We are also the Alliance, if you prefer. Bit less punchy a title, I suppose, and "We are the Horde/Alliance" or "Alliance/Horde" didn't work at all for me.

What I mean by that statement is a touch difficult to express but I'll give it a shot. Basically, after five years of World of Warcraft, and 15 years of the Warcraft franchise in general, it can be easy to get caught up in the personalities and lore figures and lose sight of the fact that Garrosh Hellscream is not the Horde, that Varian Wyrnn is not the Alliance. The Horde and the Alliance are, effectively, people on your server playing the same game as you. They're people in the dungeon finder, the people you team up with in battlegrounds and fight in the arenas, they're your guildmates in raids and the people you PUG with. The story is one of the reasons I still play WoW, of course. I love the lore, I pore over announcements and scrape up all I can find about zones like Ulduar, I actually get giddy at big reveals for Gilneas. But in the end, what makes the game worth playing are the people we play it with, and it's those people who make up the Horde and the Alliance, not the NPCs.

Last night I went on a run with friends I've made through the game and then met in real life, and we struggled through and eventually downed a boss I've killed many, many times on my Alliance toons. The kill (a first for them) was just as sweet if not more so because I knew that it was an accomplishment, knew that it's all in the group you run with. I was proud to have been there, and glad they invited me. In the end that's why I play the game. Those people were the Horde last night, and last night, I was proud to be in the Horde too.

Likewise, when my Alliance guild killed Arthas, or Anub'arak, or Yogg-Saron, I was happy because we'd done it together, that we'd finally achieved it, and in that moment we were the Alliance, the story was ours. The NPC's we meet are means to an end, ultimately. It's our game, our story, we're the heroes and sometimes to the other guys we're the villains, but it's all about us either way. I play for those moments, great and small, a group quest in Zul'Drak or a raid downing a boss, where we get to play out a story.

So share your moments, please. Tell us stories about you and your fellows, your friends, your guildmates, your PUG groups, your arena teams or your dungeon groups. Because the game is all about you who play it with.

Tags: Alliance, facebookfeed, game-discussion, gamer-discussion, Horde, world-of-warcraft-discussion, world-of-warcraft-topics, wow-discussion, wow-hot-topics, wow-issues, wow-topics

Filed under: Breakfast Topics