I noticed a lot of people saying we'll 'kill' Y-S, but I was under the impression that Old Gods (or at least Y-S) could not be killed because they are a 'part of Azeroth' and their removal would devastate Azeroth. Any idea how this could follow up after Ulduar?

One more question is how can you chain a being that spans the entire width of Northrend in one "prison room" ?

Flawed leadership can be attained without reducing the leader to a two dimensional "RARGH HAT U AND ALL UR KINDZ!" sort of caricature. The problem with Varian is not that he is portrayed as hateful towards the Horde, but that he has all the impulse control and forethought of a kid who just got grounded for throwing a temper tantrum. King Bronzebeard probably would be exceedingly happy to go into open war with the Horde, but he wouldn't be a snorting, smoldering-with-generic-rage stock character cutout doing it, I bet.

"OMG, another Dragon driven insane. We wish they would stop the cliche of bad guys being insane"
"OMG, another bad/mean leader/villain/NPC. We wish they would stop the cliche of leaders/villians/NPCS being inherently bad/mean."

You only have so many options for Archetypal personalities. Core NPCs can't be blah, they typically have 1 or two defining attributes so they're A) easy to understand and B) you have something to sympathize/empathize/connect with.

WoW cannot do subtle easily. Especially not in 2 min cutscenes every 5 months. It took them a dozen quests to set up the Loken/Thorim business. If it had been 3 quests would you have felt Loken was sneaky? No, he'd be like that silly guy in Searing Gorge.

I say let's save our complaints for things like OS which they didn't bother to explain in game at all. A page on the website doesn't encourage me to go kill black dragons. I guess me and my guild must be bad-because-we're-bad people who just like to kill dragons. No wonder we're Alliance. Go Wrynn!

(Disclaimer; I am aware that I might be infringed for some of my analogies, and if I am I accept it. I do apologise if I am hurting anyone in person, but I feel this is relevant to the discussion on Varian)

Zoombini; George Bush and the War on Iraq has a lot less support now that the three days of butt-kicking is over, and people have to face the reality that is left in it's wake, than it had just after 9/11.

I have personal reasons to dislike Varian because he acts like the captain of the football team which I always found to be an ass-backwards douche. Livejournalism aside, it is bad for the state of the future of Warcraft if Varian is allowed to dismantle the "status quo" of the current faction line. There is a reason why we don't have our world turned upside down, there is a reason why the warsong, arathi, alterac conflicts don't lead to bigger squabbles. By this I refer back to the points of the Tauren, the Darkspear Trolls having sworn allegiance to Thrall, not to just any orc, and both of these people seem (with the exception of the Grimtotem clan) to be caring about their future. In short, they'd avoid bloodshed because it's in their nature (Tauren) or because they're too few (Darkspear). The Forsaken wouldn't stand a chance versus any other faction in open war, especially not at the given time, so they'll not have much of a say in the matter.

Similarly on the Alliance side, there is nothing (as far as I know) that states that the Night Elves (bar Staghelm, but Tyrande and Malfurion hold too much influence over the Night Elven nation) nor the Dwarves that would follow Varian blindly into war without exploring other options first.

So, let us assume that Blizzard is interested in making money AND writing a good story. In order to make money, they must write a good game that reaches out on not only the technical and mechanical level but also attracts players based on more than just gameplay. Let's face it, we wouldn't pay a monthly fee to play an elaborate version of Tetris with IRC embedded in it..

In order to keep a large number of people coming back (those caring about storytelling), the world Blizzard creates must respond to what those people want when it comes to good storytelling, and to be bombastic, good storytelling is not rebuilding Iraq.

Good storytelling is not going over the boundaries and throwing everything that everyone related to up to that point out of the window. I am very excited about what Blizzard is going to conjure up next, what 3.2 and 3.3 and any surprise raids (Sunwell style) after that can bring us. But I am one hundred percent sure that if Thrall is killed off or Varian actually did go into open war instead of just "bickering" on random run ins with Horde leaders, we are going to have a massive amount of players protesting the oblivious retcons (Tauren and Troll allegiance, Dwarven sovereignty, Branns indisputable influence on his brothers, Malfurion and Tyrandes friendship to certain important lore characters that WILL be opposing such action) on a scale previously unseen.

Long story short; Blizzard has to act delicately. The clichés must at some point either die out or they will strangle everything from the Wc3 demo and up till today.

(note; I've left out Velen in the argument because I'm not sure on his position, except that I don't think he'll be interested in global warfare when he is very much personally aware of the danger Azeroth is in from the outside.)

EDIT: Grammar. Also, please jump on this post and dismantle it, I am looking forward to replies or comments on how wrong I am, and why.

Depends on what part you consider spanning Northrend. Physically he may be imprisoned, but his influence is wide.

Approximately a second later, I'd say. Besides, it won't go down like that - Garrosh will be closing for the final blow and Thrall will sigh, say something like "Your father respected me, eventually. Why do the Hellscreams always have to do things the hard way?" and thunderclap Garrosh to the nearest wall and then pin him there with earthen spikes.

Yeah, yeah the arena battle. Someone who can flatten castles in a fit of pique doesn't lose duels to some meathead unless he wants to. Sooner or later Garrosh's "Son of Hellscream" line of credit is going to run out and Thrall will end up having to smack some sense into him.

On the otherhand, the death of Thrall could be the catalyst that causes Garrosh to change. Don't forget his father also needed a catalyst.

And in regards to Thrall and Varian, I think Blizzard is having too much fun pitting the "savage noble" against the "noble savage". It speaks volumes alone on it's own.

Eye, fingernail, toes, nosehair - who knows what we "killed" and how effective it may be.

Old Gods are non-Euclidean. For all we know the Gods are singuler - just extrusions into our reality of different portions of the same entity. I bet they just want to tell us "Inside is good. So much good that Old Gods will always *germinate*." They want to be happy *campers* because *smelling* *pretty colors* is the best *game*.

Killing portions may not do serious harm to the overall whole, therefore not trigger the doom which the Titans prophesied. "Killing" C'thun and Yogg-Saron may simply banish that portion back to whence it came for an undetermined time period. To the Titans much preferable to weaken these portions and bind them somewhere, rather than push them out only to have them come back who-knows-when with who-knows-what-power.

Unsafe to kill them, tactically better to lock them up than throw them out of the house just before you go on a long business trip.

Or if they're discrete, separate entities, it could be a fuzzy line. Killing Old Gods does Azeroth harm. It can survive a goodly portion, possibly with no noticable effects at all. But at some point one kill will be one too many. We don't know how many that may be, the Titans may not know how many that may be. Safer to imprison and weaken them all, rather than accidentally kill one too many. Analogy: You can kill ants one by one - massive casualties are sustainable, but at some point there will be one dead ant too many.

Finally, they may just not want to risk the Azerothian experiment. A scientist will get annoyed and restart an experiment if the next day they notice the petri-dish has something foreign in it. But if a month has passed, it might be more advantageous to let the experiment run its course rather than restart - too many resources already invested. The thousands to tens of thousands of years before the Titans found the Old Gods were on Azeroth may be a fair equivalent. Yeah they can reboot the world at any time, but the experiment's been running long enough they'll get some data from it, even if it's not what they were looking to test.

We found Aspirin through an experimental mistake - botched experiments can teach as much or more than successful at times. The Titans decided to play with flesh after seeing the Curse of Flesh. Why risk the experiment by killing any more Old Gods?

The Wrathgate chain from the horde side made it clear that neither Thrall nor Sylvanas knew about Putress.

I get what you're saying about some of the other "atrocities" - the Royal Apothecary Society engineering a plague to kill all the humans and the abomination lab in Undercity and all that. I don't think there's anything to read into that. There's a big disconnect in the horde leveling quests about that too. I'm not sure why my orc shaman was doing quests to help the Royal Apothecary Society extinguish all life. You only ever get those quests from the Royal Apothecary Society and no non-forsaken ever mention it. I think we're supposed to assume that non-forsaken don't know about it.

The world we play in isn't the world Thrall and co. live in. For us it takes 10 minutes to cross the world and every questgiver trusts us to keep their secrets, because WoW is a game and it wouldn't be much fun if we couldn't travel quickly or couldn't see the whole plot. WoW is supposed to represent an entire world though. For Thrall or someone, for story purposes, Undercity is a secret underground fortress in a plague-infested wasteland on another continent. It's not a city that's supposed to be open to visitors, especially living ones, we just get to be the magical exception because otherwise there would be a lot of content that only undead players ever get to see. Thrall had probably never been inside the place before Wrathgate.

There was a similar thing with the blood elves in TBC, where all the NPCs in the belf starting area thought Kael'thas was the savior of their race even though several million level-capped horde players could have easily disabused them of that notion. Just because every player in the world knows something doesn't mean all the NPCs know it too (or that it's significant or character-defining if they don't).

There's also several quests in Icecrown that indicate (from the Alliance side) that the Horde attacked the Alliance from behind while they were assaulting another Scourge strongpoint. I never leveled any of my Horde guys past 70, so I don't know exactly what the flipside to that is (like a quest where the Horde get their helpful charge against the Scourge misinterpreted as an attack on the Alliance), but from the standpoint of an Alliance NPC, that does seem like something you can't just rationally discount like the Wrathgate incident.

All leaders are correctly held responsible for those they command, whether they were aware or not of those actions, and if they were unaware, they're additionally considered derelict in their duties. It's unnecessary for Thrall to personally tour every area the Horde controls, but he should have a much better idea of what's going on than he does. I realize in BC Sylvanas changed from "Kill the whole world!" to "OK, my sisters shouldn't suffer Undeath... Right, stop the plague research!" Shouldn't she have shut down the Apothecary?* It's really streching credibility to claim someone as untrusting and suspicious as Sylvanas didn't notice plague development continuing merrily in Undercity, or Varimathras having odd amounts of conversations with Putress. At the very least, after officially ending the New Plague, she should have come clean to Thrall. Covering things up only makes her (and by extension Thrall) look completely guilty in game.



* I grant you, game mechanics might have been difficult, but it wouldn't be hard to implement higher level content saying "You were unaware the Society was commanded to stop by the Dark Lady. You will not be punished if you demonstrate you only acted in ignorance."