World of Warcraft | Superior Realities

Horde Stereotypes: Are They Really True?

I’m one of those rare people that plays both factions in World of Warcraft. Back in Wrath of the Lich King, I mainly played Horde. Since Cata’s come around, I’ve switched to focusing on Alliance–in large part because I have a nice guild over there–but I still play my Horde toons regularly, and I still enjoy the Horde’s more colourful nature.

I never liked the faction rivalry in the game, and it especially bugs me when people actually buy into it and legitimately hate the other side. It’s just a game, dude! It always amuses how each side claims the other is made up of children and immature idiots. It’s just ridiculous that an aesthetic decision based on personal taste would dictate the maturity level of players. Right? The official symbol of the Horde

Lately, even though I still find it an absurd idea, I’m starting to wonder if the Alliance might not be right after all. I’ve had nothing but bad luck with people on the Horde side.

I’m a guild-jumper. My first Horde guild was nice, but it was essentially three people–including myself. I eventually left in the hopes of finding a larger guild. The first one I got into was, simply put, disgusting. The guild channel made the Trade chat anal [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker] spam look highbrow by comparison. Furthermore, despite their billing themselves as casual, some of them were surprisingly elitist and would absolutely eviscerate you if you failed to live up to their high standards.

I wound up ragequitting that guild.

My Horde characters are currently split between two guilds, and I suspect I will eventually quit them. In both cases, the litmus test came when I mentioned my Alliance characters. In one case, someone mentioned he would “rather be dead than [slur for a homosexual] Alliance.” In the other, when I mentioned that half my Alliance guild is female, someone wondered how they had found their way out of the kitchen. Face, meet my good friend, palm.

I’m only staying in the first guild for its high level perks, and in the other because I’ve only been a member for a few days and I’m hoping they’re better than they seem (somehow I doubt it). I’m about ready to give up on guilds altogether on that faction, honestly.

And it’s not just my own guilds. The other day, I joined a Firelands trash run on my Blood Elf mage with a group that was mostly made up of one guild. Now, to amuse my nerdly heart, I created a few macros that make my mage /say incantations in Thalassian when he uses his cooldowns. For some reason, the group took offense to this and began yelling at me halfway through the run, telling me to shut up and pelting me with homophobic slurs.

And for the record, it’s not as if I was filling the chat log and interfering with raid communication. They weren’t even using chat–except to harass me. I think they must have been talking in their guild channel or Vent.

If they’d been polite about it or given a good reason, I’d have shut off the macros happily. But I will not “stfu.”

This run honestly damaged my faith in the human race. To see so much bile and hatred spewed towards someone because they occasionally use fantasy words in a fantasy game… It boggles the mind.

It doesn’t so much offend me that they insulted me. It offends me that such small-minded, hateful people exist in the first place.

And to cap it all off, my random Horde dungeon groups as of late have been filled with sniping, insults, and people treating each other horribly.

I can’t help but contrast this with my experiences on the Alliance side, where my Dungeon Finder groups are polite and pleasant more often than not, where I have a kind and supportive guild that doesn’t feel like it’s made up of disturbed 15 year-olds. That’s not to say I don’t encounter immature and occasionally disgusting people on the Alliance side, but it doesn’t seem to happen as often as on the Horde side–despite the fact that the Alliance vastly outnumbers the Horde on my server.

I still find it hard to believe one’s maturity and one’s choice of faction might be linked, but it’s hard to ignore the (circumstantial but strong) evidence before my eyes.

What do you think? Is the Horde really less mature? Or am I just spectacularly unlucky? If you have any tales of Horde people behaving like, well, people, please share them in the comments. I would love to have my faith in my Horde brethren restored.

Review: Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects:

Being a big fan of Warcraft books in general and Christie Golden’s in particular, I was very eager to get my hands on her latest, “Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects,” which is a semi-sequel to the recent “The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm.”“Twilight of the Aspects” disappointed me in some ways, but it exceeded my expectations in others. It was oddly inconsistent.

One thing that stays true through the entire novel is that it is extremely fast-paced. This is, for the most part, a good thing, though there are some times when things happen so quickly that your head might spin just a little bit.

Otherwise, the book feels as if it’s split into two parts. The first is definitely the more enjoyable, and features Thrall traveling across Azeroth and through time itself in attempt to aid the dragonflights in stopping a mysterious catastrophe known as the Hour of Twilight.

This part of the book is epic, thrilling, and emotional. If it has any flaw, it’s that it too closely parallels the Elemental Bonds chain that was added to the game in the last patch, but it also includes some major revelations–not just about Thrall, but about the Warcraft universe as a whole–that weren’t in Elemental Bonds, so that still makes it more than worth reading for every lore fan. I don’t want to give anything away, but this is a very important installment in the greater Warcraft storyline; questions fans have had for years are finally being answered.

I found the second half of the book to drag a bit, though. I’m not entirely sure why I felt this way–it was still fast-paced and action-packed. Perhaps it’s that I’m starting to agree with the people who think Thrall has become too perfect–by the halfway point of the book, I fully expected him to bring all the Forsaken back to life, turn Tanaris into a garden, put Outland back together, and one-shot Sargeras with a dirty look. I think Christie Golden may also have tried a bit too hard to make things emotional. If I had to read one more description of some profoundly beautiful and moving epiphany…

I also found the villains underwhelming. One is a chromatic dragon, and I always thought the chromatic dragons were a silly concept–and doubly so now that we have the twilight dragonflight, which is supposed to be the more evolved alternative to chromatic dragons, the more refined model. The other is a mysterious figure called the Twilight Father–a confusing position, considering we have a pretty good idea of how the twilight dragons came to be, and he has nothing to do with any of it. There’s a twist at the end about the Father, but if you’re a hardcore WoW fan, it won’t come as much of a surprise.

Although this is more a of an inherent issue of shared universes than any blunder of Christie Golden’s, I found she didn’t quite capture the personalities of certain characters usually written by other authors, particularly Kalecgos and Deathwing. The cold, calculating Deathwing in this book bears little resemblance to the screeching headcase we’ve come to know and love to hate in Richard Knaak’s books and the game itself. As for Kalecgos, I’m not sure why he didn’t feel right to me, but I suspect it has to do with the fact no real mention was given of his grief over the loss of Anveena. I find it hard to believe an immortal being would get over so big a loss in so short a time.

Finally, (vague spoiler ahead–you’ve been warned), this book kills off a very major Warcraft character, and although his ending was rather spectacular, I still found it far too quick and abrupt for someone who has been so important for so long. It’s almost as distressing as the random deaths of Illidan, Magni, and Cairne.

Still, I don’t wish to give the impression “Twilight of the Aspects” was a bad book. It may have had its share of low points, but it also had some amazing highs. I’ve been intentionally vague about its better points because I think people will most enjoy them if they come in fresh.

Overall rating: 7.5/10

You can buy “Twilight of the Aspects,” as well as the rest of the Warcraft novels, on my Amazon Affiliate.

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