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Blue is such a Player 2 color.

Oh my my, oh hey hey. Things is happenin’ today. We’re getting hit with 4.3 folks and it’s brave new world time yet again.

But that’s all beside the point right now, cause I feel like talking about the recent Dev Watercooler on faction bias. Now, I’m gonna come clean on a thing or two myself first. 

I’m an Ally, have been since the beginning, and I mean the ol’ old days, vanilla vintage female dwarf rogue. I’ve played various alts through various leveling pathways of various races and factions and classes. I’ve been a two-hander shaman. I’ve arena’d in the halcyon days of Burning Crusade. I raided in Wrath from when 3K dps was godly up through the halls of ICC. I’ve snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in BG and world PvP more times than I care to remember and I’ve seen city raids fall to a single party of well-organized defenders. I’m an RPer, a PvPer, an AH-Player and a… well no, since Cata I can honestly say I’ve done like eight random dungeons. 

Point is though I been here a long time and I’ve seen the game change in many different ways and over this span of time I have come to temper my thoughts on a lot of issues with the depth of experience. But something about that post bugs me…

This all seems familiar…

It’s the old song and dance we’ve seen since the beginning of the game, “Is that grass really greener over there or is it just me?” The Dev post is well reasoned, well written, but ultimately it has a fatal flaw, it talked about faction bias. There was no way to say it without making some people get angry at the result.

For some faction bias is a scorecard, who has what, if the Horde is 11-1 and the Allies 1-11 it’s a problem. For others it’s a pure mechanical issue, and people pick pet examples to prove their point, from racials to bridges to the numbers of mailboxes per capita in the various cities. And lastly there is the big one, creative energy, development effort and the court of public opinion.

The blog post addressed a lot of option #1, “We’re sorry you lost battles, but you’ll have to take a few more punches before things start looking up” fair enough, it’s war. It then dove into lots of flowery language about forging heroes through hardship and just how awesome Thrall really is. From a story design standpoint it’s great, but the core issue that most people, Horde and Ally alike, are upset about, at least judging from the comments is the last point, how much does Blizzard care?

Sadly the answer to “What is more of the current in game story advancement being used for?” is a pretty resounding “For the Horde!”. Now this isn’t saying that in the time span of Cata the Alliance did nothing. Darkshore for example has the Night Elves engaging Horde forces and players taking part, as well as getting to help out Malfurion directly, good times, in Wolfheart, Wrynn gets to whip Garrosh pretty soundly, and run him off for a time.

While Darkshore is fine the problem with Wolfheart and a number of other events is they don’t have any impact in the game, at all. Unless you read the book, or an article on the web some place you have no idea that the Alliance was winning in Ashenvale, or had won and was later turned back, all you see is orcs everywhere, bombing, burning, and taking over previously Night Elf territory. Southshore is just gone, Alliance doesn’t even see mention of its loss. I could go on, Worgen vs Goblin development, Ally storylines being resolved in Horde side questing, ambiguous endings vs definitive ones, amount of faction leader involvement, pop-culture quests, open Horde-pride from Blizz, etc. People have made all these points, no need to be a broken record here.

Give it time.

I’m honestly not mad at Blizzard, not upset, not envious, just disappointed. I want to see things turn around, I really do. The new dungeons and raids coming today might give the Alliance more reason to like Thrall, the events surrounding Theramore are unclear still, and they say things will be better in Mists. For now it’s benefit of the doubt time. We need to let things develop naturally; Blizzard works with a big time delay and folks have to remember that. Complaining now isn’t going to change things tomorrow, they do listen, and we have given a good solid response. Now we have to wait and see what their reaction is. I just hope they learned their lesson. For Khaz Modan!