Is Faction Lore Bias Simply Just a Perception of Players

[adorich]

I think blizzard catering to casuals has increased the level of entitlement amongst a certain demographic within the player base. These players mostly play alliance and hence the increased whining commensurate to the increased accessibility of the game. Imagine in TBC someone complaining about story bias. Back when the game was challenging people had better things to focus on

What in the world does 'Blizzard catering to casuals' have to do with Blizzard's bias to one faction? You've also got "whining," "entitlement," "increased accessibility," and 'the challenge of TBC' in your post. -1 for no actual mention of "LFR" or "LFD." Your post is an excellent example of stereotyping: inferring huge amounts of information and lumping people into categories based on superficial characteristics. You don't know who plays which faction and these days many people play both.

I recall players claiming bias as far back as Vanilla. 1-60 travel was hell for Ally. 20 minutes minimum to get to Darn compared to Zeps for Horde and a great STV hub. Also, Swamp of Sorrows had Horde guards patrolling and flagging you, yet in Dustwallow Marsh, Ally npcs weren't pvp flagged.

Ally areas were so much more detailed though. Duratar was barren compared to Elwin Forest and the Barrens had so much walking! If you were north near the goblins and died, you had a 5 minute corpse walk; 7 minute corpse walk for that damn Venture Company Mine and you rezzed right into the goblins you just killed. That was hell.

[Redmage]

I play horde pretty much exclusively (except for some compromising allegations that I played a lvl 70 gnome during BC which I will neither confirm nor deny), and I have to admit... I feel like there is in fact a Horde bias.

[ShadowJester]

Pretty much. Alot of people mistakenly believe that attention equals "bias".

Granted the Horde have had alot of attention recently, but it's still not bias.

Dude this sooooooo hard. Yes no doubt the Horde has had a lot of attention, but Blizz is not biased towards them. I mean the final boss of MoP is the Horde ruler, that's not real good PR for the Horde, in fact, you could argue that its Alliance biased to make the big baddy horde. But actually it isn't alliance favoritism either.

Biased should only be mentioned if in XP6 Blizz is like, hey so now every horde member is superman, cant die and gets +15 million of their main stat (Agi, Str, Int) just cause, also now horde can take over any Alliance capitol, and lorewise, now every Alliance leader goes through the Warchief to check to see if what they do is okay, because the Horde came through and stopped a kobold invasion of SW. THAT would be horde bias

or if you Vice Versa'd them it would be Alliance bias, though change kobold and SW to harpy and Org.

People on this site like to bring up bias arguments because they just like to bitch about something. I mean wrath was hardcore alliance focused, and I bet the next one or whatever the next BL XP is will be Alliance focused with Velen and Anduin and his army of light. The lore is a focus pendulum, but it doesnt always go H,A,H,A sometimes its like H,H,A,H,A,A,A,H or whatever. just yall calm down

[kynthrus]

It seems bias in the game because there are people playing on two sides. However, as far as lore is concerned it is all one story...

[MoanaLisa]

Storytelling, good or bad, usually involves some ebb and flow between protagonists. One gets the upper hand for a while then the other. It's really no different in this case. Plus a lot of people bring their own personal bias into it and get personally offended if the story goes in a different direction than expected.

It doesn't matter that much to me. World of Warcraft storytelling is as much a problem due to the nature of the plot only moving along every few months as anything else. I enjoy the story but don't overly worry much about who is ahead and behind on a patch-to-patch basis. Over the very long run, the story-telling needs both factions so stuff happens and then there's a reaction.

If you want a great story told in a coherent manner that isn't stretched out over ridiculous amounts of time and contains some actual surprises go read a good book. MMO's are not now and never will be the preferred mode for tight plotting, surprising twists and shocking reveals.

[Sniperpally]

You clearly didn't play during TBC.
Since people did complain about how the draenei got almost no lore at all beyond their starting zone and the blood elves were everywhere in Outland.
And Horde whined about how draenei were cool and blood elves were just another version of night elves.

That you would even bring up game difficulty or casual vs hardcore in a thread about faction bias is just... sad.

Actually I played alliance during TBC and I don't remember much bitching about dranei. I mean, people will bitch about anything, so I'm sure it happened, but it wasn't emphasized like I see here on the forums. Although maybe in game alliance don't bitch about it and its purely a forums phenomenon. I wouldn't know since I don't subscribe anymore and it probably gives a skewed perspective.

[Deleted]

The general theme we have going on in the game is that the Horde is powerful, but violent and easily corrupted, while the Alliance is bickering & undecisive, but with a heart of gold. This starts from the first dungeon you saw in classic (WC vs DM), and went all the way to SoO, where we are still following exactly the same theme.

It is like people focus entirely on their preferred side's weaknesses though. No Alliance ever stops to think : Hey, wait a second, maybe us raiding the Horde's main city and killing their Warchief is really a big deal? They have united their damn dwarven clans for the first time on eight years! The Alliance looks much stronger now than the Horde which will be completely thrown into disarray by the time Garrosh dies.

[Scummer]

I'm not sure If I would bluntly say they directly favour one factions over the other.
However. As it stands there has been a big lapse in the quality of the Alliance story that has been told from Cata to the end of MoP.

I don't really wish to list all the problems simply because it winds up becoming one giant rant. I was hoping to resub to 5.4 to get some good Alliance story but that seems less likely now, 5.4 appears to be a very Horde centric patch just like 5.3 and I'm rather upset by that.

[DarkTZeratul]

Yes, very much so.

[Talen]

I think blizzard catering to casuals has increased the level of entitlement amongst a certain demographic within the player base. These players mostly play alliance and hence the increased whining commensurate to the increased accessibility of the game. Imagine in TBC someone complaining about story bias. Back when the game was challenging people had better things to focus on

Back in TBC, Blizzard provided story for both factions. Back in TBC players still complained about Draenei neutrality. Back in TBC Horde players still complained about their Vanilla levelling experience, the Wintersabre and Faerie dragon pets.

Now? Now you tend to have Alliance players complaining at their lack of story and involvement and Horde players telling them to shut up as all is fine.

The fact ghe complaints are so one sided simply confirms what Blizzard has essentially zcknowledged already - the Alliance story is poor, woefully developed, hugely unintegrated and lacking in every aspect.

EJL

[Lynneiah]

I think, and this is just my opinion on it, the Horde is just easier to write for. Flawed characters are much easier to manipulate and develop than those who, well, aren't.

The problem isn't so much that the Alliance doesn't have flawed characters. It's that Blizzard seems to go out of their way to de-flaw them (that's a word now, by the way). It took almost two expansions for Moira -the most interesting Dwarf since ever- to do anything in game. And when she did, she was being an unambiguously good girl. Varian is another example. When he was introduced in Wrath, he was clearly shown to be flawed, downright bigoted. He wasn't liked across the board, but at least he looked like he meant business. Now he's so watered down he's just dull.

Other interesting characters just disappear off the map. Crowley springs to mind, as does Shandris (seriously, what has the high-general of the Night Elf Sentinels been up to during, you know, a global war?) Kelsey Steelspark seems like a fun character as well and gave us the closest thing we ever got to a Gnome story line. The Draenei, too, have so much potential to have really badass characters come to the forefront and show they don't mess around (not Velen, though. Velen IS boring).


The problem isn't so much that the Alliance lacks any interesting characters -they're there- but that Blizzard either ignores them, or sucks out anything that makes them interesting in the first place to further develop the boring-as-sin story of the Alliance being all buddy-buddies with each other.

[Sniperpally]

Back in TBC, Blizzard provided story for both factions. Back in TBC players still complained about Draenei neutrality. Back in TBC Horde players still complained about their Vanilla levelling experience, the Wintersabre and Faerie dragon pets.

Now? Now you tend to have Alliance players complaining at their lack of story and involvement and Horde players telling them to shut up as all is fine.

The fact ghe complaints are so one sided simply confirms what Blizzard has essentially zcknowledged already - the Alliance story is poor, woefully developed, hugely unintegrated and lacking in every aspect.

EJL

The entire WoW storyline/lore is silly. Its a game, first and foremost, it seems the alliance has lost sight of that since they made it so there was no longer any meaningful gameplay elements. And now since there's no challenge left, and they've got WoW the dressing room, the next thing is to make the storyline make them feel as special as the free epics they've recently received.

It all goes back to the silly white knight/pretty princess alliance mentality, horde doesn't care about the storyline cause they know its contrived anyway. They're used to being portrayed as gray and with a certain level of absurdity. Only alliance players are either pretentious enough/dumb enough to think the story is anything but window dressing on what essentially amounts to a decade long sociopathic killing spree.

But now that Blizzard has removed most the meaningful gameplay, people have lost sight of the fact that its a game and think its more like a player-pleasing black box, and since we now have everything else covered its time to pay more attention to the story making us feel special. Its just juvenile narcissism, but that's where the game has gone.

[DeltrusDisc]

I think most the people saying there is no bias are Horde, to be honest.

And I'm Alliance and I don't think there is any bias that is truly of note.

Amazing, to be honest, eh? :P

[GennGreymane]

I havnt played since cataclysm... let me just say this

Worgen V goblin story telling.... Goblins had the better integration and conclusion to their starting zones. Worgens did not even get to participate in half of their own lore.

The revamped zones had a lot more changes in mechanics and story telling for the Horde. I played both Alliance and Horde in their newly revamped zones..... The Alliance did not get that many new mechanics or better story telling, less phasing in their direction as well. Stonard was also where the ball was dropped. The alliance victory that never actually happened. Also most of the alliance side in cataclysm for 1-60 was just cleaning up after the horde. Also once you hit 80-83/84 things are about the same. Twilight Highlands is the only difference. The alliance will black out on their way there while the horde gets an interesting quest and cutscene.

[Mihalik]

Well some of the faction bias is most certainly only in players perception...but let's look back a bit.

Warcraft 3 the RTS. Great game. And no there was no faction bias. But the undoubtedly the most popular and well made campaigns of the story mode where that of the Undead, the Orcs and the Nelfs. Arthas storyline was also great, but we didn't spend much time with the Alliance (remember back then Nelfs weren't part of the Alliance per see.) Then in the expansion we spent time with the Undead again, Blood Elfs (Humans appear very little and mostly as antagonists, Nelfs again, then you had the hugely popular Orc RPG stand alone campaign.

Move this over to World of Warcraft we are introduced to the Humans of Stormwind, (Only those old enough to have played Warcraft 1&2 remember these guys), Gnomes (never had much focus on them before), Drawfs (known as the human sidekicks). Now the only Alliance race to which gamers familiar with the Warcraft 3 had any connection to, were the Night Elves (for these guys see the Nelf model fiasco).

Meanwhile on the Horde side, you had the Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, Forsaken, all races to which there was a clear story continuity from WC3 to WoW.

And then we have Thrall a.k.a Green Jesus. The character who was undoubtedly one of the main protagonists of WC3, whom was further developed in WC3. Unlike Arthas and Malfurion who vanished from the game, Jaina who was forgotten in Theramore and the Human/Gnome leadership no one fucking knew, there was actual character development with Thrall, Cairn and Sylvanas (Vol'jin was sorta ignored). The only Alliance leader who had some limited development early on was Magni (he is now by all practical means is removed from the game), meanwhile the GOLDMINE that Tyrande could have been, was simply abandoned in Darnassus for the next few years.

Meanwhile in Vanilla Saurfang happened.

In TBC we seen the introduction of the fairly popular (SUPER FUCKING POPULAR) Belfs as a playable race on the Horde side, while the Alliance got the fiasco that was the Draenei male....(fems seemed to have fared better in popular opinion), again while Belfs had a rich background to explore and exploit, there was very little that could be done with the Draenei, but we must give it to Blizzard, they did the best they could with them, while COMPLETELY ignoring the plethora of potential AWSOME Alliance lore characters available in Outland.

Then we had Wotlk. I must admit Wotlk wasn't bad for the Alliance. There has been some pretty good changes with the Alliance, but the introduction of Varian was an Epic fail, as Blizzard managed to very quickly turn a popular comic book character into a fairly unpopular WoW NPC.

Then we got that EPIC BLIZZCON IN 2010 I WOULD LIKE EVERYONE TO REMEMBER, in which the entire WoW development team shown up decked out in Horde T-Shirts, Chanting Lok'tar with the Horde fainbois, meanwhile a bewildered Alliance fan community looked on like lost sheep. Then we had the Red Shirt guy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwyMB19q7ms ... one of the very few people who actually stood up and happened to actually know shit about Alliance Lore, that seemed to have been crassly ignored by Blizzard, in their flurry of Horde Lore announcements. (Also would like to remind you how many many people both at Blizzcon and later on online forums proceeded to carry on with the ridiculing of the poor dude, that was jokingly started by Blizzard staff themselves).

After Blizzcon, when people pointed out that Blizzard was literally taking the piss on the Alliance both ingame (Cataclysm, Horde rolling over the Alliance EVERYFUCKINGWHERE) and IRL, Blizz gone into Defcon 1 damage control, with Blue posts and interviews combined with the fact that from there on they made a point out of wearing Alliance T-shirts and all the other PC crap.

Now...Is there an INTENTIONAL faction bias? No.
Is it easier to write for Horde for a multitude of reasons? Yes.
Is there a REAL bias in favor of the Horde and the Horde fan community from Blizzards part? MOST CERTAINLY!
Does Blizzard try to be politically correct with the Alliance fan base? Yes, they do their best, more or less.

[Sniperpally]

The reason its easier to write horde is because they're already portrayed as being savage/morally grey, and the entire point of the game is to kill stuff which is inherently a savage/morally grey at best thing

also horde players probably don't care about being heroes

[Wyrt]

The reason its easier to write horde is because they're already portrayed as being savage/morally grey, and the entire point of the game is to kill stuff which is inherently a savage/morally grey at best thing

Night elves, worgen, and dwarves are good at killing things in savage ways.

The problem is Blizzard paints the entire alliance with human morality and doesn't let the other races be anything other than funny looking humans.

[Mihalik]

The entire WoW storyline/lore is silly. Its a game, first and foremost, it seems the alliance has lost sight of that since they made it so there was no longer any meaningful gameplay elements. And now since there's no challenge left, and they've got WoW the dressing room, the next thing is to make the storyline make them feel as special as the free epics they've recently received.

It all goes back to the silly white knight/pretty princess alliance mentality, horde doesn't care about the storyline cause they know its contrived anyway. They're used to being portrayed as gray and with a certain level of absurdity. Only alliance players are either pretentious enough/dumb enough to think the story is anything but window dressing on what essentially amounts to a decade long sociopathic killing spree.

But now that Blizzard has removed most the meaningful gameplay, people have lost sight of the fact that its a game and think its more like a player-pleasing black box, and since we now have everything else covered its time to pay more attention to the story making us feel special. Its just juvenile narcissism, but that's where the game has gone.

I know it is very hard for you to conceive this, but a lot of players actually got into this game because the lore. People who have been part of the Warcraft universe since the 90's. One of the reasons why WoW became so unbelievably popular was because people managed to develop a connection with the game world. With the characters, races and factions.

As soon as people started playing they were immersed in quests and stories, plots and discoveries. They weren't playing for epix most of the time, as 90% of the player base never actually even got the chance to see raids or epix. They didn't join in for the PvP as there was no PvP to talk about.

The game reached it's absolute peak in POPULARITY in Wotlk, which was probably THE MOST lore focused expansion. Millions of people flocked to kill Arthas, but oddly Wotlk was also the beginning of the convenience trend. LFD, getting epix from easy Heroics, removal of attunements, no resistance gear, easy to join in PvP, flying everywhere, no world PvP etc.

Your argument that people don't play WoW for the Lore fail to hold itself up, further your argument that Horde players don't really care about the Lore also fails to hold itself up, as the population shift from Alliance to Horde also happened in the same time as the Horde began receiving a noticeably larger development focus, and with the addition of the Blood Elfs, which didn't only happen to be Lore heavy, but also happened to be "Pretty". Add to that one more important fact...

Dark and edgy has very little to do with maturity. And until the arrival of the Goblins to the Horde, the Alliance dominated on the comic relief side, with pink haired gnomes, bearded dwarfs and goat legged misshapen Draenei.

P.S

And mind I remind you that in WoW humans happens to be the morally most ambiguous race. Humans range from everything from Arthas (fucking horribly nasty, father killer, genocidal maniac) to Jaina (do goody, good, let's all live happy ever after, I might have a crush on Thrall).

Back in Vanilla as soon as you started playing Alliance and you got out of Elywin Forrest the first quest chain you entered played upon this very lack of straight morality.

You probably never did the original Stonemasons quest chain. Essentially the first dungeon boss you where sent to kill, was the head of a group of exiled laborers and merchants who's crime was that they happened to rebuild Stormwind after the 2nd War, and then dared ask for their promised payment, and whom after being exiled gone into open rebellion.

Second quest chain you go into following that one, deals with the fact that Stormwind refuses to aid it's outlying border provinces whom are all under different kinds of duress, no matter how much they beg for it, as the Kingdom happens to be lead by a Black Dragon infiltrator who seems bent on destroying the Kingdom from within, manipulating its leadership and effectively holding the Prince hostage.

Did I mention that the Church of Stormwind was also related to the Scarlet Crusade as it was clearly mentioned that while with your right hand you were fighting them because of their habit of randomly murdering everyone who wasn't Scarlet Crusade, with your left hand you were running political errands for the same guys who happened to be financing them.

The moral ambiguity was present both in Dwarven story development with the Dark Iron civil strife and in the Nelf storyline of creating a inherently corrupted World Tree in a desperate effort to regain immortality.

There was very little to no moral white knighting as Alliance. Morally the Horde was always more straight forward. It was never about killing (that is what you seem to think), but about freedom, fighting for the future, standing up for the oppressed or simply survival and self determination (Forsaken).

[Sniperpally]

Night elves, worgen, and dwarves are good at killing things in savage ways.

The problem is Blizzard paints the entire alliance with human morality and doesn't let the other races be anything other than funny looking humans.

At this point any race in WoW is good at killing things, because they've been shoehorned into an MMO where that's what you do. But contrast trolls (probably cannibals), orcs (glorify fighting as a end unto itself), forsaken (zero regard for the living), and goblins (mercenaries) with the alliance races and you see that the alliance ones at least require some kind of pretense for doing what they do, whereas horde doesn't. Blood elves are sort of in a middle ground where they justify whatever they do on the grounds of their previous oppression and hardships, whereas tauren are like the alliance races.

At the end of the day the alliance has to justify whatever weird direction the plot takes them in and the writing suffers, whereas the horde is an MMO-ready kind of society wherein violence is normal.

What would be interesting is if they moved the alliance into a more grimdark kind of direction. This would solve the issue of trying to justify an MMO style storyline with the ideals of the faction (mass murder vs at least ostensibly trying for peace and justice). But you'd have just as many people complaining when their beautiful night elf or paladin is no longer a one dimensional white knight. Basically, the idea of the alliance is a poor fit for a game designed around killing, and the more the story is drawn out the more that becomes obvious as the story contrives increasingly thin justifications for violence. Either way blizzard isn't going to win with the player base and the expectations they've set with things like LFR have made sure the player base won't be satisfied either

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I know it is very hard for you to conceive this, but a lot of players actually got into this game because the lore. People who have been part of the Warcraft universe since the 90's. One of the reasons why WoW became so unbelievably popular was because people managed to develop a connection with the game world. With the characters, races and factions.

As soon as people started playing they were immersed in quests and stories, plots and discoveries. They weren't playing for epix most of the time, as 90% of the player base never actually even got the chance to see raids or epix. They didn't join in for the PvP as there was no PvP to talk about.

The game reached it's absolute peak in POPULARITY in Wotlk, which was probably THE MOST lore focused expansion. Millions of people flocked to kill Arthas, but oddly Wotlk was also the beginning of the convenience trend. LFD, getting epix from easy Heroics, removal of attunements, no resistance gear, easy to join in PvP, flying everywhere, no world PvP etc.

Your argument that people don't play WoW for the Lore fail to hold itself up, further your argument that Horde players don't really care about the Lore also fails to hold itself up, as the population shift from Alliance to Horde also happened in the same time as the Horde began receiving a noticeably larger development focus, and with the addition of the Blood Elfs, which didn't only happen to be Lore heavy, but also happened to be "Pretty". Add to that one more important fact...

Dark and edgy has very little to do with maturity. And until the arrival of the Goblins to the Horde, the Alliance dominated on the comic relief side, with pink haired gnomes, bearded dwarfs and goat legged misshapen Draenei.

I'm 99% sure the player shift from alliance to horde was because of gameplay elements (better reputation for pvp, stronger racials, more mature players) whether or not these things were worth switching for, or are even true, is up for debate, but the perceptual shift among the player base is what lead to the change in demographics. No one switched cause of the lore. That's just silly. If someone made a horde character cause they wanted to see that side of the game, ok, sure that happens, but now they play chars on both sides. It would be truly a rare person that says, "I stopped playing alliance altogether after years of doing so, and exclusively play horde now, because of the lore." Who does that? That person is an outlier at best.

[Mihalik]

At this point any race in WoW is good at killing things, because they've been shoehorned into an MMO where that's what you do. But contrast trolls (probably cannibals), orcs (glorify fighting as a end unto itself), forsaken (zero regard for the living), and goblins (mercenaries) with the alliance races and you see that the alliance ones at least require some kind of pretense for doing what they do, whereas horde doesn't. Blood elves are sort of in a middle ground where they justify whatever they do on the grounds of their previous oppression and hardships, whereas tauren are like the alliance races.

At the end of the day the alliance has to justify whatever weird direction the plot takes them in and the writing suffers, whereas the horde is an MMO-ready kind of society wherein violence is normal.

What would be interesting is if they moved the alliance into a more grimdark kind of direction. This would solve the issue of trying to justify an MMO style storyline with the ideals of the faction (mass murder vs at least ostensibly trying for peace and justice). But you'd have just as many people complaining when their beautiful night elf or paladin is no longer a one dimensional white knight. Basically, the idea of the alliance is a poor fit for a game designed around killing, and the more the story is drawn out the more that becomes obvious as the story contrives increasingly thin justifications for violence. Either way blizzard isn't going to win with the player base and the expectations they've set with things like LFR have made sure the player base won't be satisfied either

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I'm 99% sure the player shift from alliance to horde was because of gameplay elements (better reputation for pvp, stronger racials, more mature players) whether or not these things were worth switching for, or are even true, is up for debate, but the perceptual shift among the player base is what lead to the change in demographics. No one switched cause of the lore. That's just silly. If someone made a horde character cause they wanted to see that side of the game, ok, sure that happens, but now they play chars on both sides. It would be truly a rare person that says, "I stopped playing alliance altogether after years of doing so, and exclusively play horde now, because of the lore." Who does that? That person is an outlier at best.

You are on one hand contradicting yourself, by first saying Alliance attracted kiddies because of the white knight/good guy, then you say people shifted because gameplay elements as they don't really care about the lore or feel of a faction.

Please make your mind up.

On the other hand you are making swapping generalizations with typical internet statistics NINTY-NINE PERCENT without really having much to back that up with. (That I said that 90% of people in Vanilla never seen Epix is backed up by Blizzard statistics whom they themselves stated that only 3% of the player base got to do endgame raiding.)

Undoubtedly racials and game play elements contributed and as faction farming (although again early battlegrounds once introduced happened to be dominated by the Alliance), but that was only at best a part of the population shift. Also as it happens most of the more known early pvp pioneers and streamers happened to play Alliance. One of the major gameplay population shift elements causes where actually related to raiding (see Cleansing totems) and on the PvP side the Undead racial.