This week the @rcade goes head to head with Bryan McNamara to decide what makes for a better World of Warcraft game – do you pick Alliance or Horde?
Bryan is a 23 year old WoW player and the GM of Serpentis, a raiding guild base on Blade’s Edge-EU and an avid Alliance player. As well as World of Warcraft Bryan is an avid console gamer and Anime fan but his real passion lies in playing and raiding with Merack, his level 80 Night Elf hunter.
So read both arguments below and then cast your vote – only you can decide who is the outright winner of this battle, the Alliance are going into battle with Horde once more but this time there will be only one victor!
Alliance
Many people will say that the horde is ‘better’ than the alliance, or vice versa. Some even say that it makes no difference! I agree with all the above, and disagree at the same time!
In my opinion, the decision to play either horde or alliance should be decided upon by your own personality traits, maturity and not least of all, age!
The argument is often thrown around, by horde players, that The Alliance are a bunch of children, or that they “can’t play real characters”. From my experience having played both alliance and horde characters, this cannot be further from the truth, at least on my realm!
I’m a guild master of a very successful raiding guild, and from analysing my roster I can see the average age of my guild members, of whom there are 52 of at this time, is 24, with the oldest being 54 and youngest at 16. We don’t discriminate upon age when recruiting, so I believe that we can extrapolate from that data that the vast majority of alliance characters, who are raid ready, are not children. I can also vouch for the maturity of the vast majority of those in my guild as being very pleasurable people to be associated with.
While each faction has all the same classes under different races, the only differences between them mechanically is geographical location of capital cities and the lore associate with each faction. Alliance vs. Horde is the proverbial good vs. bad, and Blizzard has gone to great extent to show this with NPC characters and lore elements they’ve introduced in to the game. With the leaks from the expected expansion, Cataclysm, we can see the horde political structure being thrown in to a state or turmoil and tensions rising between Alliance and Horde.
Merack, the Night Elf Hunter
I can safely say that I’m glad to be playing an alliance character!
The Alliance has a much richer lore behind each of the races than most of the horde does! We also see alliance race NPCS as the ones who save the day in each of the expansions so far, such as Maiev from The Burning Crusade, and Highlord Tirion Fordring from Wrath of The Lich King.
The Alliance Capital cities are much more detailed than many of the Horde cities! Orgrimmar looks like a broken Lego set, and Undercity is just awfully confusing!
I can also say I’m glad to not be playing a horde character!
The Tauren don’t share the bloodlust of the Orcs, and are only allied with the horde because Thrall defended Cairne’s clan in the past, but will this change when Thrall steps down in Cataclysm?
The Blood Elves are an off shoot of the night elves, with the only real difference being that they are based around arcane magic as opposed to nature, but will this change in Cataclysm when even the Night Elves will be able to have playable mages?
The forsaken exist only to take revenge on Arthas, and are allied with the Horde only to help them achieve this task. Now that Arthas is no more, where will the banshee queen lead the forsaken?
All in all, things are not looking well for the horde! Yet at the same time the alliance is growing stronger, with no signs of fatigue in the relationships between the various races. Cataclysm will surely make a big difference to the end user in whether he/she plays an Alliance or Horde character. But I guess we’ll just have to wait and see!
For now at least, it is my educated opinion based on in game fact, that choosing to play an Alliance character will be more rewarding than playing a horde character! While this may not be the case on all servers, it is for Blade’s Edge-EU!
For The Alliance!
VERSUS
Horde
The @rcade has been playing World of Warcraft off and on for many years now – some of us are still regular players and one of us in particular is a serious WoW-head with three level 80 characters and two level 40 characters. Of the six characters, five of them are Horde and all three level 80’s are Horde race – Memex the Tauren Druid, Memexia the Forsaken Priestess and Xemem the Tauren Shaman (coming up with names is hard!). For the record all three of these characters started out originally as Alliance – two Night Elves and a Draenai, but there is no strength and sense of team in working with the Alliance.
The Horde are made up of five races just like the Alliance (currently) each with their own unique abilities, culture and lore – the Orcs, Taurens, Forsaken, Blood Elves and Trolls. Making the decision to move from Alliance to Horde was an easy one and here is why:
Alliance Raids are badly run – squabbling over petty details and childish antics would lead to either a failed raid or one that lacked any fun – there is no point in raiding if it’s not fun! Gathering a group for a raid can be extremely difficult because every Alliance player thinks he knows best and even if the group does get together the whole thing can be torn apart in seconds by one loudmouth player who thinks he is the best.
PvP suffers from the exact same problem – the worst part about the PvP would be when a game starts to go badly, the Alliance players are quick to blame the Horde for ‘cheating’ but the boorish and headstrong Human Warrior or Night Elf Rogue fails to realise that they need to work together and lone wolf won’t get you far against a well structured team working together to kick your pixelated butt!
Alliance chat both in general and trade chat hubs tend to be of a lower standard than that of the Horde chat. Don’t feel bad if you ignore the chat bubbles in Alliance, immature and young players would get on anyone’s nerves especially when the entire chat turns into a brag or boast off between a couple of novice players.
Ok Horde isn’t perfect, you will always have that one player who tries to spoil, a raid or PvP battle or starts a flame war in chat but for the most part, playing Horde is by far more enjoyable and worth your time.
Horde Raids tend to be very quick, well thought out and most importantly fun. The time spent planning the Raid is quick and everyone knows where they are supposed to be and what their role was and more experienced Raiders are always open to offering constructive criticism to your characters skill in a Raid. The same goes for PvP battles – whether or not your group is formed beforehand or on the spot, a well planned team is put in place ready to switch from offensive to defensive and vice versa depending on the situation.
Horde Players, be they Undead, Tauren or Orc tend to be more seasoned and civil gamers. Just because we are online doesn’t mean we can forget about manners and etiquette. Horde gamers stand out amongst Alliance players, simply because of their maturity and their ability to maintain order and an enjoyable and fair game.
Memex, the Tauren Druid
It is often incorrectly assumed that the Horde are evil – with every story there are two sides. An Alliance player is very quick to point out that they are the ‘good guys’ but they are just as responsible for committing acts of atrocity against the Horde and Azeroth as the Horde – the Night Elves abused the power of the Moon Well which drew forth the Burning Legion, the greatest evil Azeroth has ever seen.
Alliance players tend to be very vain, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder – there is strength and wisdom lying behind the eyes of a Tauren, the decrepit bodies of the Forsaken are only shells for a powerful and beautiful soul.
The discrimination faced by the Horde races under the pettiness and unwillingness of the Alliance to look beyond the physical and cultural aspects of the Horde players has brought them together in unity but not to destroy the Alliance, merely to survive and bring down the forces of evil attempting to destroy Azeroth.
Lok’tar ogar! (Victory or Death!)
So who do you think is the winner? Vote now!
