A concise list of grievances BOTH factions have with story direction: Alliance

[B-Man]

I've decided to create a concise list of lore and story direction grievances most often brought up by players of both factions. Please note: this is NOT a pissing contest to see which side has it worst, as I will try to illustrate that BOTH sides have their own problems.

Alliance:

1. Victimization: The Alliance from late Wrath/early Cata onward has felt constantly victimized, taking the brunt of major defeats and humiliation at the hands of the Horde with little to show for it besides some hollow notion of moral superiority. From the Broken Front, to Gilneas and Ashenvale being ravaged by the Horde in Cata, to the utter defeat and destruction at Theramore and now Teldrassil, the Alliance feels it like its lands, peoples, and civilizations are being torn down for cheap shock value. Races like the Worgen and now Night Elves feel humiliated, demoralized, and displaced from the lands and lore that made them worth playing. Even so-called "revenge" plots feel hollow and half-assed as victims fail to bring any semblance of justice upon perpetrators, as seen when Thrall killed Garrosh and the even more pathetic attempt to stop Nathanos by the supposedly "powered up" night elves.

2. Reactionary and Passive: The Alliance lacks almost any kind of agency regarding the plot. Constantly acting in response to the Horde and other forces of the narrative. There was an opportunity for the Alliance to take the initiative and start the war proper in BFA, and indeed many Alliance players voiced a willingness to strike first even if to do so would be morally dubious. (more on that later) But it seems Blizzard is dead-set on maintaining the status quo of "Horde acts, Alliance reacts" even to the point of absurdity. When you observe the motivations of some of our chief characters like Jaina and previously, Varian, you see that they rarely if ever act as a pro-active force in the narrative, initiating events.

3. Lawful Goodness to the point of stupidity: drawing on the first 2 points, it seems Blizzard is absolutely resolved on making the Alliance the "Lawful Good" or rather the Lawful Stupid faction. The Alliance blunders into colossal defeats (Theramore, War of Thorns) that boggle suspension of belief, but more than that, the Alliance is written as ever righteous and forgiving, especially regarding the Horde's crimes. In a position of total advantage after the Siege of Orgrimmar, the Alliance gives up its advantage and gives a laughably hollow threat. In BFA it seems the Alliance is already poised to forgive and forget the mass murder of civilians during the War of Thorns and the rest of the Horde's involvement for apparently no other reason beyond being the designated morally righteous faction. This is not believable in any sense of the word.

4. Not an Alliance anymore, now a horribly written and contrived Human Empire: The Alliance used to pride itself on being an actual Alliance, now it is a Human Empire, one of the most boring and badly written Empires in fantasy. The position of "High King" should never have been a thing. It seems to be cooked up to facilitate more lazy storytelling. When a ruler of one nation state in a mutual coalition possesses absolute military authority and enforces his will on the others, he ceases to be the leader of one nation and becomes an Emperor in all but name. This "Blue Warchief" position robs the Alliance of its core identity, and creates absurd scenarios where young Human kings dictate over Dwarves and Gnomes with centuries of experience, or in the case of Draenei and Night Elves, millennia. There is a position of supreme military authority, Supreme Allied Commander, held by Lothar and Turalyon respectively, but both of those men were chosen for their military experience and due to their apolitical positions as a disposed Knight of a fallen kingdom and a Holy Man respectively.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

The alliance is in no way a empire anduin has to go around and ask the other leaders for help in before the storm and then the night elfs and wargen flat out leave to go to dark shore instead of focusing on the current warfronts. If any of the factions in the alliance don’t agree they are free to leave or do there own thing which we saw in darkshore.

[Zandalariprelate]

The alliance is in no way a empire anduin has to go around and ask the other leaders for help in before the storm and then the night elfs and wargen flat out leave to go to dark shore instead of focusing on the current warfronts. If any of the factions in the alliance don’t agree they are free to leave or do there own thing which we saw in darkshore.

I think the point is more about how Humans steal the spotlight and they are always portrayed to be leading the alliance without anyone question their authority, maybe it's because of the writing team but still we got Legion, WoD and MoP showed a lot of the others races sharing spotlight and even being the lead in some scenarios like Suramar, the tomb of Sargeras, Argus, the whole draenor campaign and krasaga wilds.

[Irian]

Yeah, I pretty much agree with this OP. While I wouldn't call the Horde's development good, it's development nonetheless. On my Alliance characters (before I quit, I haven't played past a brief return in 8.1 and that was mainly doing Horde stuff) I feel like the story is so completely detached, predictable and reactionary that it feels like a waste of time to even do the story quests. Wow, Jaina saves people. Cool, the Alliance is helping Horde members despite Teldrassil. Also, Teldrassil still isn't really being responded to other than a warfront that will likely never go anywhere because it's a warfront.

It feels like Teldrassil is just hanging in the air like a stale fart and the developers aren't going to acknowledge it. Keep in mind that lorewise it's been implied that a massive portion of the night elf population are simply gone now and night elves as a whole are nearly extinct at this point. Why is this such a side detail to this story? Shouldn't the Alliance be full of vengeance at this point? In-character, if I played a night elf I'd be massively let down that their entire arc ends in some ugly customization and Tyrande undergoing a pointless anime transformation sequence.
Why the hell are Alliance even considering anything other than wiping the Horde off the map right now?

[Super Dickmann]

Nothing much to say except good post, OP. The ditch the Horde are about to be dropped in is just the one the Alliance have been in one way or another for ages. This is just the most frustrating representation thereof since despite the stakes being higher, the Horde being more united against them as of yet and them having lost even more, there's not even the pretense that the Alliance want to actually win the war. Genocide? Meh, what matters is this cow felt bad about one of our guys being raised.

[thesmall001]

If we draw a line under Wrath, and just look at the modern "post-WC3 era" stories, then it's really just the story of: how a Lawful Good faction stayed united while a Chaotic Neutral Faction broke down (resulting in the Alliance winning, dethroning a Warchief and sacking their rival's largest city); followed 1 expansion per faction that dug into the relative history of each faction (WoD strongly favoured Horde, Argus strongly favoured Alliance); now exploring what happens when the same thing happens again.

Now, I hear the complaints about MoP 2.0 but I'd put it to everybody that most successful sequels replicate the formula of what came before but either invert the narrative or invert the conclusion. So, until BfA ends, I'd suggest everybody hold on to that particular criticism. Because if BfA ends with the Alliance choosing to occupy a fractured Horde then that's enough to say it was adequately divergent. The characters were different this time, the tensions were different, the main story beats were different and there was escalation (more races involved and higher stakes with the planet's very life-force on the line).

So, on a macro scale, I don't think this persistent idea of Alliance victimisation really holds water. That being said, it's pretty valid to say the Alliance is mostly reactive towards Horde threats, I'd agree with that. And the Alliance being a mostly Human Empire is fair too. (Or at least, Dwarf and Human.) But that was always part-and-parcel with the faction. High Elves, then Night Elves and Gnomes, then Draenei, then Worgen, then Pandaren, now Void Elves/Lightforged; All very limited population races seeking refuge after taking heavy loses. This puts the non-Human and Dwarf races in an inherently submissive standing which allows for broad unity.

I actually quite like what we're seeing now in the Alliance, with the smaller groups starting to chafe, under the leadership of a less experienced King of the primary Kingdom. Meanwhile, the Horde is seeing a nice inversion too, having pushed its diversity to breaking point where the individual groups of which it's comprised begin to fray (people of every Horde race either do or don't support Sylvanas) largely agnostic of which race they most identify.

I've followed this story since Day of the Dragon, so pretty near the start, and these are the themes that have always been there and it's actually refreshing to see Blizzard play around with them a bit more now.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

I don't think you have any idea what "sacking" means. The Alliance did not pillage Orgrimmar. They did not loot it. They did not take the residents as slaves. That is what "Sack a city" means. They did not even enforce some minor reparations. At the end of SoO, the Alliance actually GIVES UP any claim to Azshara. They gain NOTHING from SoO.

The moment that Alliance got and was supposed to cheer for was just Varian going to Thrall and telling him to be a good boy or we'll get him next time.

Yes it was humiliating for the Horde but it was in no way a moment of pride for the Alliance. Heck it doesn't help that the Horde was useless at SoO. They failed to take the docks and then were pinned between the docks and the gates and were about to be destroyed until Tyrande showed up. Thrall and Saurfang went YOLO and run in the Underhold; Saurfang somehow disappeared and Thrall got pwned by Garrosh.

I too am confused why people think it was any type of sacking. How many other historical sackings can you say occurred like this? The Horde rebellion (with the Horde PC) was assisted by the Alliance. The Alliance leaves. The Alliance effectively cedes any land gained by the Horde in Cata/MoP and gives the Horde even more land. They don't get any real treaties, money, people, items etc. in return. Its not a sacking in any sense of the word. You could say the Alliance sacked UC, but even that was planned, and the city destroyed?

[SirBeef]

I play both and really don't have any story grievences.

[Soon-TM]

We just need the Horde to get a chance to sack an Alliance city.

We can forget about it, since Alliance has never lost a faction war, except the very first one. Even the moustache-twirling lolevil Sylvanas didn't sack Darnassus before setting it on fire.

[Mehrunes]

We can forget about it, since Alliance has never lost a faction war, except the very first one. Even the moustache-twirling lolevil Sylvanas didn't sack Darnassus before setting it on fire.

Technically, the Alliance became a thing only after the First War (in reaction to Orcs sacking Stormwind).

[Rozz]

I feel like the Alliance has lost its purpose to exist as a faction, unless it's destined to assume the authority of a nanny state to other races.

Besides their victimization and power scaling issues, the entitled policing is out of this world. Do they want to have peace with races or just control them? I've always found it unnerving how many Alliance characters are in positions to claim 'moral authority/obligation'. It allows them to stop something they honestly have no real business in other than personal interest. Even if they have a right to be suspicious about something, spying is spying and they don't own the world. It's kinda creepy. You breath and Shaw tells Anduin who will decide if that's okay or not. Your 'suspicious breathing' is enough to trigger assassins and ships on your shores to spy further. Yes the Alliance has no reason to trust a Horde with Sylvanas leading it, but I doubt they'd stop even if she left.

[Assorted Whip]

If Alliance weren't such dicks towards Forsaken and Blood Elves you'd be in much better position now.

[Rozz]

The purpose of the Alliance is exactly the same with that of the Horde. It's a military alliance of state necessitated by the OTHER superpower.

I meant it's ultimate goal, not why it was literally created. The factions existing for that reason only makes sense to a point. If all antagonistic parties are removed from either side as Anduin dreams, what kind of relationship does the Alliance want with the Horde and the rest of the world? The Alliance can't exist as a military state of necessity when there is no necessity. So what kind of state will it be?

It looks like Blizzard has set the Alliance up to inevitably work as a watcher/protector faction. Their current High King even has the potential to lead all races in a great crusade against the void. And that's ignoring their leaders (and the characters from their races) already being in positions related to peace keeping/world watching - Tyrande/Elune, Malfurion/The Dream, Illidan/Titans, Maiev/Wardens, Khad'gar/Kirin'Tor, Magni/Azeroth, Jaina and Anduin/2 of the Dragon flights, Velen/The Light, Bolvar/The Scourge, etc. While the rest of the world exists, the Alliance is propped up like heroes to defend it. They aren't just "grr, we banded together because we hate orcs!" anymore.