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Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.



To be fair, you're playing on Story difficulty, which isn't exactly... well, y'know, difficult.

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Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Kith posted:

To be fair, you're playing on Story difficulty, which isn't exactly... well, y'know, difficult.

Hey, you want someone who's actually good at the game, go pester Melth or somebody. :v:

And since I know this thread is the only source some people follow for news on what's happening with Blizzard, they settled the big discrimination/harrassment/assault lawsuit yesterday for $54 million and no admission of wrongdoing.

Combined with That Goddamn Quest from Dragonflight's PTR, yeah I feel entirely justified in my continuing bitter cynicism despite Blizzard's protests that they've totally changed and slaughtered the sacred cows. I still hear mooing.

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

Doesn't settling out of court just means buying their way out of being convicted of the crimes they did?

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Poil posted:

Doesn't settling out of court just means buying their way out of being convicted of the crimes they did?

Pretty much. Means it won't go to a fully fledged trial, just Blizzard paying X amount of money (before taxes) to be divided among those who filed the suit.

The legalese boils down to Blizzard, with the court's backing, declaring "We did nothing wrong, here's some change we found under the couch so you'll go away."

The official court statement explicitly says that Blizzard did nothing wrong, Blizzard of course treats everyone fairly and does not discriminate or mistreat anyone, and Bobby Kotick would never be mean or do anything remotely untoward.

This isn't the place to discuss this in any further detail, I was just informing readers since I know some of y'all only learn about Blizzard's current activities from this thread.

FoolyCharged
Oct 11, 2012

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!
Somebody call for an ant?

Poil posted:

Doesn't settling out of court just means buying their way out of being convicted of the crimes they did?

Not always. Sometimes the cost of litigation is so high that one party takes less damages than they should because they can't afford to continue. It could also imply that the people suing don't have much of a case and that Blizzard deciding throwing them chump change would remove the situation without the risks of going to court. With the lowball payout(relative to blizzard's money) and lack of any admission of wrongdoing, it doesn't look like Blizzard was particularly afraid of things going to court, but that's all it tells us.

Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.


Are there any noteworthy representations of law-oriented work in WoW? For some reason the idea of lawyers interacting with the homicidal kleptomaniac Adventurer Protagonist is extremely funny to me.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


Kith posted:

Are there any noteworthy representations of law-oriented work in WoW? For some reason the idea of lawyers interacting with the homicidal kleptomaniac Adventurer Protagonist is extremely funny to me.

Garrosh going on trial for warcrimes between Mists of Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor in a book (titled Warcrimes).

Baine is his legal representative because literally no-one else wants the job and Baine believes in a fair trial above his own personal dislike of Garrosh.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Kith posted:

Are there any noteworthy representations of law-oriented work in WoW? For some reason the idea of lawyers interacting with the homicidal kleptomaniac Adventurer Protagonist is extremely funny to me.

Only thing I can think of is Garrosh's war crimes trial, which involves no actual international laws or rules of conduct or what have you and is just main characters from the games and books giving speeches until someone who everyone agreed would judge the trial for some reason made a decision.

There's been references to some nations (mostly the Alliance and the elves) having courts of some kind, but I can't think of any representation of a legal system beyond the local noble making decisions on the spot and that being final.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


I think we see some Suramar legal stuff? But that's more contracts between nobility being solved via trial by combat.

Siegkrow
Oct 11, 2013

Arguing about Lore for 5 years and counting



I think you could make an argument for initiate goldmine?
I mean, contract lawyer, arguably, but still.

Rhonne
Feb 13, 2012

Cythereal posted:

Only thing I can think of is Garrosh's war crimes trial, which involves no actual international laws or rules of conduct or what have you and is just main characters from the games and books giving speeches until someone who everyone agreed would judge the trial for some reason made a decision.

The trial was also ultimately pointless because Garrosh escaped. And even if he didn't, the August Celestials that were acting as the judges said they had already made their choice before the trial even began.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Kith posted:

Are there any noteworthy representations of law-oriented work in WoW? For some reason the idea of lawyers interacting with the homicidal kleptomaniac Adventurer Protagonist is extremely funny to me.

Of course! Paladins pass Judgement all the time.

Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.


Dirk the Average posted:

Of course! Paladins pass Judgement all the time.

:golfclap:

Feldegast42
Oct 29, 2011

COMMENCE THE RITE OF SHITPOSTING

Kith posted:

Are there any noteworthy representations of law-oriented work in WoW? For some reason the idea of lawyers interacting with the homicidal kleptomaniac Adventurer Protagonist is extremely funny to me.

Cythereal appears to be filling in for that part at the moment

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
Alliance 4: Cower at the Tower



And now for the 'secret' level.



We have reached the portal, Kael. Now we'll attempt to open it!

There's a few contradictory accounts I found about how this mission came to be, but they all agree that originally Blizzard had envisioned a mission where you'd have to defend the portal against Garithos - and possibly the Scourge, depending on which account you believe - for a set period of time before Blizzard concluded that a simple timed holdout mission wasn't much fun at this point.



Glad to hear it. You'd best get moving.

What seems to be the most widely accepted account holds that Blizzard wanted to bring some of the custom scenario magic that had been so popular with Reign of Chaos into the main campaign for The Frozen Throne, but were concerned about alienating traditional RTS players so they made this mission optional.



Use explosives on the portal! Whoever destroys the portal will be a hero!

Another account claims that Blizzard had initially envisioned an official scenario pack for The Frozen Throne, an official set of custom scenarios with non-standard gameplay intended for single player, and this mission was the only one that was completed in time so they didn't bother with the scenario pack and hastily refitted this scenario to fit into the story.



Well done, Vashj. If we build more strategic towers, we should be able to hold off Garithos' forces long enough for our people to get through.
You'd better be right. If the portal falls, none of us will survive!

Unfortunately, this mission in particular doesn't come across very well in a screenshot format.



Tower defense games are a subgenre unto themselves, but one I have very little knowledge of or experience with, so I have no idea what's different or insightful about this mission compared to the genre.



The fundamental premise is simple: a conga line of enemy units will march a pre-set path towards a point you have to defend, and in this particular case enemy units explode when they reach the portal, causing damage. So you build towers along the route in a bid to stop them - plus in this case you have Kael and Vashj as an extra line of defense.



As waves progress, enemy units get tougher, sometimes faster, and will sometimes have special abilities to complicate the defense.



In return, you have a wide range of towers you can build along the attack route, and in this particular game, each can be upgraded once for a fee. In this mission you start with two tower types, but unlock three more as the mission progresses. In total they consist of:

Energy Tower - high rate of fire, good range, low damage, bonus vs air units

Boulder Tower - medium rate of fire, good range, area effect damage, only hits ground units

Flame Tower - high rate of fire, short range

Cold Tower - slow rate of fire, good range, slows enemies, has an area effect when upgraded

Death Tower - slow rate of fire, extremely high damage, medium range



This particular mission is much simpler than the one tower defense game I've played before, understandably. There is only ever one route enemies can take, they have no ability to disable or destroy towers, and your gold income is largely passive. Enemies sometimes drop coins that you can pick up with Vashj and Kael.



Part of the complexity of the genre is juggling damage and range. You can set up horrendous killboxes, but if an enemy is fast or tough enough, they can get through and then what? You do need to layer defenses across the length of the route.



One of the really nasty tricks this mission has is enemies that are immune to magic. Upgraded cold towers, with their area effect slow, are a great idea... but magic immune enemies are immune to the slow effect.



These zeppelins are a trick I'm used to, at least: when destroyed, they spawn new ground units that jump out.



This mission was mostly a pleasing cadence of watching waves of enemies die, coupled with a few moments of panic when I realized I underestimated the task. Paladin bosses in particular, I initially front-loaded my towers, but paladins have that pesky divine shield, letting them laugh off tower fire while that ability is active.



Garithos has quite the menagerie at his disposal.



Case in point about divine shield.



Also, don't sleep on the basic energy tower. They're the dedicated anti-air tower, and the air units get very beefy as the mission goes on.



I do feel that this mission made every type of tower feel useful, which I appreciate. I may not be a connoisseur of tower defense games, but my instinct from my limited exposure to the genre is that it's good game design to make every type of tower genuinely useful, rather than relegating certain options to simply what you build before you unlock the good choices.



These things drat near broke through and I'm not sure why. They just seemed to take a lot less damage than they felt to me like they should, and I was wondering if they had some sort of mana shield buff that I wasn't seeing.



And these slabs of petrified beef are immune to magic. This wave was what I had in mind when I issued that warning, even if I did handle them.



The final wave proves to be a letdown, despite being lead by the first sighting of a Pandaren Brewmaster in this LP.



I was listening to a video about the making of an old computer game called Sacrifice in the background while I was recording this, and right as the last few pandaren died, the video played the line that anyone who has played Sacrifice knows in their head by heart: "All of your manahoars have been slaughtered."

It makes sense in context.



Which the game tried to follow up on by displaying Samwise Didier's original pandaren artwork and playing the Brewmaster's line "I bring panda-monium!"



All right, men! Pull back! Pull back to the portal!
Now, young prince, we take one final step... towards destiny.

Sorry, I was getting snacks from the concession stand. Cheesey chilidog for me. And for you, a powdered sugar kodo ear with raspberry sauce.
...You remembered my favorite.
You weren't kidding when you told me your dad had never let you visit the fair.




And now we know for sure that Niamh's still in the world of the living.
She never would have missed a chance to gloat about elven engineering.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
Void Where Prohibited

Today's subject, the elves of Quel'thalas who didn't join Kael's exodus, or later split off from the modern-day government of Quel'thalas.



While the forces of Kael's exodus, and the government that stayed behind in Silvermoon and followed his example, represented the majority of the high elf (now blood elf) population, there was a substantial minority that refused to leave the Alliance or partake in demon summoning. Garithos, while a certified shitbag, was only one leader in the shattered remnants of Lordaeron, and many high elves - notably those in Jaina Proudmoore's expedition to Kalimdor and the contingent lost on Draenor during the Second War - felt that Kael and Silvermoon's actions were going too far. These remaining high elves, keeping that name, rallied primarily behind Vereesa Windrunner, the middle child of the Windrunner sisters, as their leader. Vereesa Windrunner had lived in Dalaran for much of her life, and married a human archmage named Rhonin. Vereesa is mostly irrelevant after this, and was thoroughly supplanted by Alleria when she returned.

The government in Quel'thalas at first tried to persuade these exiles to return, but the decision by the blood elves to join the Horde in WoW's first expansion solidified this rift into the blood elves calling the remaining high elves traitors to be executed. Much to the blood elves' surprise, the high elves proceeded to survive quite well. Although just as cut off from the Sunwell and the arcane power of Quel'thalas as their cousins, the high elves manage to slake their addiction by drawing on the fonts of arcane power that existed elsewhere in the world, particularly wherever the Kirin Tor had set up shop and the moonwells of the night elves, which the latter did reluctantly give the high elves access to. While the magical powers of the remaining high elves were noted in WoW to have diminished as a result of their now sharply limited access to magic, it was enough to avoid physical degeneration. Some high elves even went so far as to reunite with their night elf cousins over the years, a subplot mostly confined to Horde quests to wipe out contingents of high elf rangers that had become members of the night elf Sentinels.


It's easy to tell high elf anything from blood elf anything in WoW: is it painted in red or blue?

While always few in number, the Alliance-affiliated high elves have been a common sight throughout WoW, to the point of becoming a major reputation faction for the Alliance in Wrath of the Lich King, and Alliance fans had inevitably called for playable high elves since the game's launch. This was a notorious bone of contention between the Alliance fanbase and Blizzard (and the Horde fanbase) that remains something of an issue to this day. Blizzard continually insisted that there weren't enough high elves left to be a playable race, yet Blizzard seemed perfectly comfortable letting people play as gnomes and draenei who had comparable backstories, or the small, elite order of death knights fighting on the side of the living. Blizzard themselves were at times less than diplomatic about their stance that this iconic race of the Alliance from WC2 and WC3, that kept showing up as NPCs throughout the game, should not be playable. The thread title of this LP for Beyond the Dark Portal was WoW lead designer Ian Hazzikostas telling Alliance players who wanted to play high elves that the Horde is there waiting for them as blood elves.

Also, for some reason calls for playable high elves were a lightning rod for Horde players to accuse Alliance fans of being Nazis. Even on SA you could find people not-so-subtly implying, or just plain saying, that clearly the only reason Alliance fans wanted playable high elves was because they wanted to play 'blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryans.'

I really don't get it.



Inevitably, Blizzard in time decided to put out this fire with gasoline and gave the Alliance new elves... but not as anyone knew them. During their extradimensional exile, Turalyon and Alleria encountered forces from the Void assaulting a Burning Legion prison world at the same time that Turalyon and Alleria were attempting to stage a prison break. During the three-way battle, Alleria herself was gravely wounded by a Void Lord when she took a blow that might have killed Turalyon. While the draenei saved Alleria's life, the energies of the Void had seeped into Alleria's soul and began trying to forcibly corrupt her. Alleria managed to resist the Void corruption in part due to the help of the Ethereals, who were themselves intimately familiar with the power of the Void, and even managed to harness the Void's powers for her own use to help in the battle against the Legion. During the Argus campaign in the Legion expansion, this culminated in Alleria drawing off the power of a dark Naaru, mastering the power of the Void within herself.

At the same time, Alleria became aware that there had been elves in Quel'thalas who had begun their own experiments with Void magic since the Third War. While Kael and his followers had turned to fel magic to slake their addiction, some magisters felt that turning to the very power that had almost laid the world to waste in the war was a betrayal of all that they had fought for. The Void, while just as dangerous, was at least well known to be just as hostile to demons as it was to the living, and some of these magisters felt that the Void was a better alternative than fel energy. This research had been strictly banned before the Third War and remained banned now, but the post-Third War state of Quel'thalas had lead to a certain laxity on Kirin Tor decrees.

Matters came to a head when, upon her return to Azeroth, Alleria demanded and was granted a chance by Silvermoon's leaders to see the Sunwell again for the first time since she had left for Draenor. The Sunwell had, of course, at this point been transformed into in part a font of holy energy as well as arcane, and the arrival of someone so deeply saturated by the energies of the Void sparked a catastrophe. A powerful Void entity, attracted by the confluence of Alleria with the Light-infused Sunwell, attempted to possess Alleria and launch an assault to corrupt the Sunwell. While the blood elves, Alleria, and a visiting delegation of Nightborne successfully fended off the attack, the leaders of Quel'thalas deemed Alleria a traitor who was by her very presence a walking danger to their still-fragile flourishing, and banished her from Quel'thalas along with a new stricture against any research into the Void.


Yeah, this is what the void elf 'heritage armor' - the race-exclusive set you get for reaching a certain level as a given race - looks like.

Nevertheless, Alleria's return, and proven ability to control the Void's power despite its best efforts to seize control of her, lead to Alleria finding new allies on her way out. Not just elves who had already experimented with the Void themselves, but dissidents to the blood elf regime who saw in Alleria's return and steadfast faith in the Alliance a better cause to fight for. Void elves became a playable race for the Alliance, high elves with a suitably edgy makeover. In the pocket dimension that serves as the void elves' home base, even previously normal high elves began signing up to get a makeover as a gesture of their allegiance. While the rest of the Alliance's leadership was understandably concerned about the void elves as members of the Alliance, Alleria's stature and her husband's faith in her lead the void elves to be officially accepted by the Alliance authorities as representing Quel'thalas in exile. The void elves would go on to be a regular presence ever since, taking up something of a role as the Alliance's go-to people for weird, creepy, and altogether dark magic, like one quest where they open a succession of void rifts to yoink Horde soldiers directly into the Void never to be seen again.

To say that the void elves were controversial with the player base is a massive understatement. Blizzard had always maintained that there weren't enough high elves left to be a playable race, but void elves were even fewer in number and here they were. Some fans cried that they wanted *high* elves, not Cthulu-touched weirdos with tentacle hair. Nevertheless, void elves quickly exploded in popularity and are far and away the most successful of the allied races from a player population standpoint. And, quietly, Blizzard gave void elves regular high elf cosmetic features at the same time they did so for the blood elves. You'll always be a void elf, but now you can look like a regular high elf.

Love em or hate em, the void elves appear to be here to stay.

BlazetheInferno
Jun 6, 2015
And now, having completed all waves of the Secret Mission... you will receive a bonus on the next mission! ...I don't think it will be hard to figure out what that bonus is.

CheeseThief
Dec 28, 2012

Two wholesome boys to brighten your day

I think this secret level was my first exposure to a tower defense game, no idea where the genre started but I'm sure this level did a lot to popularise them. At the very least I know there were a lot of TD custom maps back in the day.

Falconer
Dec 7, 2003

Did you know, I was THE MOON once!

Yes! You see, one night it turned out the moon had been STOLEN!

The animal people asked ME to take its place as I am so WISE and BRILLIANT!!

Cythereal posted:



These things drat near broke through and I'm not sure why. They just seemed to take a lot less damage than they felt to me like they should, and I was wondering if they had some sort of mana shield buff that I wasn't seeing.

If I'm reading it right then those revenants have 62 armor which provides a lot of damage reduction, no mana shield needed. In comparison, the siege golems have 18 armor so they'd go down faster even though they're probably intended to be tougher than the revenants.

Natural 20
Sep 17, 2007

Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.


A little in line with the Void Elf update, here's how Alleria is set to look in The War Within.

Genuinely, I really enjoy this aesthetic and I think that giving the Velfs customisations to allow them to look like that was ultimately what Blizzard needed to do.

Gun Jam
Apr 11, 2015

Cythereal posted:

And now we know for sure that Niamh's still in the world of the living.
She never would have missed a chance to gloat about elven engineering.


Meanwhile, outside the afterlife theatre...



Cythereal posted:

You'll always be a void elf, but now you can look like a regular high elf.


Gives a "I'M NOT BACKPEDALING " energy.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Natural 20 posted:

Genuinely, I really enjoy this aesthetic and I think that giving the Velfs customisations to allow them to look like that was ultimately what Blizzard needed to do.

I don't mind the void elves in isolation, beyond that I think they're a big plot hook that's been resolutely ignored since they showed up, but I do very much dislike Blizzard's handling of the whole high/void elf thing.


Gun Jam posted:

Gives a "I'M NOT BACKPEDALING " energy.

My personal suspicion is that the void elves were a well-meaning but clueless dev going "Okay, here's your high elves! And now THEY'RE EDGY BADASSES, NOT THOSE LAME rear end PANSIES!"

Then having a shocked pikachu face when this was not universally beloved.

Mindopali
Jun 7, 2023

Cythereal posted:


I was listening to a video about the making of an old computer game called Sacrifice in the background while I was recording this, and right as the last few pandaren died, the video played the line that anyone who has played Sacrifice knows in their head by heart: "All of your manahoars have been slaughtered."



I did not expect Sacrifice being mentionned on this thread, that's for sure. Glad you did though, I have good memories with that game.

Be so kind as to not murder these memories too.

Mindopali fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Dec 17, 2023

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Mindopali posted:

I did not expect Sacrifice being mentionned on this thread, that's for sure. Glad you did though, I have good memories with that game.

Be so kind as to not murder these memories too.

"Guys, shouldn't we put aside our differences and do something about this apocalyptic threat to existence?"

"NO!!!"

A great game, but you're in no danger of me LPing it. I'll leave that to anyone who's actually good at RTS. :v:

SirPhoebos
Dec 10, 2007

WELL THAT JUST HAPPENED!

Cythereal posted:

Also, for some reason calls for playable high elves were a lightning rod for Horde players to accuse Alliance fans of being Nazis. Even on SA you could find people not-so-subtly implying, or just plain saying, that clearly the only reason Alliance fans wanted playable high elves was because they wanted to play 'blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryans.'

I really don't get it.

:stare: WTF

Mindopali
Jun 7, 2023

Cythereal posted:

"Guys, shouldn't we put aside our differences and do something about this apocalyptic threat to existence?"

"NO!!!"

A great game, but you're in no danger of me LPing it. I'll leave that to anyone who's actually good at RTS. :v:


If people are bored and feel the urge the check out an early 2000 and very original oddity, LParchive has you covered. Sacrifice is already there twice; once in screenshot form and once in video.

As for the last warcraft update, I think that secret level must now sting fans in all the wrong ways. Modders made quite a few tower defense maps for warcraft 3 back in the day. Not as known as the dota mod maybe, but still.
But now, everyone who ever modded or wanted to try out modding the game back in the day is probably reminded that to play reforged, they had to accept giving up and forever every little thing they ever created using the game to Blizzard and not having any right to it.

Blizzard made good efforts to put themselves in the unfortunate 'gonads-in-the-guillotine' situation in terms of PR.

Rhonne
Feb 13, 2012

The funny thing about the void elves is that their recruitment quest kind of proves the blood elves were right to kick them out. When you find them in their little void rift, they're messing around with some void artifact they found and almost immediately unleash an army of void monsters that try to corrupt them, which is how they end up all purple and blue. The only reason they're alive right now is because Alleria and the player were there to save them. Imagine how much worse things would have gone if they were doing that in the middle of Silvermoon.

Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.



a considerable amount of wow players are loving insane and use wow as the basis for their entire personality and worldview

Tenebrais
Sep 2, 2011

The lack of High Elves for the Alliance really feels like Blizzard tying themselves in knots wanting to not do something boring. We've seen enough of this campaign to see both why Blood Elves would be the ones that would become playable and why they would join the Horde (at least if a third faction wasn't an option, since that's clearly what's starting to form here), and adding High Elves to the Alliance would feel kind of redundant after that. But then they committed so hard to that fact that they just manage to piss off anyone that wanted them anyway. The allied races thing would have been a perfect opportunity to finally fill that gap, but someone had an idea for a more interesting version of High Elves and ended up creating, well, Not High Elves, so no one is satisfied.

Or maybe I'm being overly generous and someone senior just really didn't like high elves. Who can say?

BlazetheInferno
Jun 6, 2015
My main thing is... I wouldn't have minded High Elves, but they kept giving a firm, direct "No. It's not happening." And people kept screeching and screeching for them that I started to really, really loathe the people doing it.

The thing is, High Elves vs Blood Elves by the end of Burning Crusade was a difference of Political Affiliation, and literally nothing else. They did not want to simply add the same race to Alliance side, and they were correct to do so. There is nothing to distinguish them. By making Void Elves, they did something that allowed them to do it without them literally just being "We're the ones who didn't dye all our clothes red."

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
And there's the aggro posting I was waiting for on this particular subject. :v:

BlazetheInferno
Jun 6, 2015

Cythereal posted:

And there's the aggro posting I was waiting for on this particular subject. :v:

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? >>;

Because I stand by what I said. A lot of the people who kept demanding High Elves got bad, and any time someone tried to calmly explain that "guys, they've said no multiple times, and here are a whole bunch of reasons why", they went into full-on ATTACK mode, not even trying to address their points, just full aggression and vitriol. I've seen some poo poo in my time on the forums, man.

I ended up finding reasons to actively not want High Elves basically out of SPITE for these people because they were so toxic. And then Blizzard went and found a way to do something similar that dealt with my main reasons for not wanting High Elves. And as a bonus, the High Elf Purists remain unhappy (because Void Elves that look like High Elves are not High Elves), which frankly, I consider another win.

BlazetheInferno fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Dec 17, 2023

Keldulas
Mar 18, 2009
Ah, spite, a motivator of the ages.

I support the execution of spite on any type of writhing fanboy masses.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
I think the main way this TD level differs from what I consider to be "classic" tower defense is that the path to defend is already laid out. In my opinion part of a "classic" tower defense is that you also build and shape the path with your towers, that shaping an extra long path for the enemies without blocking them off(which triggers their "beat up your towers"-scripting) is one of the really important skills to learn.

ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!

Cythereal posted:

Also, for some reason calls for playable high elves were a lightning rod for Horde players to accuse Alliance fans of being Nazis. Even on SA you could find people not-so-subtly implying, or just plain saying, that clearly the only reason Alliance fans wanted playable high elves was because they wanted to play 'blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryans.'

While it's definitely not the only reason for it, nor is it something I feel it's fair to paint or accuse the whole of Alliance players with, it was also still definitely a reason that was given, and often, though not in so many words. More..."We want traditional elves" with all the implied baggage that would come with. WoW players were not known for their racial sensitivity, and I've already mentioned more then a few times that the Alliance's general look and presentation suffered from looking a bit too much like a Deus Vult poster. The fantasy genre has long had problems, many of them originating from Gygax's merger of Tolkien-esque aesthetics and Wild West style politics, of defining itself by having western Europeans fighting for "civilization" against monsters who represented "savagry" and "barbarism" (And who often very blatantly made use of racial coding). WoW never really divorced itself from this, and mostly just stuck to going "ok but the Horde is also good guys (who still represent savagry and barbarism)!" Except for every third expansion or so where they decide the Horde are all going to be bad guys yet again, for typically bad or poorly thought out reasons, to put the WAR back in WARcraft, naturally.

Putting the Blood Elves in the Horde, even if it were done cynically for reasons of balancing server faction imbalances, is still a pretty interesting twist on what elves tend to be and how they tend to be portrayed, and while Blizzard shoots themselves in the foot often in arrogance and spite, I do think it was ultimately the far more interesting move - and thus the right move - for the same reason I honestly think putting night elves in the Alliance is the more interesting move.

Anyways there was a major story update at one point where the high elves inact a progrom on the blood elves throughout Dalaran because of course Blizzard would do so.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
Folks, me bringing up the fanbase misbehaving was not an invitation to go "Well actually they kind of had a point..."

Leave that poo poo in the WoW official forums.

Rhonne
Feb 13, 2012

Cythereal posted:

The void elves would go on to be a regular presence ever since, taking up something of a role as the Alliance's go-to people for weird, creepy, and altogether dark magic, like one quest where they open a succession of void rifts to yoink Horde soldiers directly into the Void never to be seen again.

Another hosed up thing I remember the void elves doing was using void necromancy to resurrect ancient dinosaurs that the Zandalari people considered sacred in order to inflict psychological damage on them(in addition to the whole zombie t-rex eating people thing)

Bloody Pom
Jun 5, 2011



Natural 20 posted:



A little in line with the Void Elf update, here's how Alleria is set to look in The War Within.

Genuinely, I really enjoy this aesthetic and I think that giving the Velfs customisations to allow them to look like that was ultimately what Blizzard needed to do.

Credit it where it's due, this is a pretty sick design. Hope this trend of replacing the boob-plate with more realistic garb continues.

Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.


Yeah, that design is slick as hell. If it wasn't for the Warcraft Brand Elfbrows™, I wouldn't have even imagined it as something belonging to a Blizzard game.

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Tenebrais
Sep 2, 2011

She's even got biceps!

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