The Queue: Why don’t the Tauren like the Alliance?

Sometimes you get a question that you really, really want to answer.

This is a good question, because as much as I’d love to tell you that the tauren have no particular reason to hate the Alliance, the fact is that over the past decade of World of Warcraft events have transpired that would give them reasons.

1. Camp Taurajo was a predominately tauren settlement. We can go back and forth on the legitimacy of Camp T as a military target, the Alliance goals in the attack, etc etc. But the fact remains that Camp T was a tauren settlement and the Alliance firebombed it. Many tauren seek revenge for this.
2. The Explorer’s Guild has actually sent people into Mulgore and the Southern Barrens, used explosives on the land to excavate it, and otherwise not only completely ignored the tauren but actively attacked and even killed them while doing so. The Explorer’s Guild (a dwarven institution, mind you) even killed most of the Stonespire tribe in the Southern Barrens while in the process of despoiling their territory. In Mulgore, their actions went so far as to cause earth elementals to rise up and destroy them. Considering how much the tauren revere the earth, this is a major problem.
3. To a certain degree, the races of the Alliance have at best been less than friendly or helpful to tauren over the years. We’ve already covered recent interactions with the humans and dwarves, but the night elves did nothing to help the tauren in their thousands of years of war with the centaur, allowing the race to be pushed to the edge of extinction. Say what you want about Thrall and the orcs, but without their aid, the tauren wouldn’t have Mulgore at all and would likely still be locked in warfare that they were losing with the more mobile and genocidal centaur. The enemy of my enemy might not always be my friend, but it’s hard to argue that you can be friends with the enemy of your friend.

Essentially, the tauren don’t have as much personal animosity towards the races of the Alliance as, say, the blood elves (human forces under Garithos nearly helped wipe out their people), the orcs (we all know that song) or the trolls (who, to be fair, have as much reason to hate the blood elves and they got over that). But they do have reasons to dislike the Alliance, making it unlikely that they would switch sides. They can work alongside the night elves more easily than other Horde races, because there’s no real tradition of animosity there… but there’s not much friendship, aside from Hamuul Runetotem’s personal friendship with Malfurion Stormrage.

All.

Here’s an example of the danger of assuming personal experience to be universal, Hob.

I #$@^ing hated the Linken quests. Hated them. I hated them with so much fury and ferocity that if I could make a series of quests explode in nuclear fire, I would happily annihilate them. I would drag them out onto molten lava and hurl them in, cackling madly the whole time. I would rip the still beating heart from Linken’s chest and eat it in front of him, but I wouldn’t finish it, I’d just leave his half eaten heart there in front of him to watch as he died. That doesn’t even make sense, a heart can’t watch anything, that’s how much I hated the Linken quests.

My point is, no, not everybody loved that. I guarantee you, no matter what it is, no matter how universally beloved you think it is or was, someone hates it, and they aren’t alone either. I absolutely don’t think a quest should frustrate you, although it’s impossible to design a quest that won’t frustrate anyone.

But I agree that Blizzard should fix broken quests. I got so mad at a broken quest during this week’s leveling stream that I pretty much ruined the game for everyone else playing with me, which I deeply regret.

Man, I hated that whole series of quests so so much. I wish Linken had been at Camp T.

This is a question I wonder about from time to time. Do we even need pure DPS classes in WoW? At this point, would it be better for Hunters, Warlocks, Mages and Rogues if they went hybrid? Or would that be too much change for the loyal diehards who’ve mained those classes over the years? After all, Hunters are getting a melee DPS spec, but it’s still a DPS spec, it’s not a tank or healer spec.

The one thing I’m wary of doing is adding more tanks and healers to an already crowded list of those roles. I could justify Mage healers at this point.– the Mage healing spec could use Arcane power to reverse the flow of time to remove wounds from having occurred, or accelerate it to speed healing, for example. You could pretty easily have a Warlock or Hunter tank spec, or even a Rogue evasion tank spec. But is that good for the classes in question? Or would it dilute them? How many players of Rogues actually want to be balanced around being tank/DPS hybrids?

I’m not saying it couldn’t be done. It absolutely could. I’m not even saying it shouldn’t be done. I’m asking, what are you willing to pay for it, and are there enough people who think like you to make it a worthwhile change?

That being said, I feel for Warlocks who feel like Demon Hunters are coming in and getting the Meta tank spec they always wanted. I still want to tank with a two hand weapon.

Tim, I’m absolutely not a computer programmer, or an expert in operating systems and who uses what to play what. I know from my own experience as a player that Blizzard has always done this, and it’s what let me play WoW on my laptop back in the day when I was first getting into the game. Frankly, I’ve always appreciated it. I know that OSX is linux based now, except I’m now being told it’s actually unix based (and I don’t know the difference, like I said, not a computer guy) so it’s probably not that hard to design games for it, or port them over. Why Blizzard seems to be one of the only companies that does this, I honestly have no idea.

Why is it that Blizzard can devote the dev time to make their game for Macs but other companies don’t see a value there? It’s probably true that there are less gamers playing on Mac, and to some degree this is probably because there are less Macs out there. But it’s also probably true that if you are playing on a Mac, you’re likely to be very loyal to Blizzard because they put in the effort to keep you playing — they think your money spends like everyone else’s, so to speak. Maybe it’s worth it to Blizzard to be the company that taps that market, because they know players switch between machines but loyalty can transcend platform.

In the end, it might not be as simple at the bottom line. But remember, Diablo III is one of the best selling PC games of all time. Being able to run on a Mac can’t hurt.

That’s the Queue for today. I’ll see you guys next week. Anne’s on deck for the weekend, so ask her lots of questions.