and works on its own. WC2 basically requires you to read Rise of the Horde and a couple other books to make it anything more than a basic story of bad Orcs and good humans with absent characters and poor storytelling (and Light knows that even among Warcraft lore enthusiasts these books aren't commonly read, let alone the general populace). WoW's lore and story woes are far too well documented to even begin listing them here. WC3, taken at face value and without requiring any external reading or extrapolation just works most of the time as a complete story with a beginning, a middle and an end, plus an epilogue in the form of the Rexxar campaign, and compelling (if not very deep) characters doing their thing.

As a self-contained story WC3 is the best product Blizzard has produced in the franchise. It doesn't have the best writing or lay the only groundwork or whatever, the writing is hokey, even more so than some of what we have now, but it knew what it wanted to be and did an excellent job of it. I can't think of a single story in it that didn't land exactly as intended - except Medivh. Anyone going back to that game will find him a total loon with severe social anxiety who badly should've just spoken straight instead of doom-mongering and who had endless opportunities to prevent many of the events that ended up going down. WC2, soft spot though I have for it and functional in its own right was much more basic, but it laid a lot of groundwork that still gets mileage to this day. It's not an either/or - elements of them are complementary to one another. The WC3 orcish backstory was an objective improvement to the WC2 one and the flaws it did in what the orcs were in the present were corrected in the MMO right before it decided to ditch all the good effort it'd done in aligning these two angles.

To say nothing of the fact than an MMO isn't a very good medium for storytelling in the first place for various reasons, and an endless story is doomed to sink into mediocrity at best as it repeats the same plot beats again and again, see WoW, post-vanilla SWTOR and, in another medium, comic books which are of the origin point of so many of the flaws of WoW it's not even funny.

Long-form narratives like this need to be aware of their limitations and play to them. My main frustration is that WoW, less so before, but especially now struggles against these basic points - super hero stories with a universal cast of heroes, all of them with generally the same positions vs an overarching big bad can't do it on their own. Lessons that the gameplay mechanically can't carry and if it could would cripple the game likewise. This is a campy pulp story about war, go with it - don't struggle against it.