WoW's Darkest Secret.

[kranur]

hes not great at storytelling though...
literally anyone could do this, it relies solely on fabricating lies about reality and misleading the reader, that is not storytelling that is lie fabrication, because people don't even know they are listening to a story.

i write and review scripts for a living, i make top 10's and history ofs, i would not call anything i do "story telling" even though it keeps people hooked on a narrative the entire time.


like have you ever heard the "it was a dream all along" literacy tale? its one commonly hated cause it means everything you just listened to didnt even happen and was a waste of fucking time cause it didnt even happen in the universe of the story being written, telling a story of a real thing happening then to reveal it was all just made up a lie doesent even really make it a story in the true sense and more a fabrication of fiction.

so yes i guess in the pure aspect of it, it is storytelling, but telling an interesting "story" that is literally nothing but lies is easy, and if as he says they shoiuld do, blizzard tried something liek this, the fucking communtiy would HATE it.

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it is fan fiction, he literally made it all up, none of it is real, it is just that fiction, or did you pause the video before he revealed it was all a lie?

So all stories that are not real life happenings are just fabricated lies and should not be considered as stories?
Wtf ... I must have missed the disclaimers on books "THESE EVENTS ARE NOT REAL, NOTHING HAPPENED, YOU WASTE YOUR TIME READING THIS!!!!!!!"

[FelPlague]

The ending was literally BIS. The only way it could have ended better than being true was the way it ended.

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It kind of is though. A point demonstrated through, well demonstration.

well idk if you know, but world of warcraft is fantasy, its not real, so how do you tell a story that plays on the mindset and strings and story scheme that what is being spoken about is real life.

you may not know it but your brain does TONS of stuff subconciously.
for example, if you see a dead body in a video game, no matter how realistic, it wont be as terrifying as if you saw an actual dead body in real life. because your brain sees it and knows it is not real, therefore it does not let it effect you in the same way. why also the brain will commonly trick you into thinking real things are not real if it means saving you from the trauma, something many people who suffer trauma do without their knowledge, their brain takes these events and makes them into memeories that feel fake, that they are not real.

if he told this story EXACTLY the same way, but let us know ahead of time it was not real, or if you got this story and put it ingame, no one would care.

i dont think i need to spell it out but the fact a real life person murdered 3 people and then got away with it for decades is far more compelling then a video game charecter murdered 3 video game charecters and we didnt find out till decades later.



i mean come on, charecters in fantasy murder millions with no problem, you will see tons of people all over the world who say they love garrosh.

but i fucking dare you to go and say you love hitler, even though they did the EXACT same things. because garrosh is a video game charecter, there is a level of disconnect, it does not include ANY real people, so you can disconnect yourself from that, but hitler was a real person, so were his victims.

Hitler and literally everything connected to him is a travesty, anyone who would appretiate him would be called rightfully so countless things. yet garrosh is commonly praised among the community for doing the exact same things. this is because you cant compare fiction to non-fiction, because in non-fiction actual people are effected, actual people died in ww2 and all its surroundings, but no one died in the siege of orgrimmar, so people are fine with it. its an example of why you cant just get things from one genre and move them to another, because they dont translate. because in fantasy real people are not effected, which drastically changes the context and emotional connections of the story.

yeah, his story was compelling, but ONLY because it was based in reality, if you told that exact same story ingame, no one would care. it relies on us as humans seeing REAL people and feeling that connection that this is reality, not fantasy

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If you think his message was "story writers are shit, I just kicked their asses lol" then you're taking a far harsher take from this than I did. To me it was more like, "If the writers took the time to sit down and come up with interesting little stories rather than the big picture stuff like they're doing now, they would grab a lot more interest and attention from the players."

read above, blizzard write interesting little stories all the fucking time, but because they are fantasy and not real they get NOTHING close to the attention or love. there is TONS of these in shadowlands, the story of kaelthas for example, the story of pelagos, the story of kleia, uther, kelthuzad, plague doctor marileth, like seriously the story of plague doctor marileth is insane, its so good, but who cares its a video game charecter, their trauma their pain their loss is not real, so who the fuck cares?

[matheney2k]

well idk if you know, but world of warcraft is fantasy, its not real, so how do you tell a story that plays on the mindset and strings and story scheme that what is being spoken about is real life.

you may not know it but your brain does TONS of stuff subconciously.
for example, if you see a dead body in a video game, no matter how realistic, it wont be as terrifying as if you saw an actual dead body in real life. because your brain sees it and knows it is not real, therefore it does not let it effect you in the same way. why also the brain will commonly trick you into thinking real things are not real if it means saving you from the trauma, something many people who suffer trauma do without their knowledge, their brain takes these events and makes them into memeories that feel fake, that they are not real.

if he told this story EXACTLY the same way, but let us know ahead of time it was not real, or if you got this story and put it ingame, no one would care.

i dont think i need to spell it out but the fact a real life person murdered 3 people and then got away with it for decades is far more compelling then a video game charecter murdered 3 video game charecters and we didnt find out till decades later.



i mean come on, charecters in fantasy murder millions with no problem, you will see tons of people all over the world who say they love garrosh.

but i fucking dare you to go and say you love hitler, even though they did the EXACT same things. because garrosh is a video game charecter, there is a level of disconnect, it does not include ANY real people, so you can disconnect yourself from that, but hitler was a real person, so were his victims.

yeah, his story was compelling, but ONLY because it was based in reality, if you told that exact same story ingame, no one would care. it relies on us as humans seeing REAL people and feeling that connection that this is reality, not fantasy

Dude...wtf did I just read?

Where's that Billy Madison clip when you need it?

[FelPlague]

So all stories that are not real life happenings are just fabricated lies and should not be considered as stories?
Wtf ... I must have missed the disclaimers on books "THESE EVENTS ARE NOT REAL, NOTHING HAPPENED, YOU WASTE YOUR TIME READING THIS!!!!!!!"

did you watch the video? its literally him saying this is real for 20 minutes then "lol it was not real i lied to all of you"
and yes, have you ever seen a book? they very much usually say fact/fiction on them.

[Yarathir]

That's not the point. I don't care about the quality of the video. The video was deliberately misleading in deceiving the viewers that it was actual canon lore. We waste 20 minutes of our lives watching this only for him to go "lol this is just fanfiction, gotcha." Fanfiction should declare itself such. It would be like if you put a stand outside on the sidewalk that says you're selling lemonade. You go wait in line for 20 minutes, get to the front, only to get told. Nah, we don't see lemonade, we sell <insert whatever thing>. You'd feel cheated and lied to.

Pretty sure that's false advertising and illegal in some places.

Are you..

Are you actually okay?

[FelPlague]

Dude...wtf did I just read?

Where's that Billy Madison clip when you need it?

??? You read an explanation of why you cant just supply a story of "real thing that happened" and then say "why cant this fantasy world tell stories like this"

cause the emotional connection is entirely different. as i said there is many people who like garrosh, people who like his story, and like him as a charecter, and people are perfectly fine with that.

because hes a fictional character

but if someone does the exact same stuff in real life it pulls ENTIRELY different emotional connections, because it is real life, not fantasy.
we see people in fantasy cut through armies of enemies absolute genocide and still like them as charecters, but IRL?

In fantasy we treat death as far less impactful then it is in real life, entire armies die and we dont blink an eye.

what garrosh did was horrible, but because its fiction people are fine with it and dont really care, meanwhile that stuff happening in real life would be and WAS an absolute horror.

we as humans dull our senses when it comes to fantasy, even if the exact same thing happens in fiction/non-fiction, our brains treat the non-fiction as far more important, BECAUSE IT IS. and when it comes to storytelling this means you cant just get something that works in non-fiction and shove it in ficition and hope it has the same effect.

[matheney2k]

??? You read an explanation of why you cant just supply a story of "real thing that happened" and then say "why cant this fantasy world tell stories like this"

I read the ramblings of a madman. There is so much to unpack there, but most of it is off topic to the thread at hand

TLDR: You do you bub lol.

[cparle87]

Bro what?

Even as told in the video, it doesn't even fashion itself as a lore video. It's a story about look at the potential bug I found, ohh wait it's an out of game conspiracy, ohh just kidding, but look at how invested I made you in the game, why can't the devs who are supposedly professional story tellers do this?

I'm honestly not sure what your point is here. To shill their fanfiction video or bash on the WoW writers? You haven't made a single post without insulting them this whole thread.

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Do you get mad when you watch a movie and realize that it didn't actually happened in real life and it wasn't mentioned at the start of it?

No, because most movies are either fiction, and they tell you. Based on a true story, and they tell you. Or reality, and guess what, they tell you.

Also that's a false dichotomy. We're not comparing reality to fiction. We're considering the canon of a franchise to someone pretending their canon until the end to troll you. Remember the April Fool's Legend of Zelda trailer?

[FelPlague]

I read the ramblings of a madman. There is so much to unpack there, but most of it is off topic to the thread at hand

TLDR: You do you bub lol.

none of it is offtopic, and non of it is mad, idk what you are talking about? maybe educate yourself a bit in storytelling to learn a bit more why you can't just get a non-fiction story and insert it into a world of fiction and have it have the same effect.

garrosh did horrible things that replicate the history of world war 2 NON-FICTION, which were horrible and to this day still effect people all over the globe, yet people cheer him on, because its fiction. you can't directly translate fiction to non-fiction, its that simple.

[Rendark]

Why? Part of the reason why you get so invested into the story is because you think it's real. That believability helps make his point more powerful, it showcases how a good story can captivate audiences.

That's cool and all but i don't like being tricked.

[cparle87]

Are you..

Are you actually okay?

Do you have anything to actually contribute to the thread besides condescension and ad hominem?

[Yarathir]

I actually cannot believe the replies to this thread, lmao.

[cparle87]

That's cool and all but i don't like being tricked.

Pretty much this. Only thing worse than the trickers is the people defending it and laughing at you for being annoyed.

[Yarathir]

Pretty much this. Only thing worse than the trickers is the people defending it and laughing at you for being annoyed.

You should follow your signature.

[cparle87]

You should follow your signature.

Yes, because being upset at being rickrolled and being upset because you don't like how a game is designed are totally the same thing. To ignore with you.

[Yarathir]

Yes, because being upset at being rickrolled and being upset because you don't like how a game is designed are totally the same thing. To ignore with you.

Thank you for doing me a favor. I don't much enjoy hypocrites and "no fun allowed" types.

[Delever]

you mean what they are right now? idk if youve been playing wow but they have had insanely complicated and intricate secrets spanning years, jennifer, b'aal, unuu, the spirit darter, the waist of time, nightmare, etc, all of these super detailed secrets.

but you cant tell stories like this anymore because they get instantly spoiled, if they told a secret like this in wow now people would know about it in PTR months befoe it even goes live, cause they do do this, all the time, and yet people find it out through the PTR and datamining.

nevermind the fact "it was a dream all along" is one of if not the most hated trope in storytelling ever, and is the game equivalent of a "documentary" style story saying "oh yeah i made all that the fuck up"

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hire him to write what exactly? its easy to do this kinda stuff, like do people not know of the existance of the onion for example?

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so you are saying blizzard should write a story where they mislead players for long periods of time, only to pull the rug out from under them and say "Oh yeah none of that was real, lol get fucked"



Well here we go, at the end of dragonflight suddenly we are going to wake up back in the shadowlands with the jailer standing above us saying "yeah that was all a dream, yall fell asleep while i was monologuing, time to fight!!!"

aww man best storytelling ever.



look there is stories that work in specific styles of genre, and there is specific stories that can only work in specific mediums. for example, an action scene, far better done and visualized in a visual medium like animation or even comics, meanwhile if you try to visualize that scene with text alone it is MUCH harder.
same is said for differing medias, a monologue is much more interesting on radio then it is in a silent movie, but an action scene is much more interesting in a silent movie then in radio.
in a game universe you cant really tell a story of "this is all real, oh wait its not" and do a rugpull, instead we have the "it was all a dream" or "Time is reverted" these are how it is portrayed in fantasy, and really the only good ways to do so, and even then the simple line.
"And they woke up, it was all a dream" is a meme for a reason, cause holy shit it is the most unsatisfying and annoying thing ever.

this story is decent, but only because the medium of a murder mystery is easy, and the ending is actually just... awful, but people love it because "fuck blizzard"

The ending would have hit much harder if he let it sit for longer, and revealed it in such a way that even after revealing it was all a lie... maybe.. just maybe it might be real?



if you want to give it a shot, dont even need to write a styory, just explain to me how you would write a murder mystery that takes place in a fantasy world, and then have it turn out to all be a lie and nothing happens no one dies no one is effected it was all just a waste of time. and not have it be extremely annoying to players?

when you are playing a video game, when you are doing anything you want payoff.
a story can be fun, but if the ending is dogshit it ruins the whole thing.
what do you give as payoff to make it all worth the time and effort? nothing.
his payoff was "lol fuck blizzard" which everyone agrees with so thats enough, but how do you tell a story to only pull the rug and say "none of it is real none of it mattered, goodbye" and have the player feel like their time was respected and they were rewarded for going through that.

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"look at how invested i made you in the game" except he didnt, he made you invested in the story, which turns out to be entirely made up, a pointless lie. nothing he says makes you invested in the GAME he makes you invested in the lie he has fabricated.

something conmen are VERY good at doing, they dont sell you the product, they sell you THE LIE.

You have a hardon for defending blizzard so I normally dont bother replying to you but you can you be this dense to entirely miss the point???? The point of the video was not that blizzard should write a fake story.....

The dude made up a fake story about one of the most boring places in all of WoW and managed to get people engaged for 20 minutes. The story was fake but that was not the point. The point is that this story, if it was told by a writer and implemented in game, could have been real and would have been very engaging. Him declaring it as fake in the end is to put the context that he came up with it and not the writers and if a random simpleton can make the most boring zone in WoW engaging then so can professional writers at blizzard.

Also I agree with you about all the datamining etc ruining existing secrets but the secrets they ve made (hivemind, waist of time etc) are still legitimately fun even if you know how to do them through guides.
He is trying to extrapolate this point into the main story. The current story is full of inconsistencies and things that are either incredibly dumb or barely make any sense. As you said, often a barebones story is the best way to tell a story and the cosmic shit they re doing right now is not cutting it. The more you complicate things the more people are going to hang on to incosistencies.
The story of Arthas is held to such a high degree not because its a ground breaking super novel never before heard of story but because its nice and easy to understand with a simple yet logical narrative. Paladin with good intentions loses his way and abandons his master and ends up becoming corrupted in his pursue to do good at all costs. Simple, mildly engaging and easy to understand.
The whole thing with the jailer and the 10000000 cosmic forces that we keep chasing only to find out yet again that theres something even higher than the jailer that orchestrates everything bad thats happening around us is Danuser trying to play pretentious 5D chess.

[FelPlague]

You have a hardon for defending blizzard so I normally dont bother replying to you but you can you be this dense to entirely miss the point???? The point of the video was not that blizzard should write a fake story.....

The dude made up a fake story about one of the most boring places in all of WoW and managed to get people engaged for 20 minutes. The story was fake but that was not the point. The point is that this story, if it was told by a writer and implemented in game, could have been real and would have been very engaging. Him declaring it as fake in the end is to put the context that he came up with it and not the writers and if a random simpleton can make the most boring zone in WoW engaging then so can professional writers at blizzard.

Also I agree with you about all the datamining etc ruining existing secrets but the secrets they ve made (hivemind, waist of time etc) are still legitimately fun even if you know how to do them through guides.
He is trying to extrapolate this point into the main story. The current story is full of inconsistencies and things that are either incredibly dumb or barely make any sense. As you said, often a barebones story is the best way to tell a story and the cosmic shit they re doing right now is not cutting it. The more you complicate things the more people are going to hang on to incosistencies.
The story of Arthas is held to such a high degree not because its a ground breaking super novel never before heard of story but because its nice and easy to understand with a simple yet logical narrative. Paladin with good intentions loses his way and abandons his master and ends up becoming corrupted in his pursue to do good at all costs. Simple, mildly engaging and easy to understand.
The whole thing with the jailer and the 10000000 cosmic forces that we keep chasing only to find out yet again that theres something even higher than the jailer that orchestrates everything bad thats happening around us is Danuser trying to play pretentious 5D chess.

he didnt write a story about the most boring location in all of wow for 20 minutes, he wrote a story about a random bug that kills you and an unsolved murder.
the story has very little to actually do with stonetalon, the entire video plays around the fact of this weird very specific bug, that then leads into the solve of a real life murder!
except it wasnt, because it was not real.

lol what "if a writer put this story ingame it would be very engaging" no it wouldnt, because it is not real, and we would know its not real because its in the video game. and you cant get a story about a real life murder being referenced in the name of multiple npcs in a zone and dying at specific times in these zones into the game.

the story is literally 20 minutes to say "i made up an idea that a guy murdered 3 woman with these names and these rares in these zones killing you at these times is a reference to that" is not something you can just put in the game.


Did you know Prince Nazjak is actually an NPC placed into the game as a reference to jak ford of the Church of Nazrene who is a big fan of Faldir Chahbari the moroccan-Dutch welterweight kickboxer, who is referenced by the zone Nazjak is found in which is called Faldir's cove?







his video is correct, wow story writing is bad, but his conclusion that his storywriting is good and "blizzard writings cant do what i just did, and im a nobodoy and they are paid insane amounts of money" is hilariously fucking false.

cause i just did EXACTLY what he did with literally 2 minutes of google.

[Delever]

he didnt write a story about the most boring location in all of wow for 20 minutes, he wrote a story about a random bug that kills you and an unsolved murder.
the story has very little to actually do with stonetalon, the entire video plays around the fact of this weird very specific bug, that then leads into the solve of a real life murder!
except it wasnt, because it was not real.

lol what "if a writer put this story ingame it would be very engaging" no it wouldnt, because it is not real, and we would know its not real because its in the video game. and you cant get a story about a real life murder being referenced in the name of multiple npcs in a zone and dying at specific times in these zones into the game.

the story is literally 20 minutes to say "i made up an idea that a guy murdered 3 woman with these names and these rares in these zones killing you at these times is a reference to that" is not something you can just put in the game.


Did you know Prince Nazjak is actually an NPC placed into the game as a reference to jak ford of the Church of Nazrene who is a big fan of Faldir Chahbari the moroccan-Dutch welterweight kickboxer, who is referenced by the zone Nazjak is found in which is called Faldir's cove?

Dude when people say real they of course mean in the context of the damn game. Are you being purposefully obtuse? If this was put in game it would not be based on a real life murder but something equivalent that happens in game and you d have to solve or go through a sort of equivalent narrative using in game material. It would be a nice and simple coherent story for a zone. A lot of early zones have nice coherent stories. The current narrative has overcomplicated things and they ve dug themselves into a deep hole they struggle to get out of.
The whole thing they did with the jailer undermines so much of the impact of the earlier lore in the same way that bringing back Palpatine in the SW sequels completely undermined everything that happened in the original movies and the prequels.

[FelPlague]

Dude when people say real they of course mean in the context of the damn game. Are you being purposefully obtuse? If this was put in game it would not be based on a real life murder but something equivalent that happens in game and you d have to solve or go through a sort of equivalent narrative using in game material. It would be a nice and simple coherent story for a zone. A lot of early zones have nice coherent stories. The current narrative has overcomplicated things and they ve dug themselves into a deep hole they struggle to get out of.
The whole thing they did with the jailer undermines so much of the impact of the earlier lore in the same way that bringing back Palpatine in the SW sequels completely undermined everything that happened in the original movies and the prequels.

1- you said "The point is that this story, if it was told by a writer and implemented in game, could have been real and would have been very engaging." so that was what i took, you for your word. however even then you cant, cause people dont care, we have had multiple murder mysteries over the years in wow, literally very recently, and they were not "praised" the reason this was praised is because people think its real, that a wow developer was actually a murderer who got away with it for 2 decades until he, the creator found him out! using his expert detective skills and knowledge of an old zone. all cemented with a "fuck blizzard" puncline.

2- so was his story. its so hard to follow at times, each subzone has a different random death time, and also a rare with a name, also the zone names themselves, all referencing specific murdered women, all developed by a guy who knowing he did it somehow still gladly explained himself having put all this stuff into the game as a reference to said murders, and then kills himself and is found out guilty the exact same time randomly that this guy contacted him? all while not a single other person in the entire world happened to be in these zones and notice this bug ever in 17 years of warcraft no one noticed this one bug or these names correlations? there is SO many plotholes and complications.

1 developer does not design the zones names, rare npcs, and gain access to the codding to be able to add a "kill command" to a zone
How did the game go on for 18 years without anyone finding out this bug, not a single person, when millions of players would have experienced this bug at some point?
something like a random kill command would have been noticed RIGHT away and fixed, someone would have had it happen, contact a GM, a gm woulda gone "huh thats odd, i will tell a dev to remove it" and boom its gone.

3 plotholes, already and i could get more if i rewatched it.

its easy to pick plotholes in things if you just THINK.