f13.net

It was suggested on this site sometime ago that the only way to get the factions more balanced in this game in terms of populations was to offer elves on the horde side - specifically blood elves.  And that is going to happen.

What's not going to happen - in my view - is the appearance of more folks playing horde than in the past.  The blood elve idea was a good one - but Blizzard has done too good a job with this new alliance race the Dreani - which will appeal to current horde players that enjoy tauren.

At best the relative ratio will not change.  My prediction is that the horde side will diminish more - the new alliance race will appeal to a pretty broad segment of players.

* Wonders if Schild will re-roll his Paladin *

EDIT: oops - meant to post this in the WoW section - I am tired :)

I think you missed.

Draenei are like Tauren but cool and not cows.

YOU TAKE IT BACK RIGHT !

My cow could pwn your hoffed elf.

Schild played a Paladin?

To 60.  Not sure if it is there anymore but for awhile he had posted a player guide to playing a paladin, which was stickied on the Blizzard forums.

Mythic has the right idea: every faction has at least one giant race, tiny race, elf, human, and something truly inhuman. You can be whatever you like, and not have to choose your faction based on your desire to play from a specific perspective.

Well... they do now. When they started, one of the factions only had humans -- and the game was NAMED AFTER THEIR CAPITOL.

I think that Blizzard underestimated how much Joe Sixpack likes to look like a human.

Blood Elves get an insanely overpowered pvp racial. (horde abilities > alliance when it comes pvp)
Draenei get an insanely overpowered pve racial. (alliance abilities > horde when it comes to pve)

Blizz still doesn't have a clue about racials and balance, film at 11!

Edited to add some actual content: I don't think that many people will go from horde to alliance just for draenei. It's a cool concept, but not THAT cool.


-- Z.

I'd like this to be true.  I like the relatively tighter groups I get with my Horde characters than with my Alliance ones; I'd love to believe that my Blood Elf is going to be just as overrepresented as my Undead or my Orc (meaning: only slightly).  I mostly play on PvE servers, so I don't have to worry about Alliance zergs.  I don't mind the current balance.

But I do think that (for better or for worse) this will balance things a bit.  When I'm playing Alliance, it looks to me like almost half the characters I bump into are Night Elves (I have only old, old WoWcensus numbers to back this up, though, so it may be wrong).  If what you say is true, and all the Tauren players leave the Horde to roll Dranei, then I still don't think their loss will equal the number of Night Elf players coming the other way.  If equal numbers of people liked giant beast-men as liked Elves, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.

...or a hawt chick...


What are the racials, anyway?

The last I checked, the Taurens were popular (as far as Horde goes). Why would people move?

Moved to its rightful place. :)

Shouldn't this be in the WoW forum? I am now very sad that there is no expansion for that great Game Faction population balance.

Maybe there will be a Faction Population Balance 2.


Edit: Damn, too slow.

Last i had heard:

Draeni:
- Passive bonus to Gem Crafting +15 or something
- Activation ability:  Targetable heal that scales with level (think of it as something like a targeted cannabilize, but not channeled, or something like that.  rumor puts it in at around 500+ heal at 60.  No idea if it is affected by +healing gear)
* Overpowered ability: Passive AURA EFFECT, that grants your entire party a + to hit, scales with level, word is its around +5% to hit at 60.

Blood Elves:
- no idea what their passive / whatever bonuses are  (rumor LONG time ago had it that one would be the ability to lifedrain the bodies of dead demons (similar to cannabilize)
- Overpowered ability: (may be way off wrong on this, could have changed)  Two stage ability.  They have a drain attack (rumor says mana, but might be health), where they drain a small amount something (like 40 or less probably at 60) and get a temporary buff.  This buff stacks up to 3 "charges". lasts for about 10 minutes.  When they trigger the Activated Counterpart to this, it consumes the charges of the buff, Produces an Point Blank AOE silence effect (think warstomp, but a silence instead of a stun) and restores a set amount of mana / rage / energy depending on your class.   So imagine a rogue or warrior who could silence you AND suddenly gain a boost to rage / energy.

Now imagine that but nerfed to be a 5% base boost at level 70 - like +15 in a skill would give. That's basically how good the racials will end up, even if the initial demo version was godly. They may be overpowered long enough in live to get everybody to re-roll, such that Blizzard can buy a bit more time to write another morsel of content. By the time you get a BE to near level 70 the racial will probably be nerfed to be less useful than relentless strikes.

The blood elf activated ability isn't as overpowered as the yammering masses would like you to believe.

Last reports form E3 said the stackable buff requires a 10-second channel.  The fuck? Yeah that's useful in pvp.. I always have 10 secs to channel.
The 'blow your charges' buff does silence.. for 2 seconds. (Down from the 8 it was reported at Blizzcon)  That's if you've managed to channel for a total of 30 seconds without dying and losing the buff.  The buff it gives back is supposedly around 20 rage/mana per charge.  If this were energy for it would be significant, but they can't be.  For Mana it's nothing, may as well not have it.  The rage it gives back  IS significant, because 60 rage is a fucking LOT.

Their passives are 1) +15 to enchanting and 2) +5 to all resists.

As to population imbalance.  Well, it's a question of how many people are willing to 'start over.'  That's always the question on a new race, class or character.  Yeah, lots of folks will check them out but the need to be on a completly new server (if you PvP) or find a new group of friends, or a new guild with whom to run endgame stuff with AGAIN will keep some folks away.  It always does.

On most new PVP servers horde either outnumber alliance or the ratio is very close. Only on PVE servers and release PVP servers are alliance:horde imbalances rampant. I'd say the situation with new servers is about the general perception that alliance = PVE, horde = PVP. And I'd say the situation with the old servers was the perception then that alliance-side was more fleshed out and their capitol much closer to the action (the 2nd of which is still true).

The big key is NOW. Middies were rolling through their snowy captial for years wondering where all the white women were at.

The draenei to hit aura is only for spells and it doesnt increase with level so its just +1.  Blood elves get + 15 enchanting also. Also the draenei heal does 1075 over 15 seconds at level 70, and i believe its self only.

Am I the only one filled with "meh" by both of these races?  Oh boy, more ghey elves and some... uh... what the fuck is a draeni?

Elf with hooves and horns.

Formerly shamanic gay demon paladin trans-dimensional space invaders from Uranus who like to make jewelery. PEWPEWPEW.

What? You're not filled with "meh" already?

Seriously though, Blood Elves are like...Important to the WC world. Gotta have 'em. I don't like WoW, but Illidan rocks.

Couldn't have put it better myself.  Except they won't be Shaman.

Thus far anyway....

Back when it was the cool thing to do to theorize what the release races would be for World of Warcraft, I was convinced they'd have Blood Elves on the Horde side.  And I had people saying, "That doesn't make sense."  And I'd say, "Why not?  They hate humans, they hate Night Elves, and they're not allied with demons.  They make at least as much sense as the Forsaken."

So, I've been holding it back for a while:
I WAS RIGHT YOU FUCKERS WHO DON'T POST HERE.  It just took a while for my rightness to kick in.

Regarding population:  No, it won't fix it.  Nothing like this will ever fix it.  The closest DAoC got to fixing it was providing bonuses to underpopulated realms on specific servers, and even that provided only temporary boosts of realistically non-contributing players.  People wouldn't start over for new races, new classes, whatever.  They'd roll alts, but they were locked down in one realm on one server and that would always be their "main".  The alts never reached high levels.

This is, of course, speaking generally.  Of course SOME people have the dedication to start all over.  Not most folks, though.

Over years and years of this sort of thing, it could potentially be fixed.  I wouldn't expect to see any immediate or obvious gain, though, beyond the initial 'omg blood elves' rush.  It won't last.

I don't think the faction population imbalance is as big an issue as a lot of people make it out to be. Pretty much the only thing it affects is world pvp (more likely to run into one faction than the other) and raid progression (bigger population yields more dedicated and skilful players).

But raid progression = mroe epic loot, which in turn = more PvP BG potential.

My WC lore is not the greatest, but I thought the Blood Elves were allied with Illidan and he is working with both the Naga and the demons.  He does seem to be out for power at the expense of anyone, but basically he is a pawn of the Burning Legion.  I am totally mistaken on that?

If I am not, why would the Horde tolerate the Blood Elves at all?

Because they like to blow shit up.

Never willingly. He tried to figure out a way to escape them and failed. Then was given another chance to kill Arthas, but failed. Other things involved in the overall story put the Legion on the sidelines a bit, and Illidan's story is left 'to be continued' (he's brooding in relative safety, I guess...).

No faction is ever aligned with the Burning Legion. The same goes for Arthas and the Scourge. Nobody likes them either (including the Undead).

True, but a well-coordinated team will beat epic lewts any day. On the other hand, epics and coordination.. now that's hard to beat. Though with 1.11 PVP armor (blues and epics) will be quite competitive with raid epics for PVP.

The PC blood elves are the ones left behind by Illidan/Prince whathisname, and 'joined' the Horde (trying to reopen a portal to Draenor/Outland) due to a lack of alternatives.

Illidan is in debt to the demons, but he's trying to figure a way out of it.  In fact, he nearly did until one of the big ones (Kil'Jaeden? Or Archimonde? Whatever.) caught up to him and gave him a stern dressing down.  I believe that particular demon, however, was killed by all the wisps at the end of WC3, so Illidan may be more successfully dodging his infernal debts.

The Blood Elves are in a similar boat, in which they're addicted to demonic magics and are unwilling to give that up, but don't particularly wish to be slaves to the Legion.  So they're trying to figure out some trick around it.

Stating that X well coordinated and efficient players can beat X better equipped players who dont know what the hell they're doing is somewhat redundant, don't you think? I know there's any number of examples of PvP noobs in epics getting rolled by a group of quick witted PvPers on teamspeak with no epic gear - but macros, gear and levels and other 'earned' mechanics certainly do unbalance PvP significantly in most MMORPGs. Which is also a reason why many people prefer to PvP in them to online action shooters. F13 is probably not the ideal place to try and suggest that 'skill' plays the greatest role in most MMORPG PvP encounters.

For the same reason the Alliance would admit the Dranei: because someone at Blizzard thought it would look cool.  Blizzard's continuity gets chopped up so badly so frequently you'd think they were writing a superhero MMO.  A while ago, this kind of annoyed me, but really, who cares?  It would suck if someone were trying to do, say, a vast sweeping epic motion picture, in the style of Braveheart, set in the Warcraft universe, but really, probably more than half of the people playing World of Warcraft don't even know who Arthas is.

This makes more sense to me. :-D

It's great that Illidan and the Blood Elves are trying to escape those bonds, but that is kind of the point of demonic enslavement through power -- anyone that wants the power is going to be the demons' agent whether they think they are or not.  The Legion doesn't care how the planet falls and the more chaos the better.  Only the Orcs succeeded and that was by renouncing all the power they were given.

I'll just accept it as they thought elves would be cool to play then.

To be honest, I think it's a small miracle to even have lore that halfway makes sense.  Putting a game, especially an MMOG around a story is a pretty tricky balancing act. AC1 did a good job of it, but the rest of them are pretty lacking.

EQ?  A pantheon of gods that exist primarily to be potential future raid bosses.
UO?  Robots?  Ninjas? Chortle.
AO?  who knows?
DAOC?  It was a dark dark night in the middle ages...
Shadowbane?  It was a dark dark night, and in the morning your city was destroyed...

I dont know, much of warcraft lore is fairly coherent.

The only really confusing part is figuring out where all the "races" came from.  Explaining the Draeni as a group of refugees from a race of "demons" who were corruted by Sargeras sounds easily plausable, especially considering that very little was origionally known officially about the Eredar, other then that Archimond was one, and that they were powerfull demonic sorcerers.

Heck, go browsing around in the Warcraft Wikis and you can learn LOADS of shit about the warcraft lore.  And surprisingly enough very little is contradictary.

I want PC gnolls.  No, seriously.  And no, I don't really understand why.  But if I'm going to be an ugly race, I may as well be really ugly.  Plus that hyena-laugh battlecry is leet.

While entertaining, it's not high brow lore/fantasy anyways. It doesn't take itself very seriously (what with the Egg Shen, 'Fo Shizzle Ma Nizzle' references), so no one else should either......Though I do think it's a little sad that many people who play that game (even RP'ers) are clueless and under a lot of false impressions (like thinking the Horde are the "bad guys", for example).

Anyways....Whatever the motivations for including them, Blood Elves were needed. When the most 'attractive' race on Horde are Cows and Orc females (sexy imo!  :-P), then something's gotta be fixed.

That's not particularly what I was trying to say. Obviously people PvP in MMOs partially because the amount of time they spend on their characters will determine their success in doing so. All I was saying is that the gear one's character possesses is not the sole determinant in one's pvp success or failure.

Yeah, it's coherent, but huge tracts of it are rewritten at short intervals.  Remember in Warcraft 3, how you were at war with the Burning Leagion, an army of demons and gods who had a hand in just about everything that happened ever in the entire history of everywhere?  They weren't really mentioned in Warcraft 2 (save for their dead boss).

I mean, look at the Dranei.  The first time they were mentioned (as far as I know) was back in WC2, where they were mentioned in passing once as a race that the orcs had splattered all over the walls.  Then, in WC3, they're back for some reason, and they're fish guys of some kind.  Now in WoW, they're demons, in fact the uncorrupted branch of the Eredar. Formerly, the cruelty of the Eredar was what drove Sargeras (the head chappy of the burning legion) to turn from the protector of the universe to King Bastard of the demon army.  Now, they're saying it was Sargeras who corrupted the Eredar, though not all of them, of course, some of the Eredar escaped and became Dranei only not the same as the OLD Dranei, who are different. 

About half of this was taken from the Wikipedia page for "retcon." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retcon#Video_games)

Yeah, it's coherent, but whenever I read a story and then the author comes along later and says "no, no, see, it turns out that what REALLY happened was totally different..." it stops being a good story and starts being a flimsy excuse to tie together a sequel.  Mark my words, a year from now, Clone Thrall is going to be marrying Magneto's daughter so that they can fight off the invasion of the Elves who have really been aliens all this time.

I think that the primitive tribe of nocturnal humanoids that night elves are descended from will turn out to be the dark templars.

My Brain Just Blew.

hmmm, got me there.  I dont remember very much about the lore of the warcraft world "as it stood" at the time of WC2 and its expantions, other then the basics.  Been ages since i played either WC1 or WC2, so I cant remember hardly anything regarding how sargeras / draeni may have been protrayed in those games.  I had always been under the impression that Sargeras started out as Champion of the titans, assigned to protect what they had made, and eventually went insane because he tried to understand why demons would commit such evil acts, and just couldnt get it.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Sargeras

has a very good writeup of the history of Sargeras, retcons included.  It also does some mention of the nessicary tweaks needed to adjust for history changes in the discussion section.

As for the draeni, the plausability of their backstory never really bothered me.  I mean, at least it is less convoluted then the history of the blood elves.
Origionally, we only knew them as some race of funky looking dudes from the orcs home planet (origionally believed to have been mostly wiped out by the demon endlaved orcs).  Later we find out that some escaped to azeroth, and the ones still living on the orcs home planet are doing better then origionally believed, what with the orcs now gone.  Having them retrofitted as being not indiginous to the planet in the first place isnt too much of a stretch.

Hey!  My troll was cute.  :cry:

(http://www.gloshare.com/Images/20060609_1545_black_pantsuit.jpg)

I think you may be too hard here.  Your view is that each subsequent product should expand on the previous product without altering previously communicated story line elements.  I think of it as re-writing a story.  Each product is an effort to re-write the Warcraft story - in which there will be some revisions - to make the final product better.

It's just not a quality in writing that I find desirable.  Going back and re-writing huge swatches of backstory is higlhly suggestive that the author either doesn't know what he's doing, or has changed his mind with what he wants to do with the story.  Either way, it's not a good sign.  It might occasionally improve the final product, but usually it only serves to make it more convoluted (see: the life story of any superhero who's been around since the sixties).  Given the choice between retconning previously established elements and introducing new ones, I'd go with new ones nintey-nine times out of a hundred, because it doesn't diminish the coherence of the previous stories.

Again, though, it's not really that big a deal.  Warcraft isn't KOTOR.  The story doesn't matter.  They could make Murlocks playable and throw together some limp backstory about how Aslan jumped in and suddenly made them all intelligent and articulate, and it (the backstory, I mean) wouldn't make their game any more or less fun.  It would just go down as reason number nine thousand and six for why World of Warcraft is not well suited for Role-Playing.

I'm confused. Which part of the Dranei lore is inconsistent again? As far as I know, they and the Orcs shared a common homeworld (Draenor). Both were peaceful, alien societies. Nothing more.

Along came the Burning Legion, who noticed the Orcs, and thought the race had potential to make good grunts and shock troops. They corrupted them with demonic magic, and as a first test, had them lay waste to the Dranei. After that success, they sent them to Azeroth, etc..

I'm not sure what's consistent in the games. Or is there something new mentioned for the expansion?

Also, don't take the books into account. Those weren't even written by Chris Metzen. In fact, one of the series is explicitly meant to be a time travel/alternate history.

yeah, as i tried to show, albeit somewhat ineffectively, they didnt really Retcon the history of the Draeni, so much as expand on what we previously knew.  The standing history of the Eredar and their interaction with Sargeras got a bit of a change, but the lore regarding the Draeni was just expanded.

Righ, is that Patrick Stewart?

It's not that it's internally inconsistent, it's inconsistent with what had previously been written (or implied) in earlier games.

For the expansion, they rewrote the history of the Dranei.  Previously, the story was pretty much as you describe it (except that in WC2 the orcs were portrayed as being violent and aggressive, and it was implied that this was always the case).  As described in WC3, here, I think, is the gist of it:

1- Eredar are demons.  They run around ripping up the universe.
2- Noble Titan Sargeras fights the Eredar to protect the universe.  He can't wrap his mind around how fucked up they are.  Eventually, it drives him crazy and he forms the Burning Legion.
3- Orcs and Draenei live together on Orc homeworld (called Draenor in WC3).  Ner'zhul (Orc Warlock) makes contact with the Legion, Legion comes and gives Orcses power in exchange for fealty or something.
4- Orcs go nuts and rip apart Draenei in a matter of months
5- The Draenei are largely wiped out, but a few of them survive, (showing up as a half-faction in the Frozen Throne and as mobs in a few zones in WoW).

 Now, though, it goes something like this (as far as I know):

1- Eredar are huge, noble, powerful mages who kick all kinds of ass.
2- Evil Titan Sargeras comes and offers them power/knowledge/etc.  Cue maniacal laughter.
3- Eredar accept, turn evil, except for one group, which flees and begins calling itself the "Draenei."
4- Draenei flee to Draenor and coexist with the Orcs for a while
5- The Legion tails the Dranei to Draenor, finds the Orcs there too, enslaves them (as previously)
6- Orcs wage an eight year war on Draenei, eventually winning.
7- Draenei are partly wiped out, but many survive.  Draenei join the Alliance to balance out the teams.
8- "Draenei" shown in previous games are subspecies of Draenei (Lost Ones or Broken Ones), while "True" Draenei look like demons (the Eredar).

Yes. He shares the same birthday with Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise-D. Bloody strange coincidence, that.