On the origin of Alliance faction animosity

As you might already know if you have been reading my blog for a while, I hold no animosity towards the Horde and its players, and it seems I'm not the only one who doesn't, yet it seems the Horde holds a disproportionate amount of animosity towards us Alliance players. There has been quite of bit of speculation as to why this is, with explanations ranging from, "The Horde was once the minority, so they developed pride and resentment of the Alliance," to the surprisingly insightful, "The back stories revealed by their intro cinematics are much more about conflict and war than those of the Alliance." But either way, something about the imbalanced nature of faction animosity within the community makes me seriously wonder whether Blizzard could be doing a better job of encouraging it.

It's certainly no question that Blizzard does want there to be faction animosity in the game. That fact can plainly be seen by the fact that it's against the terms of use to engage in any attempt to speak with the other faction. Entry 9.B.viii states, "When engaging in Chat, you may not... Communicate directly with players who are playing characters aligned with the opposite faction (e.g. Horde communicating with Alliance or vice versa)..." Considering that verbal communication is what has allowed us human beings to progress as far as we have evolutionarily and is one of the defining aspects of our species, there are few more effective ways to dehumanize a group of people than to prevent communication with them (and, conversely, few more effective ways to humanize them then to allow communication with them). We can also see evidence of Blizzard trying to add some more faction animosity to the game by generally ramping up the Horde vs. Alliance conflict in Cataclysm by implementing quests that put the player at the front lines of this battle. Whether Blizzard is doing this to encourage war or to give the players the war they want is debatable, but if my poll is anything to go on, it appears the majority of players don't have any animosity for the other faction (I'm going to assume that those who play both sides don't have animosity for one of them, or else, why would they play both sides?)

So it seems Blizzard wants this animosity to exist, yet if the numbers are anything to go on, they haven't done that great of a job of making it happen. But perhaps the direct creation of animosity in the Alliance isn't their intention. Though I don't know much about lore, I know that when WoW first came out, the conventional wisdom was that the Alliance races all had their dark spots and weren't paragons of good, while most of the Horde races were just victims of unfortunate circumstances. It seems, however, that as WoW has continued, the Horde has been pulling ahead in terms of its place in the world. Sure, they've been through some hard times between everything Garrosh and Putress has brought on them, but the Horde players themselves have certainly moved up in the game. The fact that the faction balance is almost even should be evidence enough of that. Thus I propose a potentially radical theory: what if Blizzard wants the Alliance to feel like the victims now?

This possibility was brought to the forefront of my mind by one description of a quest on the Cataclysm beta:

The story [of the Worgen] from beginning to end is about unchecked, unbounded Forsaken aggression against a people who had never fought them, never attacked them, never tried to invade Lordaeron or claim lands held by them. The people of Gilneas had gone out of their way to avoid the Forsaken, and it was Sylvanas (and behind her, Garrosh Hellscream) directly attacking a neutral nation purely out of naked lust for conquest and territorial acquisition. By the time you're done playing a worgen through the starting zones, you will be ready to put orc babies on spikes. It may be the first time I've ever felt the factional hatred entirely from the game instead of from other players.

In my own comment on that post, I noted that the quest seems to parallel my own experiences with Horde animosity, which I have already detailed in the past. I also noted in my post that my experiences with Horde animosity had successfully created a bit of Alliance pride and Horde resentment in me; truth be told, they are the only thing that has ever managed to do so. Perhaps Blizzard has caught on to this phenomenon and is trying a new approach to create more Horde-oriented animosity within the Alliance, by making us the victims. I mean, it worked with the Horde, so it might work for us, too. Why would they want to create this Alliance animosity? Well, without animosity on both sides, any conflict between the two factions would be very one-sided, and the Alliance would likely view the whole thing as silly (as quite a few of us do now). Considering that the storyline of Cataclysm will be more focused on war than the storylines of expansions past, they need us to be ok with that war, and faction animosity is one way to make that happen.