World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria

[GuppyShark]

I know, right? It's not like the new Horde leader murdered the Tauren chieftain or anything.

Oh. Right.

[DudeGuyMan]

I loved the Cataclysm city overhauls.

Orgrimmar = Badass new metal buildings and shit.
Stormwind = Blown up.

[Darmalus]

Which is once again a side effect of the Alliance being the older, built up culture. Do you think anyone would care if Deathwing burned downs Orgrimmar's dirt huts (pre-makeover)? Could he make the UC more smelly and toxic? Could he do any damage to TB that couldn't be repaired in 5 minutes by throwing down some new tents? Pre-Cata, the Horde cities were so crappy nothing short of total annihilation would actually make a difference. Blood Elves excepted, I tend to forget about them.

[Sinewmire]

Well, Orgrimmar was burned down before wrath. Ok, admittedly it was for 10 seconds whilst you back was turned.

I've always played Horde, and it's interesting to see how the plot-stick falls from the other perspective. Personally, most of my hordie friends are dismayed at how the plot-stick is making the Horde seem evil and brutish compared to their saintly alliance cousins.

I knew I was going to quit WOW when a quest in Icecrown told me about how Saurfang the younger's orcs attacked the alliance, who were currently battling the scourge. The quest had you going around murdering injured Alliance soldiers.

I didn't complete the quest. This is where the Free Horde is going? Thanks Metzen.

Then, we get Garrosh. Varian is a dick, don't get me wrong, but I have yet to meet a Hordie who likes Garrosh. At all. Aside from him shouting down Sylvanas when she tried to become Lich King v.2, I have seen nothing that doesn't make me hold him in utter contempt.

So, now Garrosh is going to bury an axe in the outstretched hand of human diplomacy. Nice work there.

I eventually DID quit when they brought out the Firelands campaign. My choices were: Farm 2 instances nonstop; Complete the same boring-ass dailies every day forever; raid. I coldn't raid because I work rolling 3-3-3 day shifts, so I stopped reiding. It was when I found myself grinding Mag'har rep that I stood back and thought "what the hell am I doing here?"

[Broomstick]

I wonder if the justification for sacking Theramore will be the massacre of Camp Taurajo. You know - the Tauren settlement wiped out by the Alliance during Cataclysm.

[White Haven]

I think the eradication of Southshore has that one covered, Broomie.

[Broomstick]

Not as a tit-for-tat. Within the game world the Horde would see South Shore as a victory but Taurajo as an atrocity, not as a fair trade. Especially, Garrosh would not see it as a fair trade.

[DudeGuyMan]

In other news, totally unbiased Blizzard actually played that video of the dude from Cannibal Corpse ranting about Alliance players being "faggots" who shoud "die" and such AT BLIZZCON shortly before having said dude play. The actual word was bleeped but they've already issued an offical apology after taking some heat from the gay community.

[Civil War Man]

I wonder if the justification for sacking Theramore will be the massacre of Camp Taurajo. You know - the Tauren settlement wiped out by the Alliance during Cataclysm.

Probably, but if you want tit-for-tat, the Horde did destroy Bael Modan, slaughter all the dwarves inside, and kill the Alliance general in Southern Barrens in response to Taurajo.

[Molyneux]

Well, Orgrimmar was burned down before wrath. Ok, admittedly it was for 10 seconds whilst you back was turned.

I've always played Horde, and it's interesting to see how the plot-stick falls from the other perspective. Personally, most of my hordie friends are dismayed at how the plot-stick is making the Horde seem evil and brutish compared to their saintly alliance cousins.

I knew I was going to quit WOW when a quest in Icecrown told me about how Saurfang the younger's orcs attacked the alliance, who were currently battling the scourge. The quest had you going around murdering injured Alliance soldiers.

I didn't complete the quest. This is where the Free Horde is going? Thanks Metzen.

Then, we get Garrosh. Varian is a dick, don't get me wrong, but I have yet to meet a Hordie who likes Garrosh. At all. Aside from him shouting down Sylvanas when she tried to become Lich King v.2, I have seen nothing that doesn't make me hold him in utter contempt.

So, now Garrosh is going to bury an axe in the outstretched hand of human diplomacy. Nice work there.

I eventually DID quit when they brought out the Firelands campaign. My choices were: Farm 2 instances nonstop; Complete the same boring-ass dailies every day forever; raid. I coldn't raid because I work rolling 3-3-3 day shifts, so I stopped reiding. It was when I found myself grinding Mag'har rep that I stood back and thought "what the hell am I doing here?"

Garrosh becoming Warchief was a large factor in my decision to switch to playing primarily Alliance characters. (The other major factor was, of course, worgen.)
I don't know if maybe I missed something else, but Sylvanas' evil tendencies seem to kind of come out of nowhere for her. I thought the whole "Forsaken murder the living" thing was carried out by the "tame" demon without her knowledge?

[White Haven]

Horde: 'We're gonna fuck up eeeeverybody!'
Alliance: 'Dude, fuck off, we're busy and don't really care about you.'
Horde: 'For the Horde, who are totally peaceful despite hanging onto the title Warchief and totally not evil despite all the blatantly evil Forsaken and Blood Elf quest chains!'
Alliance: 'You know what? Fine. Fuck you. *whap*'
Blizzard: 'See? Alliance are fighting in the war, they're just as bad!'

Don't you just love the smell of bad writing in the morning?

[Darmalus]

Garrosh becoming Warchief was a large factor in my decision to switch to playing primarily Alliance characters. (The other major factor was, of course, worgen.)
I don't know if maybe I missed something else, but Sylvanas' evil tendencies seem to kind of come out of nowhere for her. I thought the whole "Forsaken murder the living" thing was carried out by the "tame" demon without her knowledge?

I figured what the demon's real activities were the creation of the Burning Legion cult inside the UC, using Sylvanas' orders to make a Lich King killing plague as a cover. He then took the blame for everything when it was deployed too early by said cult. Or maybe the demon modified the orders, its hard to say. All I know is that early on, Forsaken seemed to be almost suicidally bent on killing the Lich King, no matter what.

I created a new Forsaken character, and the impression the quests have left me with is that, withher burning need for vengeance against the Lich King sated, she realized she has something worth living for. She wants to live, she wants her people to live and grow and expand. I think she was really starting to notice how reduced their numbers were after Northrend, and her neighbors were weak and could be Forsaken-ized. It seems like it is really starting to show that her presence within the Horde is on of convenience, and I get the feeling she respects Garrosh about as much as I do (not at all). Whatever vague sense of loyalty she had was severed when Thrall left.

I wouldn't call her Lich King 2.0, however. Whatever else becoming Forsaken does to someone, it was made pretty clear you have free will and the ability to make you own decisions.

[TheFeniX]

In other news, totally unbiased Blizzard actually played that video of the dude from Cannibal Corpse ranting about Alliance players being "faggots" who shoud "die" and such AT BLIZZCON shortly before having said dude play. The actual word was bleeped but they've already issued an offical apology after taking some heat from the gay community.

He was actually hoping the players themselves died? Nevermind, I found the video link. Stay classy Horde players, stay classy.

But this isn't exactly a Horde issue. WoW had become progressively more boring for me, but I found some fun raiding Firelands with a decent group of people. In fact, 3 of the people in the raid group used to be in my guild. One of them was a really good healer and about the nicest lady I had ever met. She was our heals going into cata heroics and stuck with us during 4 hours grinds through content we barely had the gear for. She never had a bad thing to say about anyone. However, one night 3 guys from Torment joined our raid and she had some RL issues and went AFK. They started in on this massive shit-talking spree about how she was the worst healer ever and was retarded and other shit that got my blood pressure up.

I expected this from Torment players. I had a few run-ins with them (being called a faggot by one because I couldn't hold threat due to a DK in our raid fucking around in Blood Presence), so them being dipshits wasn't surprising at all. What got to me was that no one stepped in to defend her. Not as a player, but as a person and basically tell these people to shut up. I ended up cancelling my subscription the next day. I had seen behavior like this everywhere. But to see these chicken-shits run their mouth about a core raid member behind her back and no one tell them off, it really just killed my desire to continue with the game. Basically, fuck good people I want my fucking loot tokens!

[Civil War Man]

I wouldn't call her Lich King 2.0, however. Whatever else becoming Forsaken does to someone, it was made pretty clear you have free will and the ability to make you own decisions.

At least until Western Plaguelands, where she has you use a Val'kyr to mind control farmers into serving the Forsaken.

[Darmalus]

I wouldn't call her Lich King 2.0, however. Whatever else becoming Forsaken does to someone, it was made pretty clear you have free will and the ability to make you own decisions.

At least until Western Plaguelands, where she has you use a Val'kyr to mind control farmers into serving the Forsaken.

You do something similar in Silverpine Forest, on Fenris Isle. But at the same time, you see plenty of Forsaken throughout the game who get their own ideas and go their own way. My pet theory is that it's like an entire boot camp's worth of indoctrination in a single spell cast. You start all "Power to the Forsaken!" and over time experience will cause you to develop your own opinions that may or may-not agree with Sylvanas. Even then, there are people who are forsaken-ized and start off with their independence intact, such as the players and Lilian Voss.

[Darmalus]

On the subject of Mist of Pandaria, I like the way they are moving with account wide features.

Q: Since we're getting an account wide "pet library" so to speak, do you have any plans to extend this functionality to the mount page? Many players are hanging onto exclusive mounts on older/unplayed characters.
A, Mumper: We will be testing out account wide features with pet battles and if it proves successful there, we would certainly want to the same thing with mounts.

I figure the more things they do to make me attached to my account, rather than a specific character, the better. They mentioned something a while back about changing how Heirlooms work, since they didn't like the constant mailing back and forth. What videos I've seen of the Diablo III beta seem to be similar, with some sort of shared gold pool, and possibly other features that the youtubers haven't pointed out to me.

[Civil War Man]

You do something similar in Silverpine Forest, on Fenris Isle. But at the same time, you see plenty of Forsaken throughout the game who get their own ideas and go their own way. My pet theory is that it's like an entire boot camp's worth of indoctrination in a single spell cast. You start all "Power to the Forsaken!" and over time experience will cause you to develop your own opinions that may or may-not agree with Sylvanas. Even then, there are people who are forsaken-ized and start off with their independence intact, such as the players and Lilian Voss.

I see the players as being a poor example of independence, even when we are not talking about the Forsaken in particular. Depending on the context, they could either be independent, or they could be in a Bioshock-like situation where they are presented with the illusion that what they are doing is their own choice, since the only choice they are given are "do the quest and continue the game" versus "don't do the quest and don't continue the game".

Truth be told, for all the talk about Forsaken free will, Sylvanas is probably the one racial leader who has the least tolerance for subordinates disagreeing with her, an attitude which got worse when Godfrey (who is a very good example of a Forsaken with free will) backstabbed her. It's hard to claim with a straight face that the Forsaken are about free will when they use magic which causes people to do a complete 180 with their attitudes within seconds of their resurrection. And also when Sylvanas is pretty open about how she's going to torture and brainwash one of her own allies (Koltira) because he tried to maintain a truce with the Alliance instead of immediately blighting the area so she could have more footsoldiers.

[Darmalus]

Truth be told, for all the talk about Forsaken free will, Sylvanas is probably the one racial leader who has the least tolerance for subordinates disagreeing with her, an attitude which got worse when Godfrey (who is a very good example of a Forsaken with free will) backstabbed her. It's hard to claim with a straight face that the Forsaken are about free will when they use magic which causes people to do a complete 180 with their attitudes within seconds of their resurrection. And also when Sylvanas is pretty open about how she's going to torture and brainwash one of her own allies (Koltira) because he tried to maintain a truce with the Alliance instead of immediately blighting the area so she could have more footsoldiers.

True, but if memory serves, Sylvanas was always a very high strung and demanding leader, even before undeath. How much that control is magically enforced, and how much is because everyone but the Forsaken (and Horde) will be trying to kill you, I can't tell. It's pretty easy to keep people obedient when there is no where to run/defect to (the few groups who might take you in are tiny, and might not even be known to the average peasant).

It would be interesting to see how strong Sylvanas' control/loyalty really is if the Forsaken were presented with a 3rd viable option. Currently they have "Join the Horde." and "Be executed by the Alliance." as their options.

[Steve]

....yeaaaah, this is... oh come on, I was hoping the leaked account of planned expansions would continue to be accurate and we'd get the Emerald Dream. Bleh.

Anyway, WOTLK is too fucking expensive to go with Cata to get me back. Seriously, it's the same fucking price as Cata. Why would I spend almost a hundred fucking bucks to get back into WoW where I left off (TBC content to Cata) when I can get a six month sub to Champions Online or Star Trek Online for less than that same amount of money, and those two are games which I actually enjoy playing a lot more than I did WoW. Sure, they have their problems, and WoW beats their asses in when it comes to sheer quantity of content (and quality sometimes too), but those games are genres closer to my normal interests anyway and their character customization makes WoW's look anorexic.

If they do that sale again with WoTLK cut down to ten bucks, I might very well fork over the cash to play it a few months (all my toons are 70 or below anyway so no point in snagging Cata right away, well, beyond the new races, which would require me to roll on new servers anyway), but right now? Blizzard's not getting a dime out of my pocket.

[Molyneux]

I see the players as being a poor example of independence, even when we are not talking about the Forsaken in particular. Depending on the context, they could either be independent, or they could be in a Bioshock-like situation where they are presented with the illusion that what they are doing is their own choice, since the only choice they are given are "do the quest and continue the game" versus "don't do the quest and don't continue the game".

I wound up bugging a GM for about an hour about the DK tutorial being "broken" because it didn't let players skip doing things that, frankly, I found very unpleasant to do.

(I would have just deleted the character, but I had promised a friend that I would thoroughly try out a DK. The experience almost soured me on the game completely.)

In general, forcing me as a player to do something that I don't want to is a damned good way to get me to start writing hate mail to the programmers. The Worgen and Goblin introductions? Fine and dandy, lots of fun was had even if I had to run through the quests. They were fun. Murdering civilians and torturing soldiers? Not my cup of tea, and still a good part of why I have precisely one DK character.

Except in the above specific cases, there's nothing stopping a player from quitting a quest and finding something else to do. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where there was only one quest chain that could get me enough XP to level at a decent pace, and I found myself wanting to get out of it. In Bioshock, there was literally only one path to follow - with no true free will.

[Sharp-kun]

I wound up bugging a GM for about an hour about the DK tutorial being "broken" because it didn't let players skip doing things that, frankly, I found very unpleasant to do.

(I would have just deleted the character, but I had promised a friend that I would thoroughly try out a DK. The experience almost soured me on the game completely.)

In general, forcing me as a player to do something that I don't want to is a damned good way to get me to start writing hate mail to the programmers. The Worgen and Goblin introductions? Fine and dandy, lots of fun was had even if I had to run through the quests. They were fun. Murdering civilians and torturing soldiers? Not my cup of tea, and still a good part of why I have precisely one DK character.

Except in the above specific cases, there's nothing stopping a player from quitting a quest and finding something else to do. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where there was only one quest chain that could get me enough XP to level at a decent pace, and I found myself wanting to get out of it. In Bioshock, there was literally only one path to follow - with no true free will.

You're a death knight in the service of the Lich King. You don't have free will and so yes, you do have to do the nasty things.

[SirNitram]

Ironically, I always liked the DK starter quests. Perhaps it's my inner violence, wanting to chop up religious nutjobs.

[Civil War Man]

I wound up bugging a GM for about an hour about the DK tutorial being "broken" because it didn't let players skip doing things that, frankly, I found very unpleasant to do.

(I would have just deleted the character, but I had promised a friend that I would thoroughly try out a DK. The experience almost soured me on the game completely.)

In general, forcing me as a player to do something that I don't want to is a damned good way to get me to start writing hate mail to the programmers. The Worgen and Goblin introductions? Fine and dandy, lots of fun was had even if I had to run through the quests. They were fun. Murdering civilians and torturing soldiers? Not my cup of tea, and still a good part of why I have precisely one DK character.

Except in the above specific cases, there's nothing stopping a player from quitting a quest and finding something else to do. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where there was only one quest chain that could get me enough XP to level at a decent pace, and I found myself wanting to get out of it. In Bioshock, there was literally only one path to follow - with no true free will.

Basically what Sharp said. The whole point of the DK zone is that you do not have a choice. You are a monster, and you cannot be anything other than a monster until you break free of the Lich King's control. It adds to the story by showing why the Death Knights are so driven in their opposition to the Scourge (and fairly telling that throughout the whole expansion, the Ebon Blade was one of the few factions that was not infiltrated by cultists at some point).

A better example of no-choice gameplay is the torture quest in the Borean Tundra, where you are forced to torture a captured mage, and not doing it prevents you from being able to do the Nexus quests.

[Molyneux]

Basically what Sharp said. The whole point of the DK zone is that you do not have a choice. You are a monster, and you cannot be anything other than a monster until you break free of the Lich King's control. It adds to the story by showing why the Death Knights are so driven in their opposition to the Scourge (and fairly telling that throughout the whole expansion, the Ebon Blade was one of the few factions that was not infiltrated by cultists at some point).

Yes, but that lack of free will isn't actually demonstrated to the player in any way. My first time trying to do the tutorial, I was utterly confused by why it wouldn't let me progress without completing the quests.

It might help if I found the Lich King to be anything other than utter balls as a villain.

A similar thing occurred when I played Final Fantasy XI, if you've ever tried that - in order to play any of the main quests in the Aht Urghan expansion, you have to let someone trick you in the dumbest manner imaginable - and then follow that jackass' orders to do the quests. It's part of what led to me burning out on the game entirely.

A better example of no-choice gameplay is the torture quest in the Borean Tundra, where you are forced to torture a captured mage, and not doing it prevents you from being able to do the Nexus quests.

See, when it came to that quest, I simply dropped it and went looking for quests elsewhere.

[DudeGuyMan]

This being the most recent WoW thread and one which has touched before upon the topic I'll be posting about, I feel it's more appropriate to necro this one than to start another. A moderator will of course do as they feel they ought if they disagree.

Ahem, so anyway, I tend to keep half an eye on the WoW forums just to keep abreast of what's going on and how players are reacting to it. (The minority of players who post on forums, at least.) My recent observations lead me to believe that the Corpsegrinder debacle and the Theramore leak coming in close sequence have represented a sort of tipping point, and that the notion of Blizzard having a strong pro-Horde bias has gone mainstream among the Alliance playerbase to a large extent.

In short, this was the worst forum riot Blizzard has had to deal with since the whole "Let's make everyone post under their real names!" shitstorm.

Theramore in Flames: Horde Favortism (capped at 26 pages)

Part two (capped at 250 pages)
Part three (locked at 16 pages)
Part three again (capped at 51 pages)

Blizzard responds via blog post with "OMG we're not biased, STFU already!" (69 pages of comments)

Part four (capped at 26 pages, moderators no longer interested in extending post caps)
Part five (capped at 26 pages)
Part six (capped at 26 pages)

I dunno if they ever got up to part seven before the latest patch came along and drowned everything else out, but I imagine we'll hear more of this as we get closer to the Theramore event. But basically yes, the old issue of faction bias has blown up way beyond the odd occasional "Blizzard is biased against my faction because of this battleground layout, see!" thread that nobody cares about.