Hypothetical question, changes and where?

Seeing as the topic of poor Blizzard lore writing sprung up in the MoP thread, I had a rather pointless discussion to begin.

What changes in the lore would you make? Feel free to post as many in as much detail as you'd like.

I know I have a fair few stored on my external hard drive from previous lore writing for Prologue and will post them later!

Blood Elves join the Alliance, not the Horde.

It's the worst one for me. And the Horde gets Ogres, because hell yes.

Other changes I'd make;

-The Lich King is not a moustache-twirling dumbass throughout WotLK's leveling experience.

-Med'an still exists, but he's the son of KHADGAR, not Medivh. (I am in fact hoping they retcon this into the lore, because Garona and Medivh only met in the book The Last Guardian, where Garona served as a pseudo-love interest... for Khadgar, whereas Medivh was a raving old lunatic.)

-Maiev represents the traditional faction of Night Elves in opposition to Tyrande (influenced by Malfurion) and her progressive pro-alliance faction. Neither of them are the bad guys, they're just politically opposed, not corrupt or plotting murder. Also Tyrande owns up to the fact that she murdered Maiev's Watchers to free Illidan.

Hard one this one... I never put my fingers into this kinda thing since I start with the idea lore is not mine to decide. For one, I tend to like wow lore for the most part, so my choices about it'd be more gameplay driven than story driven:

-Should've killed off Genn Greymane instead of Liam in the worgen starting experience: Genn is like... 70 years old or something on that line and for most players he's not relatable, while Liam died right after giving one of the best speeches (if blatantly referencing Churchill) in the game. If not Liam, worgen could've Tess to lead them, but I honestly don't think the Alliance needs more women at the lead.

-Kill off Tyrande(or Malfurion): they both are now pale excuses of themselves and in particular night elves are badly represented by them as they're shown.

-Give us a twist with the Council of the 3 hammers giving us back the king. The whole dwarf inner conlict is fine, but I don't feel the need to play on that much more.

-Story wise, it'd be nice if the players, at least pandaren, could come and go the Wandering Isle, since it is not secret anymore and since it's hugely hinted that you can go back there(see Ji-Aysa heartwrenching dialogue in SoO).

-Do something with Velen, possibly something other than pushing Blonde Jesus forward as character. This will (probably) happen though.

I don't play much Horde, but I think more Forsaken/rest of the Horde conflict should be needed: it's quite immersion breaking, even in a Garrosh lead leveling experience, to level a tauren all fluffy and I-love-nature-more-than-thou at start and then help the undead zombies to create plagues and such to completely annihilate an entire land. Possibly, kill off Sylvanas(but I'd also erase Forsaken as race from the game).

Well, having Gilneas under alliance control, populated or not, would be cool.

Tuomas/Decurius wrote: If not Liam, worgen could've Tess to lead them, but I honestly don't think the Alliance needs more women at the lead.

Wha... Wait. Tyrande and Jaina. Is there anyone else? Moira to count as 1/3 of a leader? Are two and 1/3 female leaders too many?

Helmut wrote:

Tuomas/Decurius wrote: If not Liam, worgen could've Tess to lead them, but I honestly don't think the Alliance needs more women at the lead.

Wha... Wait. Tyrande and Jaina. Is there anyone else? Moira to count as 1/3 of a leader? Are two and 1/3 female leaders too many?

Considering the Horde has one only and that she's a bitch, I think having around 3 female leaders in a setting as wow would be not only unneeded, but also unbalanced. I don't mind having a true Queen, mind, or having more female leaders(far from me sexism): fact is it's not (too much) fitting the setting. If, say, the Horde has a shift in leadership in a way that there are more females leading(aka for example Vol'Jin giving a female the Darkspear leadership as he ruled the Horde now), then it'd be good, but now, not. Besides, as far as we know Tess is not cursed so she'd not be a fitting worgen leader anyway.

We need more female leaders, not less. We just need them to actually be quality characters, ones that don't need to be defined by men.

Drustai wrote:We need more female leaders, not less. We just need them to actually be quality characters, ones that don't need to be defined by men.

WoW needs more female characters with any kind agency regardless of whether they're leaders or not. Especially female characters who aren't defined by their relationship to a male character and who are competent equals of their male counterparts.

This is especially true of the races which seem to have no visible history of endemic sexism (almost all of them).

If nothing else it'd give some variety to the characters, instead of muscular shouting Human Man voiced by Chris Metzen and muscular shouting Orc also voiced by Chris Metzen.

Which kind of leads into a broader point. Warcraft has all this pulpy colourful fantasy variety going on in the background and since about Wotlkpretty much forever Blizzard have been focusing strongly on the overwrought conflicts of fairly boring Muscular Shouting Men with only little nods to more interesting character archetypes here and there. I suspect that this might be because Chris Metzen likes to write and then voice Muscular Shouting Men.

As an aside, how weird must it be to record lines where two different characters voiced by the same person are talking?

I have a burning hatred for the "young-but-talented" mage archetype, so Rhonin and Jaina have both drawn my ire.

I wouldn't mind Jaina at the helm of Dalaran, if she was perhaps an older more experienced and regal character. The actions she's performed don't really merit "Leader of the Kirin-Tor, one of the most powerful collectives of arcanists in the world" to me.

Edit: And to chime in with another point, I wish they would stop making Jaina so "broken" without a big strong male to act as her love interest. She's a fierce bitch. She can melt down fifty foot walls of ice with her thoughts; she can turn you into particle dust with an incantation. So can we stop with the whole Jaina/Kael'thas, Jaina/Thrall, Jaina/Arthas and Jaina/Kalecgos shit? Thank you.

Put Modera in charge of the Kirin Tor, tbfh. She's been there for fucking ever, she should logically be in charge.

I'd have liked the choice to be available to pay a High Elf instead of a Blood Elf, but that would break faction balance so completely, that we'll never see it happen. Unfortunate.

I would like a Satyr playable race, for no other reason then that I think they look cool.

All in all, I'm pretty content with how mists of Pandaria has been working out! I've got some "meh" here and there, but as a whole, It's been a fun story, with lots of fun new elements, and a lot of things to role-play with.

A conflict that messes up the status quo permanently, preferably between the horde and the alliance.

and exactly for that reason it will never happen, until wow is ended.

I wrote out a decent length reply about how and why Blizz fails at writing decent female characters, and at characterisation in general, but I closed the tab by accident. So I'll just summarise their approach via 30 rock:

Kittrina wrote:I wrote out a decent length reply about how and why Blizz fails at writing decent female characters, and at characterisation in general, but I closed the tab by accident. So I'll just summarise their approach via 30 rock:

ROFL

Kittrina wrote:I wrote out a decent length reply about how and why Blizz fails at writing decent female characters, and at characterisation in general, but I closed the tab by accident. So I'll just summarise their approach via 30 rock:

Looks accurate to me.

All right, let's see...

• Illidan would still be alive.
  One of my favorite characters in Warcraft 3, I felt he didn't get the send-off he deserved in the Burning Crusade. The first in a long chain of 'vilify trough insanity to be unambigious loot piñata' characters, I would have liked to see an Illidan that wasn't completely bonkers and stupid.
  
  
• Varian Wrynn would not be king, Bolvar would not be Lich King.
  I really like the court dynamic of a young boy king and his steward. I thought it was a lot more interesting than what we have now, at least. It would give Anduin some more breathing space out of the suffocating bubble of his father's 'development'. The kid deserves it.
  
  
• Forsaken would never have joined the Horde.
  Even though I love the Undead and I love role-playing one, I have never been comfortable with the Forsaken's place in the Horde. Such an obviously omnicidal race should not be allied to any living faction. I would have liked it better, I think, if they had kept the Forsaken as another Undead faction unallied to either Horde or Alliance for you to either enter uneasy alliances of conveniences with, or fight on the field of battle. Coincidentally, this is how I would have liked to have seen Illidan as well, with the Blood Elfs and the Naga at his side to be the zany misfit faction nobody likes.
  
  
• The Argent Crusade and other anti-undead factions would be anti-Forsaken as well
  It still annoys me that we have the Argent Crusade and the Cenarion Circle go trough all this trouble with cleansing the Plaguelands while Sylvanas is rolling out the plague barrels down south. I mean, come on guys. The Forsaken aren't any less undead than the other undead factions.
  
  
• Thrall would be dead [or otherwise removed from the narrative], Garrosh would still have been warchief.
  I want an Orc as Warchief. Garrosh has been the Orcest Orc we have seen in a long time. I like neither Thrall nor Vol'jin as warchief. Not much else I have to say on the subject.
  
  
• The Alliance and the Horde would at no point have cooperated during Mists of Pandaria.
  No uneasy truces. No backing with supplies. Just an old fashioned three-way battle where it's every faction for itself, with the Alliance almost getting Ogrimmar, but failing at the last moment once Garrosh falls and a re-united Horde manage to push them out.
  
  
• The Draenei would have another racial leader to replace Velen
  Don't get me wrong, I like Velen, but he works better as a semi-neutral leader of the Faith. His actions at the Sunwell, for example, were not the actions of an Alliance Draenei. Hell, in the books Velen wasn't even invited for a war meeting because his allies assumed he had gone neutral! I would like to see perhaps the Triumvirate play a more prominent role, with the Hand of Argus stepping up to take a more prominent role in leading the Draenei into battle. Give us one or two draenei with some character. Please? Pretty please? Some dissent within the draenei, with some draenei approving of the Triumvirate and others disapproving of them would do wonders for the race as a whole.
  
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• Gilneas would be reconquered and be usable as a city for Alliance players. Bilgwater Harbor would be ugraded to the status of a proper city, with Auction House and everything.
  More cities is always good for role-play, especially these two awesome ones that add so much flavor to their respective races. Give the Worgen Gilneas, or at least Gilneas City and make Bilgewater a viable alternative to the to other Horde cities.
  
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• There would be no Houjin or Tushui and the Pandaren from the Wandering Isle would have joined the Alliance, not the Horde.
  This is definately 'the big one' for me. Though I was initially excited about the prospect of a multi-faction race and the potential it offered, I eventually went sour on the idea. I had some fun playing Paozi on both sides, but ultimately I kept running into the problem that Pandaren fighting against other Pandaren on the other side of the faction conflict for no other reason than the color of the tabard that they wear just feels...wrong. Every time I have met a Horde pandaren on my Alliance pandaren, they have gotten along swimmingly and they saw no reason to fight one another. This assymetry with how Pandaren interact in role-play with one another and how they are expected to act in the game is very jarring for me. I think it would have been better to have kept the pandaren to one faction, and I think Alliance would probably have made the most sense.
  [/i]
  

EDIT: For some reason, it won't let me remove those surplus [/i]'s. I apologize for how messy my post looks due to it.

Sanara wrote:

-Med'an still exists, but he's the son of KHADGAR, not Medivh. (I am in fact hoping they retcon this into the lore, because Garona and Medivh only met in the book The Last Guardian, where Garona served as a pseudo-love interest... for Khadgar, whereas Medivh was a raving old lunatic.)

Agreed. After reading that book I never got the point of Med'an being Medivh's kid. Where did that suddenly come from in the middle of everything else? Feels so wrong!

But yeah, agreeing with most people. Having stuff in Gilneas - whether it is a complete alliance zone, or to reflect an ongoing struggle there. The latter would be cool to show that the world actually still has some strife going on.

Something with Forsaken as well. I also don't always understand how easy they get away with what they do, from the Horde as well as Alliance and neutral factions. I'd say they are real problem for Horde, since they make having a truce so hard...?

Those last two I look forward to being addressed soon. Could be awesome. Could be.

Sanara wrote:Blood Elves join the Alliance, not the Horde.

It's the worst one for me.

I think it's great, means you can't ERP with them.
Well, you can- and I'm sure you tried. But you can't do it as easily.

The only change we need is that Gnomeregan should be a proper city by now.

Autobutt Copper wrote:

Sanara wrote:Blood Elves join the Alliance, not the Horde.

It's the worst one for me.

I think it's great, means you can't ERP with them.
Well, you can- and I'm sure you tried. But you can't do it as easily.

The only change we need is that Gnomeregan should be a proper city by now.

Ah, yes. This. Definately this.

Now that the Darkspear's home turf got a makeover in Catacalysm, there really is no excuse.

They made it very ugly and depressing though. There isn't really anything in the echo islands.

I always kinda hoped they would 'combine' Echo Isles and Sen'jin Village by having troll buildings all the way from the isles to the shore. I mean they already stand on stilts, so there's no reason they can't stand in shallow water.

I'd have removed the Old God from Garrosh in MoP
And just had him be an orc, designed the raid to be a pitched big battle between Horde and Alliance, with the final endboss being Garrosh and Varian respectivly, both dying.

Garrosh dying an honorable if warmongering orc. Varian dying well, super saiyan.

The players taking the role of "Elite reserve" in the battle, being led by a proniminent figure of the faction.
For example Rexar and Moradin (he was alive and well again wasn't he?)

Autobutt Copper wrote:

Sanara wrote:Blood Elves join the Alliance, not the Horde.

It's the worst one for me.

I think it's great, means you can't ERP with them.
Well, you can- and I'm sure you tried. But you can't do it as easily.

The only change we need is that Gnomeregan should be a proper city by now.

They got me all hyped with those "Retaking Gnomergan" quests. And then nothing came of it.

I agree with most of what Thelos said, as usual.

I also agree with what Copper said, which is not usual.

I don't like how the Alliance and Horde always buddy up against all odds. It just seems too cuddly. I'd have had the Horde reunite and force the Alliance out of Durotar, then go on with the war between them as equal forces butting heads. One side being suddenly stronger than the other but letting them live for no reason is just a load of arse really. It only makes sense to me if they're both roughly equal in strength.

Tauren join the Alliance. Sorry tauren, but you're too peaceful for the Horde.
Worgen join the Horde. They should have made more of Genn's dislike of the Alliance rather than just having him change his mind and be all like "Shucks, you guys are alright really!". And what faction has a better track record of accepting misfits and outcasts than the Horde?!

Also yes, for the love of god more female characters in important lore positions who don't spend all their time crying or are purely defined by a male character.
Running on from this, kill Gallywix and have Boss Mida take over the Bilgewater Cartel... A faction leader who isn't attractive, isn't mostly nude, isn't defined by a male and doesn't cry all the time? Fantastic!

Oh and I really like the idea of the pandaren being split in two, with half joining the Horde and half the Alliance. I just hope they add some lore stuff in as to why the Houjiwouji pandaren (or whatever they're called) bothered staying in the Horde after the Kor'Kron tortured Ji Firepaw.
Like... I dunno, even something simple like a Horde quest where the player alongside an important Horde character or two do something honourable which impresses the pandas.

Worgen join the Horde? That is something that seams very... Something i'd not change.