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Thursday, December 1, 2011

Faction Pride

There's a thread going on at the official forums about faction pride and the Developer's Water Cooler that was posted a few days ago.

As primarily an Alliance player, I have a strong interest and disagreement with the way Blizzard has presented itself to the community in terms of this conflict, and I tried to articulate it in this post. I'll repost it here, since I think it captures how I feel about the whole thing well.


I really do think the Developer Water Cooler post missed the mark.

Story is awesome, I am all for Story, please realize that I don't care if we win or loose, honestly, what I care about is pride and even-handed dealing.

Have you ever played a table-top game? I'm sure you have. :-) When you have a conflict between two characters, and the GM is managing the conflict, how do you feel when the GM is kind of winking and nudging at the guy you're rolling off against and saying, "Good lucky buddy, you got this!"?

That's what playing Alliance is like.

We're (or at least, I'm) not looking for a tit-for-tat Theramore means Horde needs to loose Crossroads or whatever - tell the story you have to tell, but please stop with the divide and conquer.

We constantly see "Horde pride" and such all over Blizzcon, from the developers, in your commentary but we seldom if ever see any such dialogue about the Alliance. That's the crux of the problem. It's okay if you guys all play Horde. I don't care. You guys make the game, you guys deserve to enjoy it in whatever way you like.

But what I care deeply about is how you present yourself at the gaming table when you're running the game for me. Don't make me suspect you're rooting for the guy across the table from me when you're supposed to be a neutral party.


That's really it. I have written enough stories, and played enough RPGs to know that winning doesn't always make the best story. But I do require that the person in charge of the story stay neutral and fair to all the players in the game. And I have never felt that way in Warcraft.

1 comment:

  1. Very well said and well worded. (This is Nora, btw - just using my actual real life self account to post these days!)

    I know some friends who have gone to BlizzCon in the past and they've talked about how hard it is being an Alliance player, or how much not just the attendees (which is expected) but also the staff and devs - really just make them feel unwanted. It's a shame, and I have to say I actually feel like the recent Water Cooler talks and responses made it even worse for me. I think I would rather have just - not heard anything than to be told "It's all in your head".

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