#warlords of draenor was the WORST

[officialchrismetzen]

ok guys you all voted for the best expac, now it's time for:

Removing Dragonflight from this one this time since some folks made good points that it's too new for these kinds of polls, and this time, this poll is a WEEK long for better data !

VOTE AND PASS IT DOWN

[skymagpie]

This is the impression I have from how fandom talks about the WoW expancs as someone who came back to WoW after 13 years and is still catching up (mandatory this is not my opinion, this is fandom observation):

Vanilla - this is for the Classic fans, never mentioned

The Burning Crusade - Legion prequel

Wrath of the Lich King - the best thing to have happened to this franchise

Cataclysm - The Last Good Expansion

Mists of Pandaria - the REAL Last Good Expansion (underrated)

Warlords of Draenor - the Beginning of the End, the downfall, the fall of western civilization

Legion - the best thing to have happened to this franchise 2.0. since WotLK

Battle for Azeroth - Mess.

Shadowlands - the worst thing to have happened to this franchise, if you like this delete the game and never show your face in public

Dragonflight - Disney + Barbie Dragon Adventure, any true fan would've quit by now

[voidsentprinces]

Its still weird to me how narratively selfconscious WoW and its producers got about FFXIV during the Shadowlands era. Like...you were World of Warcraft man. You've been pulling the same trick of providing interesting story beats and executing them poorly or underwhelmingly for years. Battle For Azeroth was just another step in a long line of grinding shit since Vanilla's initial release. But, now Final Fantasy XIV, a game who, even during Shadowbringers, was just regarded as just another MMORPG in a sea of MMORPGs. Was getting praise for taking years of story development and loose threads of shit they were just making up and starting to tie it up. And the Devs of WoW saw that and went, "WE CAN DO THAT TOO!" Here's an expansion talking about the afterlife with a desert of a ruined civilization, a faerie kingdom, and there are now angels involve! And then like...alright fine, its bootlegged Shadowbringers at worst and not at all related at best. Fine.

But then Endwalker came out or was going to come out and was actually going to make good on tying everything off and Shadowlands suddenly went from vaguely copying Shadowbringers' homework to having to be THE END OF A SAGA! EVERYTHING FROM WARCRAFT 1 TO BATTLE FOR AZEROTH WILL BE TIED UP IN THIS ONE EXPANSION! Because...Endwalker was going to do that? And just like every expansion before it. From the Death of Illidan in Burning Crusade, to "I see only darkness before me" Arthas in Wrath, from The Dragons Lose their Powers Cataclysm to Garrosh will get a trial in a book buy now, from We Will Never Be Slaves Grommash Warlords of Draenor to Teleport Sargeras away Legion and finally Golden Finger 3 second explotion N'zoth in Battle for Azeroth. Bald man being behind everything and saying there is a bigger threat on its way COULD of just been another underwhelming ending to a WoW expansion. BUT THEY HAD TO PLAY IT UP! LIKE IT WAS WRAPPING UP 30+ OF FUCKING STORY!

And I understand that Blizzard was going through 730,217,812,472,178 lawsuits, controversies and bad PR...and still are. But, like, SquareEnix was shilling crypto and N/F/Ts while trying to push Live Service Games because its board is still living in the Arcade Era where every "replay" was an extra coin in their pocket. And Shadowbringers and later Endwalker got moderate to great acclaim regardless of whatever the fuck was going on with...choose any of the past CEOs. And World of Warcraft could of done the fucking same. But, it had to bill itself as the END OF A LEGENDARY SAGA! When it was just Cenobite Mr. Clean and the people who created the afterlife were *checks notes* Robots.

Like, World of Warcraft. You could of ignored Final Fantasy XIV and we would still probably just be, just another MMORPG in the Sea of MMORPGs. But someone got a little bit of self doubt and now we're talked about with the same cadence as WoW in terms on impact on the market. Which...I mean I love the game. But, I do not think FFXIV has had as big an impact on the world as World of Warcraft has.

You're were Kanye West, getting drunk off your success and decided today that you were going to interrupt a Taylor Swift acceptance speech so now Final Fantasy XIV is a big superstar. If you had just let it ago we would of just been trucking along doing our own thing. But, because you got a little insecure for a split second, we're now forever going to be riding on your shoulders LIKE LALAFELLS SHOULD BE ABLE TO!

#letlalasride

[tirisgarde]

🎀🚆🌪️🌈 and ☄️ for irma! :3

OC emoji asks!

WAILS my baby darling angel precious... okay, let's do this!

🎀 RIBBON - how would they fit into other worlds / AUs? what AUs would you like to try out? what fictional world would they fit / not fit into?

i love picturing my OCs in different stories and worlds! irma is one of them because she's the typical "hero" character. she's kind, brave, and passionate, which makes her a good fit for stories like final fantasy xiv, for example! she would make for a fantastic warrior of light due to her courage and her selfless nature. i think irma would adapt easily to other worlds because of this. she's the hero!

🚆 TRAIN - what is their answer to the trolley problem?

my first thought was to laugh at this question and my second thought was that this is the worst most evil question you could ask of her 😭 what is the right thing to do? objectively, sacrificing one person to save many is the most ethical decision, and irma knows this. but what if that one person is someone she loves? one of her friends? one of her family?

it doesn't matter how she feels. she will pull the lever to save the world. she's the hero.

🌪️ TORNADO - what is the biggest change you’ve ever made to them? how have they changed from their original version?

when i was 17 years old, legion had just come out at the end of the summer. i rarely logged into the game at this point; i skipped cataclysm, and i have very little memory of doing anything in mists of pandaria or warlords of draenor. i came back to play legion because of illidan, obviously, but i was struggling to remember how to play irma. my dad told me that arcane mage is the most powerful, so i should change her specialization to raid as an arcane mage. so i did!

i don't remember what changed my mind, but at some point during the expansion, i switched irma's specialization back to fire, and i never changed it again. sometimes i wonder what would have happened if i continued playing as an arcane mage. irma would be very different, i think.

🌈 RAINBOW - what advice would they give to their younger self?

"never give up hope."

☄️ COMET - what do people assume about them? are they right?

i think a lot of people assume that irma is always happy, all the time. she certainly seems that way; she's upbeat, always greets people with a smile, lights up the room when she walks in... she's very concerned with helping people and she does her best to cheer someone up when they're blue. she's in such high spirits, and it encourages everyone to keep their chin up. sure, alliance soldiers have their demons, but irma doesn't let anything get her down. and irma is going to keep letting them believe that!

[maglot]

WoW has it’s hooks in me good.

Been playing a LOT of World of Warcraft since Dragonflight came out. I quit playing back in 2019 because Warlords of Draenor was probably one of the worst expansions in the series for me, and it just burnt me right out. I dipped my toe back in for Legion, and again for Battle for Azeroth, but both of those just didn’t re-ignite the spark.

Then Dragonflight was coming out and there was a free weekend where you could play without the subscription, so I hopped on and found out that there was another expansion I missed, Shadowlands, and it was included in the free weekend, so I tried it and immediately got sucked into it. Just really loved the whole lore of what WoW’s afterlife was like, and each world was so different and fun to explore. I actually ended up playing that more than Dragonflight, and it’s become my favorite expansion in the series. Got my Vulpera Hunter leveled up and gearing him up currently. He’s a cute lil fox boy.

I had started streaming again on Twitch right before that, then BAM, WoW happened and I haven’t gotten back on since. I need to get back to that, sorry to all who enjoyed hanging with me on Twitch. I’ll stream again soon, maybe stream some WoW. Who knows?

[trixcuomo]

I'm gonna keep writing these ya know

Meanwhile, watching 50 Shades of Warlords of Draenor at Sharpen's house...

Sharpen: I dunno, this video doesn't hit the same. Not like I hoped 50 Shades of Shadowlands would.

Trixany: Should we look up something else? This is indeed weird.

Sharpen: Eh. I'd rather just watch the Thrall versus Garrosh lightning play scene a dozen more times before the pizza comes.

Trixany: ... I forgot Garrosh had metal piercings on his chest. Would ya look at that. *leans to the side*

Sharpen: *also leans to the side* Yeah, that changes the old cinematic a whole lot, doesn't it?

Thrall: "You disappoint me, Garrosh."

Sharpen: He's just a man, Thrall. He can't endure through all this hot pressure you put on him. He's not perfect!!

Trixany: Not every man can be the warchief.

Sharpen: He's squeezing him with a giant hand! He's crushing him!!

Sharpen: ...

Trixany: ... ...

Sharpen: *wheeze* Ho, yeah! That definitely takes on a different meaning.

Trixany: This dumb director is so mad untalented. What would be hilarious is if that storm... boss lady. You know from Vault of the Incarnates? If she randomly walked in on them.

Sharpen: From a whole other timeline? Yeah.

Trixany: Though it stands to reason that 50 Shades WOD would be the worst in the series--

Dathea Stormlash: "Lightning's caress is capricious. One kiss marks you forever."

Sharpen: Nice. I'm into this.

Trixany: Oh my god! Turn it off!!

[tanadrin]

hey *whispers* hey. hey. i saw your post in the wow tag. i would read THE SHIT out of your interpretation of wow lore. i have homework right now but i think i might just read through your blog a bit. the characters have always been such a high point for me (listen. i know knaak did a lot of shit. but you can pry Krasus from my cold dead hands he was EVERYTHING to middle school me) and i feel so conflicted over what theyve done to the characters - sylvanas, anduin, everyone. would love ur take

You might be a little disappointed, most of my blog isn’t about WoW (it postdates my WotLK raiding/RP guild phase, and I’ve only just recently got back into it with Classic). Lots of opinions on WoW characters below the cut.

I actually don’t hate Krasus as a character. He’s fine, he’s not a Designated Idiot Ball Carrier like some of the others are. In re: the dragons generally, I don’t like the simplistic thing WoW lore does a lot where one faction leader going bonkers turns the whole faction into baddies for no apparent reason, because all political entities are monoliths except when they’re not. I’m also not a huge fan of how crowded the, erm, metahuman bureaucracy on Azeroth has become in the lore–like, the Keepers and the Dragon Aspects serve similar roles, and the lore could have done fine with one or the other, and the dragons were here first (and Ysera and Alexstrasza are BAMFs), and so should get to stay.

Sylvanas is bae, obviously, and Sylvanas as Warchief was a terrific move plotwise. I think it’s a pity they had to kill Vol’jin to do it (because I am also very here for Warchief Vol’jin), but she is obviously the more interesting choice. Speaking of Warchiefs:

Thrall doesn’t have the Green Jesus Marty Stu quite as bad as some people think, but he does kinda have it, and I don’t see them grappling quite with the fact that he done fucked up. Like, not only did he install a Warchief who should have had all smart members of the Horde tugging at their collars nervously when he started his rule, Garrosh turned into a Sha-summoning Old God-corrupted, casual-atrocity-perpetrating maniac, not to mention all the bullshit on Old Draenor I do my best to forget about lest my blood pressure spike. We don’t really get a satisfying mea culpa from Thrall for that, and then his response is to fuck off to fiddle around with the Earthen Ring for a bit, before retiring to a farm in Nagrand. Keep in mind, one of the whole reasons the Horde came together in its current shape in the first place is because of the charismatic, hopeful figure of Thrall. It ran the very real risk of splintering under Garrosh for good (ESPECIALLY after the murder of Cairne, RIP Cairne Bloodhoof, you were too good for this world), and even the most unifying successor (which I think Vol’jin was) didn’t have Thrall’s inclusive, unifying vision. Sylvanas doesn’t, either, and even more, is sort of low-key hated by everybody else, so while I don’t think she’s a maniac like Garrosh who would recklessly divide the Horde, she’s also not, I am forced to admit, necessarily the ideal Warchief from a political standpoint.

Even if he didn’t return to the post of Warchief, Thrall had a moral obligation after the Garrosh debacle to try to help hold the Horde together and heal the divisions his negligence caused. At least to throw his support behind Garrosh’s successors, and not to pretend that Deathwing’s death meant everything was OK forever, job done. And if he wasn’t going to do that (and he has excellent motivations for not wanting to do that!), I think the consequences of that have to be explored. I think some people would blame him, and be justified in doing so. I think somebody like Varok Saurfang, who has had decades of experience with the damage bad leaders could do, would rightly be a little pissed, even as he sought Thrall out for help, that Thrall had let the Horde he built languish under subpar leadership. Thrall has been selfish–and that’s great, because he desperately needed some character flaws more significant than “cares too much” and “believes in people a lot.”

Anduin: better than Varian, still a little bland? Varian was a Professional Idiot Ball Handler, who seemed to do stuff not out of a coherent conception of his character, but just because the plot required a Generic Human King to do it. Plus there was all that stuff with the cloning and the kidnapping that never really made any sense. I like Anduin’s optimism; I like that he feels like a thoughtful, reasonable guy, who’s doing his best in often-impossible circumstances. I feel like they could show him being a little more frustrated sometimes, though, and a little pissed at people like Jaina who obstinately refuse to do the strategically correct thing even if it means setting aside their resentments for a bit. Disclaimer: I play almost exclusively Horde toons, they may address this better in the Alliance quests in WoW.

But oh man, besides the Draenei, I hate most what they did to Jaina. Jaina was that rare jewel, an optimist in a world whose setting demands perpetual chaos. Yes, yes, Theramore and the mana bomb, I’m not suggesting she should be made of stone, but it breaks her character to have her suddenly go from someone trying to forge a lasting peace between the Horde and Alliance in WC3–to the point where she would see her own father dead–to someone who now blames the whole Horde as one no exceptions for what happened at Theramore. Should she struggle with grief and pain and anger? Absolutely. But she should deal with them in more complex ways than “now I am become the mirror image of Daelin.” Nevermind that even if she did that she should at least regret not listening to him back in WC3. (Do they address that in BFA with the introduction of Kul Tiras? Idk, I haven’t played BFA at all yet.) It seems like Jaina’s role now is to be the Person Who Hates The Horde, and honestly, that’s a tired trope. It’s just not interesting, it has no nuance, it has no interesting outcomes. You could maybe get away with it with the generation of leaders from the Second War like Daelin and Genn who knew the Orcs only as the fel-corrupted servants of the Burning Legion, but it’s obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together than the current Horde is a very different animal politically and strategically, so even if you hate the Orcs with a burning passion, that is not going to transfer to the Tauren, nevermind onetime allies like the Blood Elves.

Gul’dan: oh my god the time travel plot was so stupid. Did the whole universe get duplicated in the alternate timeline? Since travel between the universes is cheap and easy that means there’s a whole nother Burning Legion with a whole nother Sargeras out there that’s still a huge fricking threat! Not to mention a whole nother Azeroth! Did just Draenor get duplicated? That doesn’t seem to match up with the fact a lot of the Burning Legion characters in WoD seem to be parallel universe versions of Burning Legion villains we already know, but it’s not directly confirmed or disconfirmed. Is it some sort of weird Bronze Dragonflight timey-wimey thing that doesn’t have its own independent reality? Ok, fine, but obviously this alternate Draenor has enough of an independent existence for us to visit it again and see what it’s like decades later, not to mention bring some of the people there back. Gul’dan was a fine, if one-dimensional villain but bringing him back from the dead was dumb, dumb, dumb, in a setting where death often feels meaningless and seems to be reversible at random. And the general incoherence of magic in the setting combined with the perennial incoherence of time travel plots (Gollum voice: *we hates them!*) really just reduced WoD to a quivering mess of plot holes, like febrile fan speculation made manifest.

Tirion Fordring: good example of a purely heroic character done well, which WoW has few of. I think because he actually has challenges to overcome, and he doesn’t feel like an idiot.

Bolvar Fordragon: Literally did not know or care who this guy was until the Wrathgate cinematic, but what they did after that with his character was terrific, 10/10.

Malfurion, Tyrande, Illidan: These characters all bore me to tears. My WotLK main was a druid, and I’m a big fan of the druid lore, so I wanna like Malfurion, I really do, but he’s just so dull. Partly because it doesn’t feel like he has any real limitations on his power, just whatever the plot demands he be able to do or not do at any given moment, partly because he just feels like a stiff-necked scold. Tyrande is even more one-dimensional. Illidan is pure 3edgy5me, and the demon hunters in general feel like they get to be too cool to actually traffic in any of the pathos of what should be their emotional equivalents like the Death Knights and the Forsaken. It’s like, “oh man, my life is so tormented, I have these bitchin’ horns and tattoos, and I’m, like, totally immortal, here, hold my rad sword thingies for a second.” At least with the Death Knights you get the feeling that being a Death Knight is a genuinely miserable experience, so there’s some genuine conflict at the heart of the class: sure, you play as a hero, but not the kind of hero you’d necessarily want to be. Demon hunters are just pissed they don’t get to sit at the cool kids’ lunch table, and Illidan genuinely acts like a giant asshole and then gets self-righteous and whiny when his friends and family are like “Dude! Stop being such an asshole!” There’s room for a prickly character, who’s a dick, but who’s our dick, and maybe that’s what they were going for, but Illidan is just the worst.

Azshara, Lady Vashj: The Naga were a giant fucking mistake. A symptom of the inability to let backstory stay backstory, to have to resurrect and retread the same events over and over again that plagues serials when lesser writers without original ideas get let loose on them. Settings like WoW (like Star Wars, like Star Trek, like Dune) are whole universes. You should be expanding the borders, making them feel bigger, more fine-grained, more alive, not beating the same major characters to death over and over again. The ancient Kaldorei are way more interesting as a lost past and a lesson in hubris than fish-snake-people who live under the sea.

Also, water levels are dumb and I hate them. This applies to coral-and-shellfish themed zones regardless of whether swimming is involved.

Cho’gall: I loved the “insane nihilist death cult” reincarnation of the Twilight’s Hammer Clan in World of Warcraft, and Cho’gall as the many-eyed crazed ogre mage with two heads was great. Would much rather have more Cho’gall than Guldan 2.0.

While I’m on Cataclysm: one thing you don’t often feel in worlds like WoW is the possibility of real defeat, because for extradiegetic reasons, it’s impossible to truly lose in any long-lasting way (or, in quests like Battle for the Undercity in WotLK, they just… don’t let you, which feels dumb as heck). I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, a world where the bad guys won, and all the worst things the good guys feared came to pass. I think this is one reason I loved the original interpretation of the Draenei so much, because we saw in Draenor what that really looked like. It was bleak, and it was poignant, and even though it was set within a silly melodrama, it actually moved me. Cataclysm did something similar with the postapocalyptic time-travel instance (time travel being used well for once in WoW!), where you saw that Deathwing’s victory wasn’t just an abstract possibility, but a thing that could actually happen. It made the possibility of defeat feel more real, and it gave you a taste of that same bleak, poignant feeling: this, it said (just for a moment!) is what failure looks like, an Azeroth without life, without hope, in which everything you ever struggled for was utterly in vain. And that motivated you to work even harder to prevent it.

Alleria, Turalyon: “You last saw us in WC2, and since then we’ve been fighting a thousand years (subjective) of endless war against the Burning Legion and been irrevocably changed by the experience” is actually pretty great! But if I were going to rewrite WoW lore, I would make that a thousand objective years and set the final victory over the Burning Legion in the future, at a time when the Alliance and Horde have made a durable peace, and Azeroth has moved on from decades of endless war. I think there’s a real problem with trying to make the player one of the heroes that brings down Sargeras for good because it’s *such* an epic battle, but it’s a massively multiplayer game. Making every player the grand master of their class order was bad enough, but when you are obviously playing out entirely different diegesis from everyone around you, even if you didn’t have problems like sharding and a glut of phasing and cross-server activities and instant teleportation to dungeons, it really feels like a single-player RPG with a chat function. I mean, conflicting diegeses is always going to be a problem with questing-based MMOs, but suspension of disbelief worked when you were plainly one person embedded in a larger effort, like in vanilla, BC, and WotLK. But “you are one of thousands of people who is the Best Warrior Ever and sole Leader of the Warriors, and who has the Only Artifact Weapon that somehow also has thousands of copies”… yeah, that just doesn’t work for me. I feel like I’m being pandered to, and not in a fun way, like with the Pandaren.

Sargeras: I like that they retconned Sargeras to have a better motivation than “demons made me nihilistic.” The idea of a void-corrupted titan being something so terrible a member of the Pantheon would shatter worlds to prevent it is interesting. But the Void gods still feel… kinda non-threatening? We don’t see them actively working to threaten anything we really care about, the Void is mostly a pretty passive abstract force like the Light, and in general I feel like the setting isn’t really dualistic, but er… trialistic? Is that a word? In that there’s a three-way opposition between the Void, the Light, and the Nether/Arcane, from the perspective of which each is the opponent of both of the others, but that’s never laid out explicitly anywhere.

[tetrabytez]

⌐ Wᴀʀʟᴏʀᴅꜱ ᴏғ Dʀᴀᴇɴᴏʀ ¬

𝕊𝕡𝕚𝕣𝕖𝕤 𝕠𝕗 𝔸𝕣𝕒𝕜

[carcharadroid]

Warlords of Draenor this, Shadowlands that, butchered lore, bullshit systems blah blah blah

Nah man, worst thing WoW ever did was never make “Friend of the Grummles” a title

[sigurdjarlson]

Hm I think WoW has hit a problem that both the MCU and shows like SPN are/did hit.

‘We need to keep making an increasingly bigger and badder villain but its getting increasingly more absurd.’

When you’ve fought Death itself what comes next? Ultra death? Super ultra death? Oh okay let’s go with fighting whatever created death and then wherever created the thing that created death and so on.

You can go back to smaller conflicts after but they seem petty and underwhelming as a result.

Ex: We went from fighting and defeating the Legion one of the biggest threats in the WoW universe to..a faction war in BFA. They had to add elements of the old gods and shit at the end to raise the stakes and it didn’t really work. It ended up being underwhelming and causing the conflict itself to feel petty and pointless in the grand scheme of things

BFA may have worked as a story in WoW’s earlier years but directly after Legion? It just doesn’t seem to work.

Maybe this is something that says hey your series’ lifespan has run it’s course you’re beating a dead horse’ or maybe it’s just that the media currently relies too much on ‘making a new powerful big bad’ rather than telling an engaging and gripping story.

I won’t pretend I know how to fix the problem or if they even can at this point I’m not a video game designer or a professional writer.

(this is all just me speculating at absurdly late hours of the night because my sleep schedule is fucked)

I’m not being as despondent as this sounds now that I’m reading it over. Im not saying I want WoW to end because honestly I don’t, I just want to see it continue to improve rather than decline

I’m not even saying the writing is all terrible. I think it varies in quality wildly actually but my opinion is not fact (and it’s also not a personal attack on people who disagree. It’s just my personal opinion. You don’t agree that’s cool, honest. Agree to disagree!)

It’s also important to note so much of what constitutes a good story snd expansion is subjective.

I loved Warlords of Draenor. It was one of my favorite expansions but it’s also often called one of the worst expansions by a lot of other fans. So, you know, personal taste does play a role.

Earlier I saw someone say Legion was a terrible expansion. Legion is also one of my favorite expansions.

Some aspects aren’t necessarily subjective like obviously you want your story to make sense. But again some people might agree and disagree on whether or not it does make sense lmao.

Is the majority of your fanbase enjoying your game is kind of a way to measure quality I suppose. Individual opinions are subjective but if the majority of your players are unhappy or leaving in droves there might just be some problems you need to fix 😂

So idk just some thoughts I guess

But my mind keeps coming back to that problem. Where do we go from here? [Shadowlands]

[badkatdesignsmastersblog]

FOREFRONT SPOTLIGHT: Activision-Blizzard

Bet you thought I was only gonna be spotlighting good games and critics. Well sucks to be you nerd, we can’t talk about videogames and gaming culture without discussing Activision-Blizzard’s BS.  

I think as a woman who is about to start a career in games that it’s worth considering, dissecting and critiquing the industry culture itself. I don’t want to hear any asinine handwringing about how this isn’t what these blog posts are for, it’s an issue and argument in the forefront of the industry, and I think it’s well worth talking about if I’m being asked to produce 10 of these on top of a functioning game. 

So yeah to start with, the state of California is suing Activision-Blizzard for some truly horrendous and dehumanizing work environments for workers who are not cis straight men, specifically women. Lots of ex employees came forward last month to allege that their treatment was dehumanizing and gross (”cub-crawls”, ew), and they were treated disrespectfully - someone even committed suicide over the shitty treatment. 

In addition, they sided with China in the Hong King protests from last year, and covered up their shitty allegiances by announcing Overwatch 2 (now not coming as soon as they said) to shield themselves from backlash. This makes them at best really shitty people, and at worst pro-censorship narcs who care more about making money in China than giving a shit about players in Hong Kong who were straight up getting gassed by police at protests. 

The amazing Stephanie Sterling does a great job of discussing these controversies in more detail, so I’ll link to their videos on the topic, but consider this a brief intro into the heinous crimes ActiBlizz has committed on humanity. (Also Warlords of Draenor - absolute dogshit.)

- Toxic leadership culture at AB  - California lawsuit  - Censorship of Hong Kong-based Hearthstone player

[wp100]

I think people are saying that warlords of draenor was fun simply because the PvP was at its peak in that expansion. You could hit max level and jump into BGs and actually mean something in the team. There was no gear locked behind rating like it is now, no systems to grind for, no borrowed power you had to grind for either, nothing like that. You could just ‘plug and play’.

Maybe the lack of content made the PvP shine a bit more in that expansion, and that’s why people remember it very fondly nowadays. Esp with the state of casual/non-rated PvP right now in Shadowlands. I want a 1 honour / 1 conquest set to come back. Locking gear behind rating was a big, big mistake. Probably one of the worst mistakes blizz has done.

WoD really was a much simpler time.

[therebloggerbird]

World of Warcraft Trailers RANKED

Because I’m incredibly bored and needed something to do. I played WoW briefly back during the Wrath era, and still like to keep up with what’s going on in that IP once a year or so. But I’ve always been really impressed with Blizzard’s cinematic trailers. So I have them ranked here, based on my personal preferences. Bit long under the cut, but I’ve still tried to keep things concise overall.

9. Mists of Pandaria

I almost feel like Mists of Pandaria gets a pass because in many ways it doesn’t feel like it “fits” with the others. Even the art style looks “off” to a degree. What’s with the strangely bara-looking characters? Overall it’s a pretty tight and decently crafted cinematic – Blizzard is very good at making these trailers even at their worst, as we’ll see – but it feels disconnected from the larger world. I can even overlook the whole kung fu panda concept to just say that the weirdly humorous and cartoony affect doesn’t seem to hit, even by the admittedly cartoony standards of the whole IP. Just kind of silly.

8. Shadowlands

“Icecrown.” This is where I wish I could review these in reverse, but I always like to count up rather than down in list reviews. Shadowlands is the culmination of a trend that can be seen from Legion through to the present in terms of Sylvanas Windrunner’s character progression. Right off the bat this trailer has a big setup – we’re returning to Icecrown Citadel, one of the most memorable and important locations in the entire series. While the full extent of her fall is not made clear until later, we can see that old Sylvia is clearly going the Garrosh Hellscream route of turning into a villain by popular demand. What follows is a very stupid action sequence. Is it cool looking? Of course it is, the budget on these things is ludicrous. It’s still stupid, however. Sylvanas might as well have dealt with the OG Lich King by herself, along with pretty much every other raid considering how untouchable she is in this showdown. More than that, the disrespect to Bolvar Fordragon, who I believe was never seen again after the end of Wrath, seems a bit harsh. The ending leaves more questions than it answers, and not entirely in a good way. The concept of the “Shadowlands” as given later doesn’t seem bad, but you’re telling me nobody thought to do this with the Crown beforehand? It’s a bit out of nowhere.

7. Battle for Azeroth

Battle for Azeroth’s cinematic trailer suffers from having come after the trailer for Legion. Legion’s trailer is incredibly over-the-top in a very endearing way, and BfA takes a step back from that. I get that it’s probably an homage to the early days of WoW, but considering how Legion showed how far the world had come in many ways, BfA seems kind of dull and same-y. Siege towers? Really? When you have legions of magical air-dreadnoughts? It also shows the ongoing negative trend with hero characters in the franchise. Nobody gives a damn how powerful the “main characters” are in a game about the PLAYERS going around and having adventures. And if they do, I’d still ask who on earth these stupid schmucks are who sign on to be a part of the Alliance and Horde line-infantry at the very least. Sylvanas shows off an early taste of what’s to come in terms of her decline, and Anduin is kind of a funny character to me. Look at this child they put in a set of Warhammer space marine armor. Who let him onto the battlefield? Hand over command to the werewolf and protect this poor kid!

6. Cataclysm

Cataclysm goes with a good trend you can trace back to the Burning Crusade in focusing on the villain. That’s good framing in an RPG. The problem for me at least is that Deathwing’s voice lacks something. He sounds like a bit of a dullard, and while his voice is deep it lacks resonance and sounds a bit tinny. Compared to the narrations in other trailers, it’s just not as good, even if it isn’t bad. The visuals are great, however, and the way we’re shown the world being destroyed clearly communicates a “the world will never be the same” vibe in a very direct and visceral way. Overall not a bad trailer, but just a bit basic and weaker when compared to the top performers.

5. Legion

I like this trailer the more I watch it, because to me it’s probably the purest distillation of what Warcraft actually is. Every character in this trailer looks like they could be a player, not a “protagonist” or an “NPC”. The dynamics between the big, crazy, chunky character models and the very cold and realistic lighting makes for an amazing image. I always wondered what the demand for a live-action Warcraft film was when they have cinematics that look like this. This trailer has some great action, balanced yet bombastic, and also features Infernals, which are always cool. As said before, the sheer scale of everything puts BfA to shame, yet it doesn’t feel as silly as something like Shadowlands. The biggest problem with this trailer is that Varian Wrynn’s voice just isn’t that impressive. He gives a great speech, for sure, but he still just sounds like “a guy” and doesn’t exactly have the pipes of a Menethil. The line “I’ve been slow to trust” as he sees Sylvanas come through the fog is pretty hilarious in retrospect.

4. Burning Crusade

You are not prepared! A classic, and many people’s favorite. Burning Crusade doesn’t really have a “plotline” within the actual trailer, but the visuals are all very cool nonetheless. Special mention goes to the draenei paladin, who looks amazing and whose motions seem to have so much more weight than anything else in the trailer. The rest of the clips are impressive, and there’s a bit of humor thrown in as well. Of course, the big showing is from Illidan, who gives a fantastic little speech brimming with tension and gravitas. I’d maybe consider #4 and #3 on this list tied in a lot of ways.

3. World of Warcraft

The vanilla cinematic trailer benefits from novelty and a good sense of focus. Opening narration (by who, I don’t know) provides us with everything we need to know about the state of the world and what we’re jumping into. The faux-Latin orchestral sting right afterwards makes for a stunning opening to the visuals, and we’re then treated to a very lasting impression of Warcraft’s aesthetics. All the action is good, with special mention to the Infernal summoning, and there are very few weak points in the trailer. There’s no “narrative” but one isn’t really needed, as we’re trying to sell people on exploring a world rather than investing in a plotline just yet.

2. Warlords of Draenor

Warlords of Draenor is an incredible cinematic adaptation of one of the most important bits of Warcraft backstory. The execution of this trailer is incredible, and again makes me question the necessity for an actual live-action film. We have big, baritone-voiced characters brimming with detail in a very tense and dark moment, followed by explosive action. Everything looks good. Grommash looks cool, Gul’dan looks sinister, and Mannoroth is absolutely fearsome. The dialogue is overblown and over-dramatic in the absolute best of ways, and is made better by every single character having voices that bottom-out the register. Mannoroth’s death is a little quick, but doesn’t really need to last that long, and all the musical and visual notes are beautifully synced. Even Garrosh gets a cool showing, and the trailer ends with a dramatic rise that is one of the best examples among all the trailers. The actual idea behind having an alternate-history timeline plot in Warcraft is a little wonky, but I feel like this trailer sells the idea better than the actual expansion did (from what I hear).

1.Wrath of the Lich King

The grandmaster, the pinnacle. “My son.” I am absolutely biased. Wrath of the Lich King is not just a great Warcraft trailer, its a great trailer by any standard. Intense narration that really builds up the scene coupled with a fantastic soprano opening to the trailer proper. This is another trailer that does a great one-scene bit, and is also similar to Legion in that it contrasts some very subdued visuals with some very over-the-top ones. You almost question whether or not this Dark Lord looking character is the villain, if you didn’t know the backstory of Arthas, with how soft the start of the trailer is. The consistent dynamic where his dead father will narrate some virtue, followed by the Lich King displaying the opposite is great. “Exercise restraint” with the summoning of the undead dragon Sindragosa, followed by “stirring the hearts of your people” with a shot of the undead horde is a great progression. And the trailer even manages to end with some heart-pumping intensity while still remaining very subdued. There’s a reason why, even when I’m not entertaining any feelings of nostalgia for Warcraft, I still go back and watch just this trailer. It’s a fantastic piece of art all on its own.

[mozelledeliond]

When you first started writing Mozelle, what kind of mindset did she have? Did that change over time? If so, what caused it to change and what did it become? Do you think her mindset will change again — either as a result of her experiences, or the company she keeps ��� for better or for worse?

Mozelle’s mindset has definitely gone through shifts and changes over the years I’ve played her, but one piece has remained central: her dedication to survival, no matter the cost of it — no matter how much of herself she must flense, no matter how much of herself must be destroyed or be faked into existence.

When Mozelle was first rolled back in Cataclysm, her mindset was definitely less cynical, perhaps even hopeful at times; at her core she wanted to bond with people and form meaningful connections, to find her place in the world, to simply live a life like anyone else and leave the shadow of what had happened behind.

And then everything that could go wrong, did.

Through Mists of Pandaria and early Warlords of Draenor, fear became her primary push: fear of repercussion; fear of not being good enough; fear of betrayal; fear of injury; fear of imprisonment; fear of dying; the list goes on and on. Her time with the Twilight’s Hammer hollowed her out and she turned herself into an artifice of a person to slide back into society—she could not quite recall how to be a person, but she could mimic the behaviors of others well enough until it became such second nature she didn’t know how to stop. From both of these aspects came a deep desire to be needed by others, so they couldn’t get rid of her just or being strange or discard her like rubbish.

Time went on and her perceptions of fear altered—she doesn’t think she’s afraid anymore, but really it’s just become one part finely-honed paranoia and one part anxiety that never goes away, and it’s all become so baseline to her perception of herself that it doesn’t register to her.

Mid-Warlords of Draenor and Legion simply saw a maturing of her personality without any major changes. She choked off the worst of her violent outbursts to better adjust to working with nobility, and grew to hate how she would be lauded at one point for verbally eviscerating someone and then hated by the very same person who’d lauded her when she did it again—but what is she, if not a vessel to fulfill the wills and whims of others, regardless of her own desires?

And, finally, Battle for Azeroth has seen her latest change in mindset: a growing arrogance bred both of her steady low-key exposure to the Void and of faking self-confidence until she made it; and the changes to her psyche perpetuated by the Gift of N’Zoth—among them, she’s become quite enamored with the seas she once feared and avoided, though she remembers her previous distaste of them enough to occasionally make comment on it.

What drives her now is her loyalty to N’Zoth (his so-called defeat, as far as she is concerned, is all merely part of a greater plan) and her own personal hunger for new explorations and for forgotten histories and secrets: to see and devour all that the world has to offer her—and yet, at the same time, she knows there will never be enough to satisfy her, and she will always go hungry in the end.

I think that, over time, Mozelle’s mindset will continue to adjust to the world and events around her, and a few more expansions down the line she may very well be markedly different than she is now—but ultimately I think any changes will be slow-paced, and she’s unlikely to have a major change in personality even if her motivations change.

[spartanlocke]

I've mainly been interested in WoW lore but I've never played the games and it seems there's a lot I still don't know. Like when did WoW writing get so bad? I know Warlords was bad (anything with time travel is in my book except Destiny and the Vex), then I heard Legion was good apart from killing off Vol'jin. What happened? Change in writers or something?

…WoW’s writing has always been bad. Even with expansions like Wrath of the Lich King and Mists of Pandaria, which I think were both excellent, there’s always this one part of the story that feels like it’s just there to remind you that Blizzard doesn’t want to put actual consequences (or effort) in their story.

I think Blizzard has always had the same writers, but things quickly went downhill when Chris Metzen left. You see, Blizzard’s writers are extremely favoristic. They’re practically addicted to playing favorites, so their favorite characters will always get the plot working in their favor, even if it means contradicting the narrative (BFA making every other character act OOC) or letting them get away with mass murder (Illidan and Grommash.) This is also obvious in the Horde’s case, because they’re the faction Blizzard likes, they get to commit genocide every other expansion and get away with a slap on the wrist and a “Welcome back to the family” party with the Alliance, who they were cheerfully massacring a few patches ago. 

Metzen wasn’t much different, but he at least cared about the Alliance a little bit. Unlike the current writers, who had half of the Night Elf (an Alliance race) population burned alive in their own city, then didn’t give them any form of compensation for it (instead, hinting that their leader is gonna go insane and be killed off.) 

As for the lore, well that shit don’t matter anymore because Blizzard’s thrown it all in the garbage to make their fanfiction Battle for Azeroth/Shadowlands work. The Alliance having more powerful characters than the Horde? Irrelevant. The Night Elves defeating invaders for over 10,000 years? Irrelevant. Literally any character having any sort of competence or standards??? Irrelevant. Pretty much the only characters who haven’t been utterly bastardized by the writing are the new ones introduced by BFA. Everyone else is just utterly stupid or doing things they never would’ve done before this expansion. And that’s not even going into that Blizzard literally can’t go five minutes without retconning something. Seriously. There is no consistency in WoW. If old lore doesn’t work with what they want to do, they just retcon it into something that does. 

For me, WoW has always been the greatest example of wasted potential. It has all these incredible concepts, lore and characters and yet every single time, the writers chose the most generic, repetitive, straight-up disrespectful plots to go with. It’s been like this every time, since Warlords of Draenor. Even Legion, all the stuff that was actually creative just ended up a stepping stool for main plot, Sucking Illidan’s Dick. 

Blizzard’s also incredibly sexist and racist, but you should know at least that already.

Long story short: Don’t bother. Right now is the worst possible time to get into WoW’s lore, because Blizzard has simply decided it doesn’t matter anymore. And considering they had the chance to fix this with Shadowlands and instead made it worse, it’s unlikely they’ll ever change. 

[deathlygristly]

Do you ever just look at pics of Americans marching around with Nazi flags and remember your decade plus of trying to warn people who told you that you were crazy and alarmist and just disagreeing with people and who yelled Godwin over and over instead of thinking?

And you tried to say that you spent your formative years reading about Nazi Germany, that you were basing this on a decade of reading and learning, that you weren’t actually ever even exposed to people who took Nazi comparisons too lightly until the debate about flying mounts in WoW when Warlords of Draenor came out, that you grew up having nightmares about what happens when a nation goes sick and rotten, and you had smelled that rotten death smell in American culture since we started bombing Afghanistan.

But no one listened, so whatever. Don’t come crying to me now. After all, Godwin, right? And also acknowledging current victims of fascism disrespects the past victims of fascism, and if anyone had done anything to prevent the current victims from becoming victims, that would have been too impolite and disrespectful to tolerate. The proper way to respect the victims of fascism is to always feed it new victims.

Sorry, just kind of bitter sometimes after beating my head against a brick wall for all of my adult life, and then seeing the future I tried to warn people about coming to pass.

But I guess you see the same thing in the pandemic response. It isn’t real for some people until there are piles of dead bodies in the streets, just like how fascism isn’t real for some people until they’re being led through the liberated camps after the war. Until then it’s alarmism and drama and not as bad as their faint impressions of events in other countries and other times, so why do anything to prevent the worst of it before the worst of it has come to pass?