As Horde, i have no motivation to hate the alliance

[bloodmoth13]

From what we know so far for BfA, the horde has been given no reason to engage in war, and as a horde player i have zero motivation to fight the alliance.

This whole expansion appears to play on the faction conflict but so far there is a clear bad guy and a clear good guy. In the recently released cinematic we even have anduin telling saurfang what the horde should be, its getting to the point where the alliance knows whats better for us than we do.

The story is starting to look very predictable, we all follow the dark queen and do unspeakable evil, along the way we all look at the evil shit we do and think 'why are we even doing this again, we deposed garrosh for less, those alliance guys are totally good dudes, why dont we just negotiate a surrender and hand them sylvanas'. Horde are agressors the entire way and we have to do mental gymnastics to justify anything we do. With all of the horde racial neutral heroes returning to the horde (rexxar, garona etc) they have to somehow justify not being neutral and it feels like complete garbage.

I dont want to play another expansion where i hate my leader and cant justify fighting for my own faction. Our own leader is doing more against us than our supposed opponent. At the very least sylvanas could be furthering the hordes interests at the detriment to the alliance but nothing she is doing makes any sense other than existing as a lazy plot device to force faction conflict when there are much more logical reasons to start one.

Whats worse, voljin sanctioned sylvanas, the guy who overthrows garrosh for being an evil dictator decides sylvanas is an appropriate replacement. Voljin knew what sylvanas was, he knew her motives but goes against everything he believes and endorses her, he is directly responsible for all of her actions, so everything evil sylvanas does voljin is directly responsible for. so that means we have 3 evil warchiefs in a row.

Also, the horde forces know what went on with garrosh, and what is left over are those who fought against him, yet when sylvanas starts doing stupid shit they all slackjawedly just say "YESSIR!" and go along with EVERYTHING!
And thats just the NPCs! the player character is doing the exact same thing, and the lore heroes! are horde characters so spineless they cant oppose an unelected warmonger and reign her in? if she is going so directly against horde culture why isnt she deposed after the battle for the undercity? she lost her power base and is now essentially the weakest member of the faction, if baine, saurfang and lorthemar disagree with her they can just say 'nope' and create a council.

The alliance never do anything wrong, its always the horde being the aggressor, even though at this stage it makes perfect sense for the alliance to lead a first strike against the undercity due to a plethora of reasons. that would give the horde a reason to fight back but blizz cant have the alliance ever doing anything bad.

This would all be fine if the horde was MEANT to be the bad guys! if it was our goal to destroy azeroth then our actions would make sense, but we are supposed to be the good guys too, and both factions are meant to have some grey characters but its all so ridiculously one-sided.

Either the horde needs to go full burning legion/scourge/black empire and our characters need to stop putting responsibility onto the faction leaders and admit that they made all the evil choices because thats what we are, or blizz needs to make both factions a lot more grey.

TLDR The horde needs a reason to fight the alliance

[Steelangel]

TLDR The horde needs a reason to fight the alliance

How about "the Horde are the bad guys".

[bloodmoth13]

How about "the Horde are the bad guys".

even bad guys have reasons for doing their bad stuff, whether its greed or whatever, it just feels like the horde are simply evil to give the alliance someone to punch.
also added a poll, you replied very fast...

[Arkthugal]

Them wanting to kill you and destroy everything you love isn't reason enough?

[Shadowspawn115]

Them wanting to kill you and destroy everything you love isn't reason enough?

I mean...the Horde kinda started it...

[bloodmoth13]

Them wanting to kill you and destroy everything you love isn't reason enough?

Do they though? the new novel blurb basically states anduin wants to be pals but the horde are giant dick bags and insist at every turn on war.

Alliance have done nothing to threaten the horde, they only attack the horde when the horde attacks them.

I wish the alliance wanted to destroy the horde, that would give me an excuse to crush them, but they dont, and any conflict i just assume is me attacking them because im a violent sadistic shit.

[maccajoe]

I mean...the Horde kinda started it...

How far do we go back? The Dranei started it. Coming to Draenor was a mistake.

[Jastall]

Same. There's little reason for the Horde to hate the Alliance, really. Spare me the stories about internment camps and Taurajo, the Horde has already done way worse in the first few hours of BfA than anything the Alliance ever did to them.

Now, there is no requirement for the grievances between the factions to be equal in all things. I'm fine with the Horde being a darker shade of grey. But the disparity as it is far worse than that. Alliance grievances include a bevy of events that would make a people in real life swear eternal hatred on those who forced such atrocities on them, such as ''they nuked our city'' or ''they keep murdering our civilians for kicks''. Horde grievances amount to ''well they kept us in camps instead of killing us after we tried to genocide them'' or ''they forcefully threw us out of their city and some among them covertly used this opportunity to kill some of us''.

Blizzard says the factions aren't good vs evil, but what they show tends to paint the conflict in another light. Objectively, it's hard to see the Alliance being in the wrong when they get tired of being punching bags and fight back.

[Wondercrab]

I've rarely had any reason to feel investment in the faction conflict since they always portray it as so balanced. One side is rarely the bad guy, so I just feel like kind of an idiot fighting over pointless spats most of the time.

It'd a bit late in the day for this, but portraying one side as good and the other as bad would make it way easier to have fun roleplaying either a courageous hero or a moustache-twirling villain. The most invested I ever got in the faction conflict was in MoP when they actually made Garrosh a bad guy, but that's a trick they'll have trouble repeating without it feeling played-out.

I still maintain that the faction war is one of the dumbest, most narratively-constraining weights around modern WoW's neck. BfA is their last chance to do something meaningful with it, or it'll be the deadest horse Blizzard's ever beaten.

[Qualia]

Alliance have done nothing to threaten the horde, they only attack the horde when the horde attacks them.

To begin with, saying the Alliance did nothing wrong isn't true. While I personally don't think the Alliance did anything on the same scale of what Sylvanas did (attacking the NE and aiming to assault their capital), the Alliance had their fair shares of aggressive maneuvers against the Horde. Maybe not the Alliance as a whole and more of the actions of a few individual leaders / commanders, but we did have clashes between the two factions way before BfA - what Genn did during Legion was an example. It might have been rather a small conflict / skirmish instead of an all out war, but it did threaten Sylvanas' life.

In my opinion, what I just said above and Sylvanas being rather paranoid are more than enough reasons for her to assault Teldrassil. After all, if Anduin wasn't able to control Genn before, how could she be sure that he will be able to now, or in the future? It's true that Anduin might be able to do it, but Sylvanas doesn't want to take the risk. What if Genn go rogue and somehow manage to kill a bunch of Horde soldiers - aka her shield against the darkness? Or even kill her? Or worse, what if Anduin will change over time and take a more aggressive stance against the Horde? Sylvanas saw what was waiting for her if she ever die, and she didn't want to experience that again. Defeating (or killing) all of her possible enemies certainly sounds like a good way to keep herself alive forever. With the discoveries of Azerite, she knew it could be her tools to achieve that, and she wasn't going to wait.

The rest of the Horde might not have as much of a reason to go against the Alliance. However, after Sylvanas attacked Teldrassil, the Alliance entered the war and answered by assaulting Lordaeron. I assume that the Battle for Lordaeron happened shortly after Teldrassil, so none of other Horde race could have time to think properly or reach out for peace (if they wanted to). At that point, they had to fight to defense the Horde and themselves. Can't take the risk if the Alliance, if they somehow defeat Sylvanas and the Forsaken, decide it wasn't enough and go after to other races in the Horde, can they? I don't think they hate the Alliance as much as the Alliance hate the Horde after Teldrassil, but they are rolled into the war and after Lordaeron, it likely escalated - it won't stop until either one side is completely defeated, or one side somehow gain advantage but decide to step back for peace, or a third party intervene and threaten both sides.

[Kieldon]

Does "want to crush Sylvanas alone" count as an option? I like both factions but an autistic lady ordering everyone to do her crazy bidding without a negative response... Horde druids being O.K. with attacking teldrassil (or malfurion) ehh... This expansion I might not roll a horde character.

One thing is being evil, that's fine, but it makes no sense for others to follow.

I still like the background of a faction conflict, but the reason we go to war is one person acting cringeworthy arrogant.

[bloodmoth13]

Same. There's little reason for the Horde to hate the Alliance, really. Spare me the stories about internment camps and Taurajo, the Horde has already done way worse in the first few hours of BfA than anything the Alliance ever did to them.

Now, there is no requirement for the grievances between the factions to be equal in all things. I'm fine with the Horde being a darker shade of grey. But the disparity as it is far worse than that. Alliance grievances include a bevy of events that would make a people in real life swear eternal hatred on those who forced such atrocities on them, such as ''they nuked our city'' or ''they keep murdering our civilians for kicks''. Horde grievances amount to ''well they kept us in camps instead of killing us after we tried to genocide them'' or ''they forcefully threw us out of their city and some among them covertly used this opportunity to kill some of us''.

Blizzard says the factions aren't good vs evil, but what they show tends to paint the conflict in another light. Objectively, it's hard to see the Alliance being in the wrong when they get tired of being punching bags and fight back.

I think its also a kick in the teeth to the alliance since they just take so much shit before fighting back like little cowards. Horde just stomps them and stomps them over and over and nothing is ever done, horde burns their house to the ground and they just hand them the keys to their neighbors.

If they want to balance things out, the alliance needs to go on the offensive, and BIG TIME! if it were the case that the alliance invaded lordaeron first, the whole story would make a lot more sense. the alliance has a backlog of grievances to get through and its damn well about time for them to fight back, instead sylvanas twirls her mustache and burns a city to ashes, because the alliance need MORE reasons.

If the factions are grey, then blizzard needs to add some pure black into the alliance color pallete and the horde needs a bucked of white. Factions are not grey vs grey, its black vs white masquerading as grey vs grey, all i ask is blizzard either be honest or ammend, either commit to good vs evil or rectify the gigantic disparity

- - - Updated - - -

Does "want to crush Sylvanas alone" count as an option? I like both factions but an autistic lady ordering everyone to do her crazy bidding without a negative response... Horde druids being O.K. with attacking teldrassil (or malfurion) ehh... This expansion I might not roll a horde character.

One thing is being evil, that's fine, but it makes no sense for others to follow.

just vote 'want to crush horde', it essentially just means current horde, which essentially means toppling leadership, no need for super specifics here.

hell gimme a reason to kill druids while we are at it, maybe they are greedy with all the spirit magic and thats messing with the elementals *shrug*

[A Chozo]

I play horde and I just want to be a chill Mag'har Priest of the Blackrock Clan and commune with my ancestrals while adventuring in the magical world of the Azeroth.

But no.

The Horde and Alliance defeated the Devil, but now we have to fight eachother because Sylvanas is dense, has plot armor, and Gallywix wants to get more rich by funding this war. GREAT!

[bloodmoth13]

To begin with, saying the Alliance did nothing wrong isn't true. While I personally don't think the Alliance did anything on the same scale of what Sylvanas did (attacking the NE and aiming to assault their capital), the Alliance had their fair shares of aggressive maneuvers against the Horde. Maybe not the Alliance as a whole and more of the actions of a few individual leaders / commanders, but we did have clashes between the two factions way before BfA - what Genn did during Legion was an example. It might have been rather a small conflict / skirmish instead of an all out war, but it did threaten Sylvanas' life.

In my opinion, what I just said above and Sylvanas being rather paranoid are more than enough reasons for her to assault Teldrassil. After all, if Anduin wasn't able to control Genn before, how could she be sure that he will be able to now, or in the future? It's true that Anduin might be able to do it, but Sylvanas doesn't want to take the risk. What if Genn go rogue and somehow manage to kill a bunch of Horde soldiers - aka her shield against the darkness? Or even kill her? Or worse, what if Anduin will change over time and take a more aggressive stance against the Horde? Sylvanas saw what was waiting for her if she ever die, and she didn't want to experience that again. Defeating (or killing) all of her possible enemies certainly sounds like a good way to keep herself alive forever. With the discoveries of Azerite, she knew it could be her tools to achieve that, and she wasn't going to wait.

The rest of the Horde might not have as much of a reason to go against the Alliance. However, after Sylvanas attacked Teldrassil, the Alliance entered the war and asnwered by assaulting Lordaeron. At that point, they had to fight to defense the Horde and themselves. Can't take the risk if the Alliance, if they somehow defeat Sylvanas and the Forsaken, decide it wasn't enough and go after to other races in the Horde, can they? I don't think they hate the Alliance as much as the Alliance hate the Horde after Teldrassil, but they are rolled into it and the war has escalated - it won't stop until either one side is completely defeated, or one side somehow gain advantage but decide to step back for peace, or a third party intervene and threaten both sides.

Its a hell of a stretch and thats what im talking about with the horde needing mental gymnastics to justify anything. a civil dispute is no reason to burn a non-related factions capital to ashes. And genns aggression was because sylvanas was killing his children!

Genn was totally the hero in that conflict, hes the best thing to happen to the horde due to him being the lightning rod for horde justification for anything they do, but he sure as heck wasnt unjustified in denying sylvanas in enslaving a vrykul Godess.

Horde should have just let the forsaken get crushed in the battle for lordaeron, sylvanas fucked up and there is no reason for tauren, orc or troll casualties to defend someone who is provoking war against their neighbors! Kick the forsaken out of the horde or demand sylvanas step down and imprison her, its like blizz forgot entirely that the non-forsaken horde races have their own interests.

[Amathricus]

I'm also a Horde player and, aside from an unreasonable dislike of gnomes, I hold no hatred for the Alliance either. Specific characters, sure. But as a whole, not really.

Much of the Alliance dislike started with the old Horde, the mostly orcish one that invaded Azeroth and sacked Stormwind as well as killing a King or two. Fair reason to hate orcs. The newer Horde, the one Thrall lead to Durotar is not the same one. But then Blizzard does things like make Putress go rogue and throw Blight Bombs on the armies of both sides. They then make Garrosh blow up an Alliance city in the name of War without the blessing of the other factions within and then go further down a dark path to the point where we have to take him out. Now, it was an great storyline for sure, but it only makes threads like this appear. Alliance calling us the evil faction. And here we go again, at least from what I've seen in Alpha. Now I don't want to spoil anything in BfA for people who want surprises, but suffice it to say it's coming around again that we're going to look way worse, at least for a little while. As someone said, it's all greys. The 'evil' factions are suppose to be The Scourge, The Burning Crusade, The Twilight's Hammer, Hogger. :P

I played Alliance this expansion for much of it to play with a friend who won't leave her Draenei. I really didn't find things any 'nicer' aside from Anduin himself. He is annoyingly 'good', though I still love the character. I would actually enjoy seeing him take a dark turn. Would be interesting to see.

[Raikh]

There is literally no reason to hate the other faction as a player at the end of legion. The tragedy of the broken shore was cleared up by the rogue order hall, with influential characters of both sides beign infomred of it being a trap.
The war of cata and MoP has concluded with no on desiring further war.

BfA lacks a proper setup in its entirety to sell another war to players. As of the war starting players and many improtant lore characters sit comfrotably in their orders. Incredibly powerful cross-faction groups that combined have more than neough means and power to curbstomp both Alliance and Horde with the characters of the order subtracted, even without artifacts.
We just defeated a literally universal foe and that saving Azeroth and taking care of Azshara and N'zoth is a top priority is known to a whole bunch of characters.

So the next logical step is ofc to dissolve all orders and kill each other against all better means and knowledge. It might not even be that it isnt plasuible that horde and alliance fight over Azerite just as a precaution and to secure their survival should th eother faction abuse such an immense power source, but given the situation we as players find ourselves in we have no business aiding either the alliance or the horde and it would be far more logical and productive to stop the war and take care of actual threats.
As grand and epic some of the battles and scenarios they've thought out so far for BfA are, they make very little sense in the context of legion's story.

Like you can go through all the order halls and would barely find any who would have any interest in going back to their factions and start bashing eahc others head in.
DKs and DHs are almost independent and have basically no attachment to the factions. DHs sacrficed "verything" to save azeroth and would surely have no itnerest in fighting over it among thrmselves. DKs pretty much abandoned the concept of loyalty towards anything but their goals and even work with the LK.
Warlocks probably also fall into the morally grey area and have their own interests and cant really care. Shamans and druids should be the first to rush off healing Azeroth since its basically their duty. Mages are linked to Dalaran which absically returned to a peaceful neutrality under Khadgar who told the player that he has no business fighting either horde or alliance. Rogues literally ivnestigated the broken shore incident and have oppsoite interests of a faciton war and monks, especially those tied to the pandaren representatives have already gotten their share during SoO and would ver ylikely nope out. The Paladin factions were neutral for the msot part since wrath and have alos no interest in changing that. LIke that already should be more than enough to show how nonsensical the whole premise is within the given context and the lsit is still going on.

They blew their last chance of proper faction war when they threw away Garrosh as a villain and couldnt get off their inner conflict shenanigans. AT this point they would be better of introducing a neutral mercenary faction where people could decide if they wnated to play Azeroths heroes and do the world saving stuff as their primary agenda or if they help a faction due to patriotism, money or grudges they have RP wise.

[Whitedragon]

From what we know so far for BfA, the horde has been given no reason to engage in war, and as a horde player i have zero motivation to fight the alliance.

This whole expansion appears to play on the faction conflict but so far there is a clear bad guy and a clear good guy. In the recently released cinematic we even have anduin telling saurfang what the horde should be, its getting to the point where the alliance knows whats better for us than we do.

The story is starting to look very predictable, we all follow the dark queen and do unspeakable evil, along the way we all look at the evil shit we do and think 'why are we even doing this again, we deposed garrosh for less, those alliance guys are totally good dudes, why dont we just negotiate a surrender and hand them sylvanas'. Horde are agressors the entire way and we have to do mental gymnastics to justify anything we do. With all of the horde racial neutral heroes returning to the horde (rexxar, garona etc) they have to somehow justify not being neutral and it feels like complete garbage.

I dont want to play another expansion where i hate my leader and cant justify fighting for my own faction. Our own leader is doing more against us than our supposed opponent. At the very least sylvanas could be furthering the hordes interests at the detriment to the alliance but nothing she is doing makes any sense other than existing as a lazy plot device to force faction conflict when there are much more logical reasons to start one.

Whats worse, voljin sanctioned sylvanas, the guy who overthrows garrosh for being an evil dictator decides sylvanas is an appropriate replacement. Voljin knew what sylvanas was, he knew her motives but goes against everything he believes and endorses her, he is directly responsible for all of her actions, so everything evil sylvanas does voljin is directly responsible for. so that means we have 3 evil warchiefs in a row.

Also, the horde forces know what went on with garrosh, and what is left over are those who fought against him, yet when sylvanas starts doing stupid shit they all slackjawedly just say "YESSIR!" and go along with EVERYTHING!
And thats just the NPCs! the player character is doing the exact same thing, and the lore heroes! are horde characters so spineless they cant oppose an unelected warmonger and reign her in? if she is going so directly against horde culture why isnt she deposed after the battle for the undercity? she lost her power base and is now essentially the weakest member of the faction, if baine, saurfang and lorthemar disagree with her they can just say 'nope' and create a council.

The alliance never do anything wrong, its always the horde being the aggressor, even though at this stage it makes perfect sense for the alliance to lead a first strike against the undercity due to a plethora of reasons. that would give the horde a reason to fight back but blizz cant have the alliance ever doing anything bad.

This would all be fine if the horde was MEANT to be the bad guys! if it was our goal to destroy azeroth then our actions would make sense, but we are supposed to be the good guys too, and both factions are meant to have some grey characters but its all so ridiculously one-sided.

Either the horde needs to go full burning legion/scourge/black empire and our characters need to stop putting responsibility onto the faction leaders and admit that they made all the evil choices because thats what we are, or blizz needs to make both factions a lot more grey.

TLDR The horde needs a reason to fight the alliance

Ya I have to say at this point I really don't get this war. Sylvanas seems to be the ONLY one pushing this war, all so she can propagate a race of people that A shouldn't exist to begin with, B by her and its own members admission when life finally dose end you end up in a very bad place so shes condemning them to damnation, and C itself dose take some issue with some of her actions. I mean at this point why do I hate Liadrin? why dose that Tauren want to help with the destruction of the Night elf lands? Hell here is the big one for me, what has Sylvanas actually done for the horde? since she has become warchief she has done 2 things, she has abandoned the cause of pushing the legion back and instead makes a deal with a minion of the old gods to try and get herself more val'kyrs, and she stops everything right after the legions defeat to go mine some super powerful substance so she can make war upon the alliance. Oh ya she also yelled for the horde to reinvigorate her troops as her city was being attacked, what a hero.

Yes I know most likely by patch 8.2 we will have dropped most of the AvH stuff for old god fun but still this is just getting silly. I'm hoping that the next Expack is an experiment to see if they can just soft merge the factions. they could still leave some small scale fighting between 2-4 races at a time for various resources, BGs and stories, but we don't need to be in all out war. I think It would be kind of cool to hang out with a Tauren an Orc a Dawrf and a Worgen at the same time.

[Friendlyimmolation]

No matter How many times you repeat it Helya is/was not a minion of the old gods, sheesh.

[Kwento]

I used to rp a few years back. When you look at the world of Azeroth through the eyes of just some random guy living in Razor Hill, it isn’t that hard to blame the Alliance for *everything*. That’s just how world works, if you live a life you aren’t comfortable with and cannot really change, you start blaming a rich neighbor.
For an orc it is extremely simple to hate the Alliance. Most of the veterans who walked through the Dark Portal as the old Horde are dead by now and those young orcs that are left know Alliance as guys who constantly harass their borders, hoping to put orcs back in chains or just outright kill them. At this point human-orc relationship is probably unfixable.
For a troll it is even easier. Darkspears first had to live through humans hunting them down on their isolated island in the middle of the ocean with no provocation. Then they had to live through Proudmoore blasting their islands because he was a dick. Then, as the time went by, Alliance proved themselves worse and worse allies. Now add like 10.000-7.000 years of resentment towards trolls and complete disregard of their territories.
For a Forsaken... I guess it’s good enough when someone who you could call your family suddenly call you a monster because of your disease and disfigurement. And then murders your ambassadors that were supposed to bring peace between your kingdoms. It’s also gery easy for a random Forsaken to hate Alliance.
For a goblin you don’t need to hate. You have a job, it pays well.
The tauren are an interesting thing... I don’t know if they “hate” the Alliance, but all that has happened through the recent years can change their way of seeing these people just as easily as anyone else.

[ello]

No matter How many times you repeat it Helya is/was not a minion of the old gods, sheesh.

This thread also already has the classic "Greymane attacked because he knew about Eyir", "undead are unnatural" and "all undead are damned" falsehoods.

ETA on "Forsaken don't have free-will"?