I would like to share something with you all, I post on the
Scrolls of Lore forums from time to time. I'm not a major member, I mostly lurk and add my two copper when I have something to say or ask. However I was going through thread called "
Neutralization of racial themes has been equal" when I came across these two posts by
ARM3481. Where he puts out some of the most rational well spoken arguments I have seen about Warcraft Lore in regard to factions balance in a long time. Read for yourself and see if you agree or not. This might not be the greatest lore rant but at the very least its a
tribute to it.
~73's
Part 1
Oh, it's even worse than cheap "QQ". It's math. I don't know about anyone else, but few things grate on my nerves more than those who obsess over math and statistics when it isn't called for, which is ultimately what such complaints are, regardless of which faction they're coming from: attempts to make plot turns and twisted into a hollow statistical average of give-and-take in order to make a point.
Horde gets three of something, Alliance gets two, and Alliance fans freak out. Alliance gets four of something, Horde gets three, and Horde fans freak out. Neutrals get anything, and both sides throw a fit.
To make matters worse many such individuals claim such mathematical unfairness constitutes bad storytelling. That's not bad storytelling. It's the outcry of arbitrary tallies fueled by petty irritation that the entirety of a given story wasn't resolved to a satisfying conclusion within the span of the current expansion.
The Horde's stomped around throughout Cataclysm, and in some people's estimation the fact that the Alliance didn't get their cup filled to match by the time Deathwing was floating face-down in the Maelstrom translates to some kind of permanent unfairness.
If such faction "imbalance" makes for bad storytelling, then I guess Lord of the Rings was horribly bad storytelling, because there were an absolute crap-ton of orcs and trolls for every human, elf, hobbit, dwarf or ent and the only circumstances in which Middle Earth could succeed were hinged upon the miniscule odds of Frodo's success at Mt. Doom. They even took one of the other side's wizards! Faction imbalance! Even as the orcs routed at Pelennor, the defenders never truly had the upper hand. That victory left mankind's armies crippled and doomed in the event of a sustained conflict. Sauron retained the military means to crush all resistance through attrition and sheer numbers under any circumstance that didn't involve the One Ring being slipped past him and destroyed. Gee, guess that was a terrible story, given how heavily the odds were stacked in favor of one side over the other...
Just because a person's chosen favorite faction isn't getting a win for every time the other side wins, does not equate to a bad story. Especially in something like WarCraft, it simply amounts to the state of affairs at a particular point in an ongoing story that could change in any of a thousand different ways at any point in the future.
One needn't bother trying to suggest that to the most rabid of either faction-oriented fanbases, though. They've decided that every expansion - or even every content patch - is supposed to be a mirror of ups and downs between both player factions. As far as they're concerned, they paid for this expansion, and they're being mistreated in some fashion by that purchase not concluding the entire tale to their satisfaction, despite knowing that the faction conflict in particular was meant to outlive the Lich King's fall, the tantrums of Deathwing and his pals, and likely even our upcoming foray into Pandaria.
Without even realizing it, they clamor for a story that boils down to the thematic equivalent of the Horde killing a boar for every wolf the Alliance kills and vice-versa. Or even worse, both factions killing an identical number of boarwolves with flavor text that makes it "for the Horde" and "for the Alliance". It's like they stepped out of Wintergrasp from the days of factions trading victories on purpose for maximum honor points and became incensed that the narrative doesn't play by those rules.
WoW is an ongoing story, and to get our noses out of joint about the current state of "unfairness" between two groups of protagonists is to apply some imaginary end point to a tale that doesn't actually have one.
They've already said this is all building up to something, and honestly the only response I tend to hear consistently from the naysayers is the defeatist assertion that because they've been wronged thus far, then clearly nothing will change. "They're just saying that. They favor Horde, so it's all just hot air and the Alliance won't ever bounce back." Really? They love the Horde so much that they handed it a complete and utter defeat at the climax of its greatest string of victories during the Second War? They loved it so much that they saddled it with a cadre of half-rotten allies whose sinister and irresponsible scheming nearly cost it the war in Northrend and all but cast a player race as villains at worst, and highly informed abettors of said villainy at best? They still love it so much they installed a Warchief who elicits outright hostility from half the Horde's racial leaders and contempt bordering on disgusted indifference from the rest?
And honestly, the story is far from over. Cataclysm isn't some twenty-year span of the Horde running roughshod over the Alliance that will culminate in them finishing the job during MoP. Tons of this stuff is very likely intended to be happening at the same time around Azeroth, and the nature of prolonged warfare is that often one side starts off more aggressively and racks up the wins more quickly while the other side adjusts and gets ready to strike back. It makes sense for the Horde to have the initiative at first because they've always existed as a collection of states expanding across largely hostile and untamed lands, as opposed to the Alliance, which generally deals with attacks upon lands that they've already occupied and controlled for a long time. It takes time to switch from a footing of protecting what one has to striking out against enemies abroad, and while the Horde's very nature has kept it on the latter footing since day one, the Alliance's "default" is to commit its forces to the defense of its current territories, as it's not particularly expansionist by nature, so it doesn't perpetually maintain a state of trying to conquer new lands. The resource-hungry Horde's always had its eyes on the lush territories adjacent to its own, while Stormwind's not really eying Stranglethorn or the Blasted Lands. The Forsaken have by necessity been trying to oust and destroy the Scarlet Crusade and Worgen for years, while Darnassus hasn't spent the past ten thousand years desperately trying to claim the Barrens or Tanaris. Even where Stormwind is fighting, like Dustwallow, they don't exactly want the place. It's just tactically necessary; otherwise Stormwind's got its delineated borders and lands, and doesn't seem particularly interested in changing them. It's all just a matter of long-established nations with ready access to long-established resources and infrastructures clashing with younger, expanding nations that lack abundance and see it in lands abutting their own.
It's only natural that the latter are going to keep a larger standing army ready to invade than the latter because they see invasion as a potential necessity in and of itself rather than solely an act of retaliation to attack. The Alliance's nation-states have, for the most part, been around long enough that they've got most of what they need land-wise and only rally armies for long-distance excursions when they feel threatened by something abroad. As a result, it stands to reason that they don't cavalierly begin amassing for gargantuan warfare in distant lands, especially when something like the recent attacks of Deathwing have them on a defensive footing and dealing with at-home calamities.
Really it's just a different mindset thing. While every orc is raised to look forward to the chance for glory and honor in battle, a citizen of the Alliance wouldn't necessarily want to go fight the Horde while their home is still on fire from Deathwing's latest fly-by.
In the wake of Deathwing's fall, that can change. The massive third-party threats to the world are quelled (for now), and while the leaders of the Alliance have known for some time what's going on with the Horde's aggressive expansion, only now can the average person finally finish rebuilding their demolished homes and focus on dealing with the shenanigans Garrosh's Horde has been up to during the Cataclysm while they were busy putting out the fires in their houses and seeing to their families. Nobody wants to march off to war if it means leaving their spouses and children waiting behind in the charred husk of what used to be their home, but with that situation rectified, the peoples of the Alliance as a whole can zero in on the next pack of bastards that are out to ruin their day, safe in the knowledge that the Aspect of Death and his army of crazed nihilists aren't still out there trying to destroy everything they know and love.
Part 2
Well, even during WCIII, Maiev hardly proved to be an example of predominant night elf temperament, as most of them didn't have a grossly overdeveloped sense of personal vengeance.
Plus I frankly think people grab onto that quote a bit more literally than it was intended to be taken. After all, the Qiraji and Silithid survived, now didn't they (and not in secret either; the night elves knew they'd locked a powerful and enduring enemy away behind the Scarab Wall)? The trolls survived the rise of the kaldorei, back when the night elves were actually aggressive expansionists kicking the crap out of their neighbors. The satyr remained a consistent local danger before and after the War of the Satyr. Hell, they'd just fought against the Horde and Alliance intruders mere months prior, and those "races" were still around.
The sad reality of the other examples is probably a result of development time curtailing their ability to do what they'd have liked to.
Really, I think it's easy to forget that at a fair amount of the frustration expressed here about such things is likely shared by the developers. I'm sure they'd have loved to have turned every single zone in Azeroth upside-down and packed them full of every awesome new story they could think of.
Yet the cold reality is that Mr. Eric Browning's Blizzcon Art Panel joke about getting to only keep three puppies applies well beyond just his department of in-game prop designing.
What it adds up to is that in addition to story-driven change, certain zones needed heavy mechanical change than others. Naturally, as they were getting a heavier revamp overall, such zones were likely afforded greater change overall - including story-based change - due to the fact that they were already undergoing more extensive renovations to begin with. Zones like Westfall and Duskwood probably already fit more cohesively into the leveling curve, so they were subjected to less stripping-down of their basic designs, and therefore offered less room for drastic story mechanics to squeeze in.
The Alliance isn't alone in that, even if it might theoretically possess more zones to which it happened to apply. There are also Horde areas and hubs where it feels like the player is shuffled through at a breakneck pace (even by current leveling standards) likely for the sake of not leaving it unused while also not completely outpacing the overall leveling curve they were going for. Even in Stonetalon, certain parts of the Horde questing experience literally involve swinging into an entire settlement, doing one quest, then accepting a follow-up that is literally a narrated "go to the next town".
The fact is, gameplay will take precedent when the chips are down and deadlines are approaching. It's both sad and heartening, because while it means sacrificing story at times to get the job done, it also means the job will get done. Just try setting a room full of creative people loose without a deadline, whether self-imposed, enforced by some form of management , or imposed by the filter of other creative teams' constraints. They'll never, ever, ever finish the job, because new ideas will never stop coming and they'll never feel compelled to cut things off and say "this won't work mechanically, it's time to cut and print what we can and polish what's there". They'll say "this won't work mechanically, let's overhaul the mechanics from scratch to make it work", and it will never be done.
(I am guilty of this myself, incidentally...*cough*)
Personally, I think the "imbalance" is basically due to the Alliance having better zones to start with in Vanilla WoW. And not "better" in the subjective or story-driven sense. Simply mechanically, the Alliance had a smoother rate of progression from zone-to-zone (no prancing to-and-fro in the Barrens, for instance), which meant they required less bare-bones ratcheting of the gears and bolts that carried the leveling player between them, while the Horde literally had to break a zone in half to smooth things out. As a result, the Alliance-centric zones called for less attention from the software Programmers and Developers, who are essentially the agents by which the Creative Developers actually inject their conceptualized stories into the game itself. Such zones needed less done overall, so they garnered less attention than those which required heavy-duty mechanical revamping to smooth things out the way they intended to.
And really, even the Horde stalls out in places, suggesting the cruel mistress that is the deadline hacked off their efforts short of completing the entirety of their revamping. Arathi is only marginally better for the Horde than the Alliance, which suggests to me that they were at some point "headed in" to the zone from the more heavily altered Hillsbrad when plans for it had to be stopped short and capped off. While regardless of one's opinions on the actual narrative victories therein, the Barrens, Stonetalon, Ashenvale and the Plaguelands got serious overhauls for both factions because those zones were significantly juggled around the leveling curve (Plaguelands) and altered to serve as truly viable leveling progression zones (Barrens, Stonetalon and Ashenvale). Or even Silithus, which found itself in the unenviable position of being a level 60 zone in an age of WoW where people tend to skip to Outland at 58. The Blasted Lands had proximity to Outland going for them, but Silithus was largely untouched for both factions, likely because it just plain didn't fit into the modern leveling curve and rate of progression in WoW.
It's unfortunate, and we may bitch about it (I've said some things I regretted in retrospect, at least by way of the tone in which I posted them), but it's highly likely that a great many of our own frustrations about lacking of story content are shared by the people who actually come up with the stories and who, in a perfect world, would release every expansion jam-packed with a fresh new Azeroth and a billion stories to tell.
But the world isn't perfect, so they get everything they can into the game, and do their best to weave it all together, even if producing fewer results to satisfy the short-term remands means taking extra time to get it all out in the long-term and the whole thing doesn't necessarily fit into the confines of this-or-that particular patch, expansion or questline. They're working through a medium that metaphorically yanks entire chapters, characters, themes and plotlines out of their proposed stories even after the normal process of editing and requires that they staple together what remains into something serviceable, and considering the limitations they work with, I've personally been pretty impressed by the rate of improvement we've seen in the game's storytelling from the Sunwell patch onward. It's not perfect by any stretch, but under the circumstances it's a great deal more cohesive than one would normally expect.
(Again? Thank God for that quote button.)
The other guy that has been helping me out a ton is Ormi. He just stated writing a blog called The Sanctuary. He as only written a few article but he could put most bloggers to shame including me. This posts are in-dept they are detailed. His one lore post could beat anything that has shown up on WoW Insider in the last two years. Its really that good. Personally Ormi offered to help with the podcast something I hope to take him up on once I get past this current knot of madness.
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