How should the Horde story have been handled and advanced ?

[jellmoo]

That was literally the reason why Garrosh was so hellbent on expansion when he discovered that Thrall decided to have the orcs inhabit an inhospitable land, not because it looked like their original homeworld, as stated in the Founding of Durotar, but because he wanted his race to repent for the sins of their fathers... which was so bloody dumb.

Yup, I just think that this should have been crystal clear from the get go, not 3 expansions later. The Horde/Alliance conflict should have reasons to be a thing right at the start of the game, and the politics of it should have made both sides look shitty.

If they wanted to double down on the fact that Org was built in probably the stupidest place it could have been built, it should have been a plot point how hard it was for them to survive there.

[KOUNTERPARTS]

This shuffling of the deck of Horde leaders is becoming tiresome. Personally I would have stuck to character development of Garrosh into a more righteous character. From there it's anyone's ball game.

[LemonDemonGirl]

Not killing Vol'jin or Rastakhan

[sighy]

There is a long series of things, but for one not turning Kael against Silvermoon and not restoring the Sunwell would be among the earliest. It effectively hamstrung any future storytelling potential the Blood Elves had and severely neutered them to a point, where the kind which the players were sold upon are rare exceptions and usually die very quickly. It's comparable to the wrench The LAst Jedi threw in the Star Wars Sequels, where the bulk of the story thread was prematurely resolved leaving the ongoing narrative with little to work with, which is why the Blood Elves ahve only really shown up as Jaina's punching bags or "still here" cameos since then.

Maintain Sylvanas consistent with her previous characterisation, don't involve the Jailer, until a last resort deal with the devil situation and build on previously established points of contention. Build the conflict on the Horde being suspicious of the Aliance given their stunts in Stormheim and Arathi. Build the conflict by organically escalating it and having the Horde double down, because there is no way to go back. Directly contrast Saurfang vs Sylvanas mak'gora with Cairne vs Garrosh, where one was fueled by emotions and drawn out hard fight this one would be swift, decisive, purposeful and somber to establist that Sylvanas means business, but unlike Garrosh isn't in it for glory or any such thing. On the Aliance side there would be two sides of debate, where one would blame Anduin for provoking the conflict through his diplomatic ineptitude and the other side would blame Anduin, because he wasn't proactive enough and honestly should have purged the zombies and savages a long time ago. Leading into a good man vs good king story for them. The war would takes us all over seeing that where one finds allies the other finds their enemies ultimately leading to a confrontation, at the gates of Capital City, after a grueling opposed landing heavily inspired by D-day both factions at their limit by the time they reach the city itself. The Aliance thinking they had finally won the day call for Sylvanas to surrender, but that is when she unveils her last resort and calls for the dead to rise as ground trembles and the very sky begins to crack the dead of both sides begin to rise and quickly overwhelm the attackers, who rout and escape (Aliance perspective would very much so resemble Hardhome.) The Horde had ultimately prevailed, but at what cost? Leading us into the N'zoth expansion, while the death stuff is built up on a back burner.


TLDR don't resolve all Horde stories with "Be more like the Aliance!"

[VladlTutushkin]

There is a long series of things, but for one not turning Kael against Silvermoon and not restoring the Sunwell would be among the earliest. It effectively hamstrung any future storytelling potential the Blood Elves had and severely neutered them to a point, where the kind which the players were sold upon are rare exceptions and usually die very quickly. It's comparable to the wrench The LAst Jedi threw in the Star Wars Sequels, where the bulk of the story thread was prematurely resolved leaving the ongoing narrative with little to work with, which is why the Blood Elves ahve only really shown up as Jaina's punching bags or "still here" cameos since then.

Maintain Sylvanas consistent with her previous characterisation, don't involve the Jailer, until a last resort deal with the devil situation and build on previously established points of contention. Build the conflict on the Horde being suspicious of the Aliance given their stunts in Stormheim and Arathi. Build the conflict by organically escalating it and having the Horde double down, because there is no way to go back. Directly contrast Saurfang vs Sylvanas mak'gora with Cairne vs Garrosh, where one was fueled by emotions and drawn out hard fight this one would be swift, decisive, purposeful and somber to establist that Sylvanas means business, but unlike Garrosh isn't in it for glory or any such thing. On the Aliance side there would be two sides of debate, where one would blame Anduin for provoking the conflict through his diplomatic ineptitude and the other side would blame Anduin, because he wasn't proactive enough and honestly should have purged the zombies and savages a long time ago. Leading into a good man vs good king story for them. The war would takes us all over seeing that where one finds allies the other finds their enemies ultimately leading to a confrontation, at the gates of Capital City, after a grueling opposed landing heavily inspired by D-day both factions at their limit by the time they reach the city itself. The Aliance thinking they had finally won the day call for Sylvanas to surrender, but that is when she unveils her last resort and calls for the dead to rise as ground trembles and the very sky begins to crack the dead of both sides begin to rise and quickly overwhelm the attackers, who rout and escape (Aliance perspective would very much so resemble Hardhome.) The Horde had ultimately prevailed, but at what cost? Leading us into the N'zoth expansion, while the death stuff is built up on a back burner.


TLDR don't resolve all Horde stories with "Be more like the Aliance!"

Was about to write a long reponse but kinda tired of doing that so i will just make a short one: No.

Alliance was sacrificed to aggrandize the Horde and make you look cool , but then of course Blizz had to stop before they actually destroyed one faction. They were carving, cleaving, scorching and neutering Alliance ever since BC out of theit biases. Now they just ran out of “material” to further mutilate.

So you get nothing, you lose. Go sit around with Baine and listen to your council.

- - - Updated - - -

Yes. That's what a gameplay where all conflicts are resolved by violence and where your prism into it is one of two playable factions can do.

You can do noblesavages existing in a vegetative state in a complete story, which is why the WC3 Horde works in WC3 despite being perfunctory to the Starcraft retread that is the actual plot. You can also do this because in the RTS you aren't limited to two playable factions but can conceivably make anything playable and so cast the conflict through the lens of any view point. You can't do it in long form pulp fantasy, which is what WoW is, because anything you create needs to be sustained in variations on its present form indefinitely. Whether he happens to be a doctor, a company owner, a satanist making a deal with a devil rather than just divorcing, Spider-Man will still be shooting webs and punching baddies in flamboyant costumes in the face. The same applies to the Horde. It is a brand, a symbol representing a particular axis of conflict.

You can do this whole rigamarole about it learning about the benefits of a council system from an absolute monarchy or you can even start it in a position where it doesn't have much to do besides run errands for its opposite number, like the Kalimdor Horde's total absence of any real plots of its own in Vanilla. At the end of the day all these things are aberrant in not serving the main purpose of it as a pulp storytelling tool which is to have green people hit pink people (and now people of all colours) in the face and vice versa, and so the writers will eventually relapse. Other franchises like Warhammer don't get themselves in this position because they're self-aware of the needs of their franchise hence why everything is penned with the proviso that every playable group must be able to fight every other playable group and itself, but with Warcraft it's a cycle instead because the writers keep thinking they can reinvent the wheel.

Main problem is that Warhammer is not an MMO. It had an MMO which died before it got its first expansion. Or maybe before second i dont remember and it dosent matter.

Also in Warhammer you dont have humans sparing orcs out of stupidity. Hell, Sigmar ascended after killing so many greenskins that he literally scorched that into their racial memory so now they have subconscious fear of his hammer, Ghal’Maraz and get PTSD when they see it. Orks, the most warlike and carefree race in the settings gets a collective fear of one weapon because of just how many of them it mauled.

And so on.

Warhammer is awesome for strategies, tabletops, single player games and so on. But for an MMO its a questionable material.

[Thage]

My biggest thought is, Thrall should not have discounted Cairne out of hand. Instead, he should have chosen Cairne (a well-loved Horde leader with combat and peacetime leadership experience), and appointed Garrosh as Saurfang's successor as High Overlord. Garrosh clearly respected Cairne and his opinions early on in The Shattering before they both grabbed the conflict ball, and Cairne's approval of Garrosh's forethinking during the evacuation brought him sincere joy.

Warchief Cairne would have sought more productive ways to address the Horde's near-catastrophic resource shortages, but done so without immediately ramping up invasion efforts in Ashenvale. More likely, he would have tasked the druids and shaman loyal to the Horde to begin large-scale irrigation projects (including water purification) and gotten the goblins to work on developing technology to desalinize seawater, opening up a literal ocean as a potential water supply to work with. He and Jaina aren't on the friendly terms she and Thrall were, but it can be assumed they're on well-enough terms that she would agree to host a meeting between himself and Varian to discuss how to tackle the ongoing resource problems, walking away with the understanding that while leadership would work toward dealing with the Twilight's Hammer problem, they also need to overlook border clashes and some skirmishes over resources on the frontier (essentially continuing the status quo of Vanilla and TBC).

Through all this, Garrosh is learning from the older and wiser of the Horde while also bringing to the table youthful vigor and a genuine desire to see the Horde improve. Tempering the worst excesses of his personality, he flourishes as High Overlord and taps unconventional allies like the Dragonmaw as well as sending Horde adventurers (with his and Cairne's blessings to establish alliances as needed) out to major fronts in Uldum, Hyjal, and Deepholm. He sends forces to control an important resource-rich island near Stormwind, which prompts the Alliance to send ships out, as well; after the events in Vashj'ir both factions withdraw their claim to this island to prevent another attack of opportunity from the naga forces in the area. Garrosh maintains a Warsong presence in Ashenvale, but at Hamuul's suggestion, instructs the Warsong to replant two trees for every one they cut down, Horde-affiliated druids tending to their growth, which in turn mitigates night elf reprisals to 'business as usual.'

Pandaria becomes a matter of both Alliance and Horde seeking to win over the various pandaren villages and municipalities to agree to trade, providing military support for the growing Sha problem in exchange for badly-needed natural resources. Some pandaren become curious about the outside world and join the Alliance and Horde as adventurers.

The Burning Legion's third invasion sees Cairne dying heroically at the Broken Shore, or otherwise realizing he's too old to effectively govern the Horde entire. He promotes Garrosh to Warchief, now poised to lead with a vision for the Horde that is one of strength and honor, a blade to compliment the Alliance's shield against any that would threaten his world. Neither does he sit idly by as Thrall would have once, and he continues an aggressive campaign of irrigating Durotar and the Barrens, seeking sustainability for the Horde, while defending its borders fiercely and passionately. He becomes the 'greatest Warchief the Horde ever had' that the Bronze dragons mention him being in other timelines. The name Hellscream becomes a source of pride and hope for his allies who hear his warcry as well as a terror on the battlefield for those who would threaten the Horde or the world he now calls home, and he's known for being tough but fair in negotiating with the Alliance, neither offering effluent praise nor sneering condescension and accepting neither in turn, and answering any aggression in kind.

[sighy]

Was about to write a long reponse but kinda tired of doing that so i will just make a short one: No.

Alliance was sacrificed to aggrandize the Horde and make you look cool , but then of course Blizz had to stop before they actually destroyed one faction. They were carving, cleaving, scorching and neutering Alliance ever since BC out of theit biases. Now they just ran out of “material” to further mutilate.

So you get nothing, you lose. Go sit around with Baine and listen to your council.

The Aliance drags all stories it's remotely involved in down and there hasn't been a good story brought forth by the Aliance, for at least 10 years so I'd throw them under all the conceivable vehicles in reality and fiction, if it meant we could get at least one good story out of them. What i wrote, while abridged and only touched upon gives them their own storyarc, as opposed to being foliage to forced Horde drama plot and giving them Echo Isles + Orgrimmar would strike home for more of the playerbase, while allowing the Horde to have a visually different capital maybe using the 2nd floor of Undercity, rebuilt Silvermoon or expanding upon Thunder Bluff since they're all more about the people than the places they've settled recently.


As for the Warhammer MMo that's a story of EA mismanagement than anything regarding the IP other than it not being as big as Star Wars, because it's team got gutted in favor of working on Star Wars the Old Republic.

[Syegfryed]

It is extremely easy, turn back to wc3 or cata, make then what they rly are and not a plot device so the alliance don't feels bad for attacking then. Fuck the council, bring the warchief back, leaded by an orc, and don't neglect the clans and tribes within the horde, kill off Baine and Make the forsaken eladership a council of 3.

Horde was always more of a reaction attacker and the alliance the active one, should go back like that.

But now the Horde had Hillsbrad Foothills and Aszhara for quite a while.
What exactly did they do with it?

azshara in specific was a hellhole overcomed by demons and crazy elementals before the cataclysm, it only became suitable to use after they had to push further in ashenvale, but blizzard want to swipe Cataclysm under the rug.

- - - Updated - - -

Alliance was sacrificed to aggrandize the Horde and make you look cool ,l.

What in the nine hells game are you even playing dude? in what game the horde was "aggrandize" and "look cool"

cause we can't be more low than we are and we def don't look cool since cataclysm. This has to be a joke.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

What in the nine hells game are you even playing dude? in what game the horde was "aggrandize" and "look cool"

cause we can't be more low than we are and we def don't look cool since cataclysm. This has to be a joke.

The funnest part of the Horde storylines are the early parts, when you're being the big bad conqueror. Invading Silverpine Forest and Gilneas, slaughtering innocent people and enslaving them for Sylvanas. Becoming a soldier in Krom'gar's army and climbing up the ranks as you crush the Alliance. Being onboard an airship escorting Garrosh as he does a bombing run of Alliance ships in the Twilight Highlands. Invading Pandaria and machinegunning Alliance soldiers like its Vietnam. Marching towards Teldrassil, cutting a path through the forest and burning every elf village you come across and slowly cutting down all who stand in your way. You feel like a conqueror and powerful. It's little like the old Death Knight intro where you're the big bad Darth Vader stomping into people's homes and killing them in cold blood as they beg for their puny lives.

The latter half of the storylines are what sucks. It's the part where the writers try to pretend that you're some morally righteous noble savage who isn't ackshually evil! (Even though you totally went on an unprovoked mass murder spree 5 minutes ago). Your leaders start moralizing and apologizing and pussying out. It feels totally unearned, hypocritical, and a smack in the face. The whole story comes to an end. Honestly it would have been better if the story had just stuck to its guns. Either have me conquer the Horde, or have the entire might of the Alliance bear down on me and we lose in a glorious last stand. Even losing as hundreds of Alliance soldiers die taking me down, going out in a blaze of glory, would make me feel more powerful than wimping out and giving some lip service about how we're reformed and we promise not to be evil next time (only to go evil again in a couple expansions because that's what is fun).

[enigma77]

Simple, the Alliance shouldn't have been written to be the goody two shoes faction so there could have been some legitimate grievances against the Alliance and therefore justified conflict.

Instead the hoomans and their lackeys are always unquestionably benevolent and just and perfect little angels. And the Horde is always bad and wrong.

Humans & Dwarves should be racist, Night Elves should be extremely xenophobic and these three should push the Horde into taking an aggressive stance and then maybe go too far, further making the Alliance hate the Horde.

Blizzard is the only studio I know that always portrays Humans as purely good, which is one of the dumbest things you can do because guess what? Take a look outside.

[confety]

Just dont give crazy nazi commie warchiefs that kills the other faction and its own people to have a dumb and weak way of advancing the game's plot.

A united azeroth where the 2 factions fight a cosmic threat seems more interesting that human/orc bad or just making the player go alone with 4 npcs that do literally nothing more than stand afk in "insert main expansion city hub here".

A horde and alliance war machines united against the forces of death would have been a way more complex and cool theme, like the battle for mount hyjal was

[Super Dickmann]

Main problem is that Warhammer is not an MMO. It had an MMO which died before it got its first expansion. Or maybe before second i dont remember and it dosent matter.

Also in Warhammer you dont have humans sparing orcs out of stupidity. Hell, Sigmar ascended after killing so many greenskins that he literally scorched that into their racial memory so now they have subconscious fear of his hammer, Ghal’Maraz and get PTSD when they see it. Orks, the most warlike and carefree race in the settings gets a collective fear of one weapon because of just how many of them it mauled.

I mostly mean 40k. I've never much cared for Warhammer Fantasy honestly, though much the same can be said about it regarding how it understands what beats it's trying to cover.

Yes, indeed, the franchise has never reached a point where the various factions hugged it out or whatever or even allowed a situation to take place where the plot can only continue if one faction spares another. Blizzard does because they want to tell you some moralizing lesson about the innate humanity of us all or whatever which is readily apparent to anyone with two braincells to rub together and at the same time runs counter to the purpose of the franchise as a whole which is to enable as many permutations of us fighting each other and us fighting big bads as possible. The story still does so because that's all the franchise is really suitable for and why it has the success it does, but it's almost self-conscious about it and so each permutation rather than just being a natural outgrowth of the story instead has to quietly bin the message of the preceding chapter. This results in that message being even more over the top the next go around and in turn makes the subsequent even less plausible when it inevitably happens. It's a very sad cycle and earlier writers more aware of this.

@confety

There's genuinely nothing complex at all about the Battle of Hyjal. It works precisely because it's simple - everyone is basically nice guys and they overcome their surface differences to team up and fight someone who's incorrigible, irreparably evil. It's a classic story and completely functional but there's a reason why the expansion sequestered Thrall and Jaina to their own leprous side campaign while focusing on Arthas, Illidan and the night elves - those still had things to do.

Even in the base game, you could cut the playable orcs out of Reign of Chaos entirely and change zero about the end state of the plot. It was called Starcraft.

[VladlTutushkin]

The Aliance drags all stories it's remotely involved in down and there hasn't been a good story brought forth by the Aliance, for at least 10 years so I'd throw them under all the conceivable vehicles in reality and fiction, if it meant we could get at least one good story out of them. What i wrote, while abridged and only touched upon gives them their own storyarc, as opposed to being foliage to forced Horde drama plot and giving them Echo Isles + Orgrimmar would strike home for more of the playerbase, while allowing the Horde to have a visually different capital maybe using the 2nd floor of Undercity, rebuilt Silvermoon or expanding upon Thunder Bluff since they're all more about the people than the places they've settled recently.


As for the Warhammer MMo that's a story of EA mismanagement than anything regarding the IP other than it not being as big as Star Wars, because it's team got gutted in favor of working on Star Wars the Old Republic.

“Alliance” dosent drag down anything. Its the otjer way around. Developers either dont care about factions and only write for their pet characters and waifus or main Horde and dont want to write Alliance as remotely “cool” because in their warped perception it would diminish the Horde’s “cool factor”.

So they write Alliance in a most boring and uninspired way possible, out of either lack of care or misguided idea that strong, proactive Alliance would make Horde look bad.

They KNOW that how they write Alliance sucks. And THATS WHY they keep writing them this way. Because if they stop, they would have to write Horde like that (at least thats how they see it, i guess) and they dont want to shit on their favourite “team”.

[geco]

Without making many changes.
It shows that everyone at BFA hates it but they can't do anything about the war but actively show how they hate it and how they play against it.

In the long run. Voljin didn't have to die yet. Sylvanas did not let her ethnicity be a bad "pragmatist". BFA had to go through Nzoth's fault.

Varock let's say it never had to be important XD.

[Darththeo]

Both the Horde and Alliance should have been written as "Morally Grey" factions with characters covering all sort of morality in both factions. The Horde's leadership has been destroyed twice by terrible writing (Garrosh and Sylvanas). Garrosh was painted as wrong and went into super villainy. Sylvanas was terribly written. Vol'jin they didn't do much with but had potential.

The fact that there is no inbetween "I am noble and will do what is right" and "MUAHAHAHAHA! I AM SUPER COMIC BOOK VILLAIN!" is annoying.

[loras]

Not long ago I did a thread about the way the Alliance story has been handled, as well as to discuss what should have been better ways to handle and write the Alliance lore over WoW's progress : https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...d-and-advanced

So today I am making the same thread but for the second big faction of Warcraft universe : the Horde.

How do you think that the Horde story should have been written and advanced since the beggining of WoW up to this day ? What issues, progresses, success and failures should the Horde have faced since Vanilla ? What should have been its evolution ? And what issues and problems should have been resolved already and how ?

I do not mind how it was handled up until Legion, broadly speaking (yes there were minor failures and such, but i do not remember it as being too bad). Or perhaps i've just forgotten too much about it since then.

Anyway, BfA should have started with Alliance aggression or mutual escalation, not the unlikely and poorly executed genocide at Teldrassil. Then over the course of the war the Alliance's naval power should have caused pressure, with the BoD largely proceeding as it has. However at that point the Horde should have started to shine: from a position of adversity a daring gamble is born to draw the Alliance's forces out on land and inflict a crippling defeat of their land forces; a large navy is nice but without enough men to mean something on land that makes them largely toothless.

Meanwhile Sylvanas could still do her gig in the background, this time staying more true to her scheming and subtle character.

Aszhara could still show up, perhaps with a different setup requiring the Horde to expend its land armies and the alliance its navy, then N'zoth still shows up, but with the alliance retaining clear naval superiority and the horde retaining land superiority.

And then Sylvanas sneaks off after a cold war "peaceless peace" has been established to ensure that the slaughter continues in her absence.

[sighy]

“Alliance” dosent drag down anything. Its the otjer way around. Developers either dont care about factions and only write for their pet characters and waifus or main Horde and dont want to write Alliance as remotely “cool” because in their warped perception it would diminish the Horde’s “cool factor”.

So they write Alliance in a most boring and uninspired way possible, out of either lack of care or misguided idea that strong, proactive Alliance would make Horde look bad.

They KNOW that how they write Alliance sucks. And THATS WHY they keep writing them this way. Because if they stop, they would have to write Horde like that (at least thats how they see it, i guess) and they dont want to shit on their favourite “team”.

Suuure. It's the Horde's fault that Aliance's resident angelic golden boy super martyr god emperor Anduin and his human potential can do no wrong and are undisputed beacon of goodness and morality. Conflicts aren't based on legitimate grievances and diplomatic fuck ups of an inexperienced king, but "Screw you and HEIL SATAN! BYE!" You can't fucking have mutual animosity when the Horde can't view the Aliance as their villains. That's the reason BfA went to hell, before the prepatch was even through so they could set up how the only way to be a good guy is to ditch your own faction and effectively join the Aliance, in all but name.

God damnit i WISH the Aliance fans would get some of THIS """favoritism""" and see everything they ever liked about the faction be removed piece by piece, in favor of dumb crap, which nobody in their right mind wants to see, until there is no identity or A-list characters, who all died in stupid ways or left their faction and race behind purely to serve the plot. The highest level Aliance character this ever happened to was Benedictus and most people didn't even know who that was.

[Terrorthatflapsinthenight]

Suuure. It's the Horde's fault that Aliance's resident angelic golden boy super martyr god emperor Anduin and his human potential can do no wrong and are undisputed beacon of goodness and morality. Conflicts aren't based on legitimate grievances and diplomatic fuck ups of an inexperienced king, but "Screw you and HEIL SATAN! BYE!" You can't fucking have mutual animosity when the Horde can't view the Aliance as their villains. That's the reason BfA went to hell, before the prepatch was even through so they could set up how the only way to be a good guy is to ditch your own faction and effectively join the Aliance, in all but name.

God damnit i WISH the Aliance fans would get some of THIS """favoritism""" and see everything they ever liked about the faction be removed piece by piece, in favor of dumb crap, which nobody in their right mind wants to see, until there is no identity or A-list characters, who all died in stupid ways or left their faction and race behind. The highest level Aliance character this ever happened to was Benedictus and most people didn't even know who that was.

It's not the Alliance fault for having a character like Anduin in its ranks, nor for him being such a creator's pet that is given so much time and importance while the rest of the Alliance characters are neglected or even mistreated.

Nor that the Alliance is forced to never have any genuine grievance or retribution against the Horde for their actions and atrocities against the Alliance races tfor which they almost never suffer any karma.

And the Horde has had the same problem of creator's pets and spotlight monopolizers in Thrall, Baine and Garrosh to a smaller degree and even worse with Sylvanas since Danuser became the main writer of WOW.

[geco]

God damnit i WISH the Aliance fans would get some of THIS """favoritism""" and see everything they ever liked about the faction be removed piece by piece, in favor of dumb crap, which nobody in their right mind wants to see, until there is no identity or A-list characters, who all died in stupid ways or left their faction and race behind purely to serve the plot. The highest level Aliance character this ever happened to was Benedictus and most people didn't even know who that was.

You missed the entire Tyrande arc right?
And there seems to be more.

[Psychotrip]

The story at the start should have surrounded how the Horde was dying. The Orcs and Trolls had nothing. They inhabited the harshest, least viable lands in the known world. The Tauren were nomads struggling to figure out how to be more sedentary and living in lands barely better. The story should have really cemented how desperate they were to survive. How children were starving. This forced them to venture into Night Elf lands just to have the resources they needed to survive. Everything from the starting character creation narrative, to the starting quest texts should have hit this home. The Horde should have been on the verge of destruction from the get go.

For the Forsaken, the narrative should have been about their isolation, and how everyone around them reviled them, thought them no better than the Scourge, and wanted their destruction. Their should have been Human and Dwarf army camps setup surrounding them. They should have been looking to figure out a way to survive when they saw nothing but enemies at their doorstep and no way to get out.

The Horde should have been desperate on all fronts. Backed into a corner, just wanting to live, but having a more formidable force (from a resource, tech and organizational level) all around them that had what they needed. The story should have really reinforced why they were in conflict with the Alliance. Why they felt like they had to expand their territory. Why they felt the need to attack.

Its easy to forget that Blizzard set up the world in a way that could have easily led to realistic, nuanced conflict for the horde.They just dont seem capable of seeing whats in front of them, nor do they seem willing to allow the Alliance to ever be in the wrong or to drive the conflict forward in a meaningful way.

For example, the Ashenvale issue is a lot more 3 dimensional when you consider that most of Kalimdor is a barren wasteland thanks to the war of the ancients, and yet the instigators (night elves) get to hoard their resources in the north while the vast majority of kalimdor's population is barely scraping by. Meanwhile, the Horde's control over the gold road gives them a massive economic advantage. Humans colonizing Kalimdor makes more sense when you remmeber that their race just survived a literal zombie apocalypse and half of their homelands are blighted hellscapes.

The writers were given everything they needed to create years of relatable, nuanced conflict between the two factions, but instead they chose to make the horde mindless followers of whatever tyrant is in charge that week, and the Alliance can do nothing but respond to them with repeated slaps on the wrist.