Blizzard dies and Bobby rides
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Merrith
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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I would say it wouldn't be shocking in the slightest if they came up with this idea (or if Furor did), not even as some sort of sabotage, but just "wouldn't it be cool if she literally burned the Night Elf home down?". Shock value is there, sorta makes sense with what BFA was supposed to be (or supposed to supposed to be, once upon a time). BFA in general was a mess, so the idea that they came up with an idea, and never really came up with the proper narrative follow up, then wanted to go another direction but didn't know how...well, frankly that sounds very current Blizzard.
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They had to force the Horde v Alliance shit down your throat to keep it relevant somehow. Legion ended with both sides teaming up and holding hands against a cosmic evil through the power of friendship. Kind of hard to go from fighting Argus and stopping Sargeras to worrying about whatever small scale squabbles the factions were having back home.
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Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
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This is another annoyance in their story telling - the need to constantly hit the Horde vs. Alliance reset button like it is a old sitcom resetting consequences between episodes.
All the possessed Anduin shit makes me feel like their storybeat will be a) Anduin becomes fucked up from the experience because he was too likable/a good guy before and they need to give him more flaws b) he pulls a Thrall and withdraws from leadership and lets the move divisive voices take over leadership of the Alliance...all as their way to better explain a post-Sylvannis Horde vs. Alliance conflict.
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Daidraco
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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If there is any good that will come from WoW's downfall its that the faction shit will die in a fire. Unfortunately it comes as a result of low player numbers instead of just a quality of life feature that was needed 10 years ago. All the people that we could have had during Legion just missed out since 3/5 of us were Horde.
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Wrong game. I heard Pantheon has a lot of people falling down while tposing though.
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It is highly probably that this was an order that came from above: "We need Horde vs. Alliance, find us a reason, and better make it big."
The way Blizzard handled the feedback on cross-faction grouping until the 9.1 mass exodus, and how they handled it afterwards, tells a pretty clear picture that they wanted Horde vs. Alliance to go on forever, because they didn't want to alter the "DNA that made the game successful", without realizing that they have been on that trajectory for a long time already.
This was probably the game director's decision, or even worse: PR.
yerm
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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If they had just used some carrot and stick mechanics like queue based on faction specifically instead of server, and xp boosts and price cuts for underdogs, they might have gotten balanced factions and therefore might have gotten fun faction shit to build with.
Instead they just watched while every pvp server (and even many pve) just became lopsided shitshows, and then tried to bandaid it with xserver garbage that doesn't fix anything storywise because those are theme park arenas and your actual world is fucked. Classic it happened again in no time.
If they wanted the game to feel like a faction game, no amount of storywriting was gonna do it while the world had no feel for it. They lacked either the will or maybe even the wherewithal to fix that first. Even like sc1 and d2 story writers with wc2s musicians couldn't have salvaged factions.
Instead they just watched while every pvp server (and even many pve) just became lopsided shitshows, and then tried to bandaid it with xserver garbage that doesn't fix anything storywise because those are theme park arenas and your actual world is fucked. Classic it happened again in no time.
If they wanted the game to feel like a faction game, no amount of storywriting was gonna do it while the world had no feel for it. They lacked either the will or maybe even the wherewithal to fix that first. Even like sc1 and d2 story writers with wc2s musicians couldn't have salvaged factions.
Gavinmad
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Eh I think you guys are falling into the trap of looking for complicated answers when a simple one will suffice.
The most likely answer is that they all thought the Sylvanas/BFA story was brilliant and that the players would love it, because they're arrogant and completely out of touch and have been that way for years. Same as how they thought yall would love the terrible Shadowlands story too. That 'Garrosh simp vs Sylvanas simp' is probably just something people tried to invent after the fact to try and deflect blame.
The most likely answer is that they all thought the Sylvanas/BFA story was brilliant and that the players would love it, because they're arrogant and completely out of touch and have been that way for years. Same as how they thought yall would love the terrible Shadowlands story too. That 'Garrosh simp vs Sylvanas simp' is probably just something people tried to invent after the fact to try and deflect blame.
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Actually, there was a leak like that from 2019, where "players will come around to Sylvanas at the end of the expansion":
A lot of things came true from that, or were rumored: Diablo 4 wasn't even planned until the Immortal backlash, WoW level 60 squish, OW2 will fix it, Overwatch for the Switch ...
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Chris
Potato del Grande
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Seems like there's too much unconfirmed and vague stuff in this storty to know either way, for example there's no mention of what the two possible WoW expansions were, also the described D4 is totally wrong unless that version got cancelled.
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Do any of you know who George Krstic is? He was Blizzard's director of story and franchise development.
wowpedia.fandom.com
Want some funny quotes?
www.vg247.com
George Krstic
George Krstic is Director of Story, Creative Development, at Blizzard Entertainment.[1]
Want some funny quotes?
Blizzard won't let negative fans influence its stories
Despite the loud voices, Blizzard has said that it doesn't allow negative feedback from fans to influence any aspects o…
www.vg247.com
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In a perfect world where programming realities and tech debt do not exist, having Putress/Sylvanas split off into a third faction during Wrathgate would have at least let them do the DAoC style 'two weaker factions can team up against the stronger one' shit. Beyond that, your faction should only be used for faction cities and pvp. Not being able to group/queue for PvE cross faction while the 'leadership' prances around helping one another is stupid.
Being so married to Horde vs Alliance is weird since all the best stuff came when the horde and alliance put aside their differences. Shit, the entire end point of WC3 was the Horde and Alliance working together and that was the whole essence of Thrall. Maybe they could be convinced that in current year, it's not appropriate to silo people into nationalistic ethno-states. Not that anyone gives a shit since thegame development team isn't worth saving.
Being so married to Horde vs Alliance is weird since all the best stuff came when the horde and alliance put aside their differences. Shit, the entire end point of WC3 was the Horde and Alliance working together and that was the whole essence of Thrall. Maybe they could be convinced that in current year, it's not appropriate to silo people into nationalistic ethno-states. Not that anyone gives a shit since the
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Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
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The problem is PvP has always been a small subset of this game. To be sure a passionate one, but still a small one.
The story mostly served to support a reason for pvp, because they wanted “war” in Warcraft and could only envision a player vs player war apparently.
Now you have a situation where “pvp flavor” is fucking your playerbase’s ability to even do shit due to lopsided factions or dwindling player counts, and it turns your franchise into recycling story beats just to keep the horde vs alliance thing going like it is some Red Sox vs Yankees thing you want to market to the fans.
The story mostly served to support a reason for pvp, because they wanted “war” in Warcraft and could only envision a player vs player war apparently.
Now you have a situation where “pvp flavor” is fucking your playerbase’s ability to even do shit due to lopsided factions or dwindling player counts, and it turns your franchise into recycling story beats just to keep the horde vs alliance thing going like it is some Red Sox vs Yankees thing you want to market to the fans.
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Going to BFA after Legion made sense to me. The factions didn't really want to cooperate and still had their longstanding issues. A common enemy bringing them together made sense (as it did in all the prior expansions). But then once the common enemy is gone, why do they still cooperate? Plus they need to explain why the same characters who finally destroyed the Legion can't just walk into an enemy city and butcher everyone. But if all the characters and faction leaders are generally of equal power, then it makes sense why my powerful undead priest can't genocide all of Stormwind.
Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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I for one am absolutely shocked the man who made himself on vehemently flaming others in a very public way went on to create an environment where he banned all criticism that might be directed at him when he was finally in the position of the people he flamed.Do any of you know who George Krstic is? He was Blizzard's director of story and franchise development.
George Krstic
George Krstic is Director of Story, Creative Development, at Blizzard Entertainment.[1]
Want some funny quotes?
Blizzard won't let negative fans influence its stories
Despite the loud voices, Blizzard has said that it doesn't allow negative feedback from fans to influence any aspects o…
Oh the irony.
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George Krstic is not Alex Afrasiabi. That article tells us there was, in fact, a writing room full of people that went ahead with the story.
Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Uhh its an interview of George in which he says Alex created the no negativity rule.
Which means Alex essentially created a room full of yesmen. Which really explains the monumentally stupid choice after stupid choice Blizzard has made over the years. Bunch of fragile people at the helm who couldnt take any criticism whatsoever.
Very ironic considering Alex got his job specifically because he mouthed off at EQ's devs over and over.
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From the article: "Our team comes from various backgrounds, various point of views and I really love that in our rooms it's not all one voice and we're not all one people," he said."
I get that you project everything negative about Blizzard and the current state of WoW on Furor, but there's enough blame to go around here. At the topmost level it is the game director who calls the shots, and that's still Ion.
Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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I didnt say Alex is responsible for everything, I said is very much responsible for WoW's shoddy story/narrative as that was his job during his tenure there. Combine that with the context that tenure is king or was at Blizzard and he was the one to create the "no negativity at all" mindset/rule, its clear he was running the show in their "story group".
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