Will you trust the word of Blizz execs in future lore discussions?

[TheRevenantHero]

As long as Christie Golden is helping to write for the game, I have absolutely no faith in the future of the story. The most recent cut scene reeks of her bull shit and I hate it.

[Mehrunes]

Believing is everything that Blizzard says without thinking is stupid(there are few people on this forum who do so).

I'm not sayin that Blizzard stricty is lying to us, but we should shouldn't be obedient sheeps. Take their explanations with a grain of salt.

Their explanations on lore is literally Word of God, which is about as canon as it can get, meaning that taking it with a grain of salt enters fanfiction territory.

Also, believing their explanations does not equal believing everything, because most of what Blizzard says isn't actually explanations. What you said here is immensely reductive to say the least.

And your argument about Battle for Lordaeron is bad even if you don't take Blizzard's statements into consideration.

[Magnagarde]

It wasn't necessarily a lie. The whole purpose of what she's done hasn't been revealed and there's clearly an ulterior motive there. Sure, she's the old egocentric, ruthless and quite clearly evil self, but morally grey may just refer to how her character sees itself. Sargeras didn't see himself as the bad guy either. It obviously doesn't change the fact that she's done unspeakable evil, but it is one way to look at it and it is the way I've looked at the whole "morally grey" thing from the very beginning.

Revealing more than they did at the beginning of the expansion would've defeated the whole point of slowly revealing the existence of another death-related entity at the end of 8.2.5, one that we might or might not already be familiar with.

[huth]

It wasn't necessarily a lie

It wasn't a lie for a simple reason: Blizzard never said it.

[Eazy]

Their explanations on lore is literally Word of God, which is about as canon as it can get, meaning that taking it with a grain of salt enters fanfiction territory.

Also, believing their explanations does not equal believing everything, because most of what Blizzard says isn't actually explanations. What you said here is immensely reductive to say the least.

Because retcons and false information weren't ever spread by famous Blizzard employers before.

And your argument about Battle for Lordaeron is bad even if you don't take Blizzard's statements into consideration.

I think it's pretty good actually.

If you have enough power to destroy the enemies without sacrificing anything - you do that.
Undercity was lost, Banshee ran away. That wasn't win.

[Polybius]

They've contradicted a lot of posts in the past, so no. Their responses are based on works in progress so take it with a pinch of salt.

[Super Dickmann]

It wasn't necessarily a lie. The whole purpose of what she's done hasn't been revealed and there's clearly an ulterior motive there. Sure, she's the old egocentric, ruthless and quite clearly evil self, but morally grey may just refer to how her character sees itself. Sargeras didn't see himself as the bad guy either. It obviously doesn't change the fact that she's done unspeakable evil, but it is one way to look at it and it is the way I've looked at the whole "morally grey" thing from the very beginning.

The Sargeras comparison may end up being an accurate one. In as much as I see Sylvanas getting any kind of remotely 'human' motive, I can see it being a generic JRPG bad guy one - i.e that she intends to kill everyone and/or bind their souls to her eventual death realm to save them from hell. She'd still be doing this primarily to save her own soul but she'd also view it as her rescuing/teaching the masses that she was right all along, hence the bit about how they'll understand what she next shows up in the loyalist questline.

[Polybius]

As long as Christie Golden is helping to write for the game, I have absolutely no faith in the future of the story. The most recent cut scene reeks of her bull shit and I hate it.

Can't blame her. She's not the only person on the writing team, and they're trying to bring new antagonists to the table after the first designers blew their load post-WotLK. The game has to be milked somehow.

[SirKickBan]

Yes, if you don't have your "blizzard sucks" blinders on.

People are complaining that BFA's story sucks because of what has come before it (eg Garrosh) but when you tell them to consider what comes after the current beat of the story, that's impossible. Every patch so far in BFA has had a reasonable storyline (blood trolls/g'huun/MOTHER in Uldir, Bwonsamdi/Talanji/Jaina in 8.1, Naz'jatar/Azshara/Alliance+Horde in 8.2) which have all been mostly contained to their particular patches, while the Sylvanas arc has been ongoing since Legion, let alone BFA, and hasn't been wound up yet. What you're saying is like watching a single episode of a procedural drama and assuming that the entire season's story arc has already been told, when it hasn't.

People are expecting The Wire levels of writing from a totally different medium and it's ridiculous. All anyone does is complain, and then once they get bored of complaining about the story they waddle along and start complaining about something else, because they don't actually want to be satisfied, they just want to shit on things because it makes them feel better.

So... Let's be clear, then: What parts of BFA's story do you think are good?

Was the Burning of Teldrassil good, with its string of contrivances and bizarre, almost nonsensical 'twist' at the end?

Was the Siege of Lordaeron good, with its consequences being almost completely ignored for the rest of the expansion, or with a single character swooping in to Deus Ex Machina one side out of danger, twice, for no reason beyond simplifying the storytelling (It's easier to say "A wizard did it" than give a real explanation, and all).

Was Saurfang's whiplash-inducing views on honour good? -Was the characterization of the minor NPCs we met.. -The motives of Lilian Voss, Rexxar, and the like, good, or were they another bizarre and handwaved twist in otherwise sensible character 'arcs'? Was the storytelling of the Siege of Daz'Alor good, or was it another series of handwaves to excuse the raid that was about to happen (They literally push a button to delete the Horde fleet, without any indication in the story beforehand that that was being set up or worked on)?

Is Bwonsamedi's story even good? -Does it go anywhere? ..Do we know anything meaningful, because of it? Has Bwonsamedi's pact affected Talanji in any way at all, so far? -Or are we all still waiting in hope that it's all made good on the final page?

What I'm saying is that it's like watching every episode of a procedural drama, except the last one, and the show's arc so far has been a janky, scribbled mess, while the show promises us, and naive fans actually believe, that the next episode will make it allllll make sense.. -And they've been saying that since the very first episode. "Just one more", they whisper, eyes dry and throats cracking, their desperation to excuse their rabid fanaticism growing with every failure of the show to deliver on a single one of its promises.

Sylvanas's plot wasn't good in Legion. It hasn't been good in BfA. -It has, in fact, poisoned a good chunk of BfA by forcing other characters to be squished and molded around not rocking the plot-boat, and even your own little 'explanation' here hadn't said anything but a weird kind've "..Well.. The raid story is good..?", which is hilarious, given how tiny a silver of the story that is, and how, at least for the first raid, it's also almost objectively wrong. -It may be for the others, as well, but after the first I really couldn't bring myself to follow the other raids, so I'll just pretend you're right about them, somehow, and those tiny series of boss encounters are actually storytelling gold. -Is that all BfA has, that's good? ..Because it sure doesn't seem worth waiting for the last page, to me.

[Nzx]

Because it sure doesn't seem worth waiting for the last page, to me.

So... don't wait for it then?

There are fucking plenty of TV shows and movies where there's a constant drip of "just watch the next episode and it will all be explained". That's literally how long-term storytelling works, because if you resolve all of the plot points immediately you lose the viewers who only cared about that storyline (see: Wrath killing off Arthas). Take something like the Blacklist - at first there's a shadowy villain who no one knows anything about, then you find out that someone else was pulling his strings, then there's a shadowy cabal, then there's a main character's parent, then there's the person you thought was good all along. Take something like Sons of Anarchy - it's the Mayans, then it's the cops, then it's the Irish, then it's an internal thing. Go back to a character like Wrathion, who had a storyline spanning the entire MoP expansion and is only now surfacing again, with a storyline expecting to take us into 9.0. Alleria and Turalyon were gone for the entirety of World of Warcraft until Legion, and while they were used to introduce Argus content and Void Elves, their stories still aren't finished.

What it boils down to is that people are still expecting the same level of quality writing from a persistent world environment with tens of thousands of quests, doodads, lore items and exterior stories, that a team of experienced screenwriters produce for twelve 45 minute blocks per year or a single movie. People expect that 15 years into World of Warcraft, and an entire child/young adulthood into "Warcraft" as a universe, the storyline decisions made for a single RTS game in the 90s will remain totally unchanged for an MMO in almost 2020.

The storytelling isn't perfect, by a longshot, but before a character is "written off" it's unreasonable to assume that you know their entire arc. Anduin and Sylvanas didn't even have unique models in Vanilla. Nor did Saurfang. It's ridiculous to assume that you knew all of Saurfang's story by the beginning of Wrath, ridiculous to assume that you knew all of Thrall's story as "Green Jesus" in Cata. You will never be satisfied if you metagame the entire storyline (of WoW or anything else) instead of just experiencing the writer's intentions and trusting that they have something in mind for the story being told. Once the book is closed and there is no more story to be told, absolutely go back and hammer it for any holes that are left.

[SoundOfGuns]

She's relatively morally grey.

If you can formulate a moral argument both for and against someone doing something, then it is morally grey as there is no right or wrong answer clearly defined from any other answer. If a character's entire moral backbone is comprised of a highly morally grey struggle (Like Orgrim Doomhammer, who is by far one of the most morally grey characters in the entire canon) then you have a character who is morally grey.

Sylvanas is selfish but you could make a moral argument that she's merely looking out for herself because she knows what will happen when she dies. She hasn't done anything incredibly evil as of yet, or anything for the sake of causing pointless harm to others. Even the burning of Teldrassil was to destroy a powerful military and logistical base of her most pressing enemy. This is what sets her apart from, say, the Lich King who just wants to kill everyone to rule them and be an edgy death lord and stuff.

Of course they're leaning her more and more towards either a boring Garrosh retread (as stupid and predictable as that would be) or some dumb galaxy-tier chess player who is somehow outwitting the void. Neither are good paths, but I'm not exactly defending the quality of the writing.

Im not sure i can see it that way. But i get where you are coming from. The way Blizard wrote her, however, implied to me that she is doing a lot of arguably bad things simply to ruin someone elses life. This is in my eyes an arguably evil act for evils sake. There is nothing grey about it. Why did she burn down Teldrassil? This did not seem to be her intention judging by both the questline and the book. This might be a mistake in display on sides of Blizzard, i will admit the possibility, but if its not... i would say she was just... a damn evil bitch, to put it bluntly. It didn't feel like a huge tactical act. It felt like it was done out of spite. Surrendering Lordearon like this which she must have known would be attacked next due to where its located did not only make her people, she supposedly cared for, refugees but also... well its damn unbelievable that the Alliance didn't try to march into Silvermoon in a swoop, because it was now entirely on its own as well. I would have went for Stormwind with the biggest gun i could find (and do have) if i wanted to do something tactical. But im not a tactician...

And i know you aren't. No worries. Im pretty sure you are ...not exactly wrong? But only if we assume that whoever is writing the lore is knowing what they are doing. And while this is... a remarkably smug thing to say in itself i also got to add that at this point... i have seen Gamemasters in D&D and so on that would have pulled this all off A LOT better... And i don't think the scale of an MMO is to blame here, you know?