Faction population balance: Expansion

[Lantyssa]

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.

[Jayce]

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...

[SurfD]

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[stray]

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.

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!  ), then something's gotta be fixed.

[Chenghiz]

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.

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.

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.

[Kail]

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

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."

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.

[Righ]

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

[Ironwood]

My Brain Just Blew.

[SurfD]

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.

[Lantyssa]

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!  ), then something's gotta be fixed.

Hey!  My troll was cute. 

[Simond]

[jpark]

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

Yeah, it's coherent, but huge tracts of it are rewritten at short intervals..

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.
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 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.

[Kail]

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.

[stray]

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.

[SurfD]

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.

[MrHat]

Righ, is that Patrick Stewart?

[Kail]

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?

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).

[Righ]

Righ, is that Patrick Stewart?

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