Editing Warcraft (section)

==The good, the bad, and the ugly==

GOOD: 
* WarCraft 3. Widely hailed as one of the best RTS games ever, and not without cause. While it arguably gets more credit for being revolutionary than it actually deserves, it tells a good story, has distinct factions with a host of colorful 3D models that looked pretty good for their day, and also got some solid expansions to boot.  It also tells the tale of Arthas' downfall, which is basically the best story WarCraft has done to date.
* The "stop poking me!" lines that units say in the WarCraft RTS trilogy.  So much fun that a few other video games have copied this.
* Arthas. Again, his story is the best (think Anakin/Darth Vader in High Fantasy or a less skubby version of Archaon and you'll get the idea).
* Thrall, who is basically an Orc blend of Moses, Spartacus and Thor, and as [[Awesome]] as that sounds...at least before [[Fail|he became a Self-Insert for Chris Metzen.]]
* Elves that feel closer to Tolkien's take than many other modern Fantasy portrayals, and also having their own unique flavors instead of rehashing the High, Wood, and Dark varieties. 
* Dinosaur mounts. Mostly only available to Trolls, but every now and then one gets available for non-Troll players. 
* Playable Werewolves in the Worgen (even if they do mean attracting a certain number of furries).
* The Cinematic Trailers, which manage to be consistently epic and well made even when they're for expansions that turn out to be awful (we're getting to those).
* Dragons, especially Deathwing. And come Dragonflight, you can now play as humanoid Dragons.
* Death Knights
* Samurai Orcs
* King Varian Wrynn
* Grom Hellscream
* Alexstrasza
* [[Skub|Depending on who you ask]], Illidan being retconned from an incel wild card into an edgy-anti hero (unfortunately still a bit of an incel).

BAD: 
Some of many examples of Warcraft's horrific experimentation are, roughly in order; 
* Tauren Paladin "Holy Cows," (whilst this was initially explained by having them draw not from The Light, but from the Sun, the writers later forgot this and had Tauren paladins worship the Light only one expansion after their introduction). 
* Night Elf hippies using environmentally unsafe arcane magic that they avoid because it's addictive and served as a homing beacon for the demons threatening the world.  
* Forsaken Hunters that don't have a sense of smell and can't eat what they kill.
* Blood Elf "I broke a nail!" Warriors, because even though WarCraft's Elves are less hated among the /tg/ crowd as a whole, they don't totally drop all the usual Elf traits.  
* Not one, not two, but '''THREE''' furry races with the Worgen, Pandaren and Vulpera (Tauren may or may not count, depending who you ask). And as already noted, Worgen do translate to playable Werewolves, so there is that.  And then they added scalies to the mix with the Dracthyr (although that does mean you can play as Dragon-people now, which isn't so bad).

UGLY: 
* Deathwing in Cataclysm, who's essentially reduced to an [[Furry|Derp-tastic emo dragon who has a ridiculous looking jaw and acts like an obnoxious kitteh]] (except in the Cinematic trailer, where he's still boss). 
* Lightforged undead princess, with holy magic raising someone in an unholy form ''despite holy magic being able to resurrect people anyway''.
* The Devs having the bad habit of telling players that they've "heard" them and are "listening" to what they want, and then completely fail to deliver. Over time people have started to call the devs out on their bullshit, but seriously, for all they get right, the above is the tip of the iceberg for issues.
* The retcons.  So many retcons.  Everything from the color of people's outfits to the nature of the cosmological forces is changed every 1-3 expansions, often without an in-universe explanation.  
* [[Skub|Depending on who you ask]], Illidan being retconned from a trickster to an edgelord.
* WarCraft III: Reforged: Intended as a remastered, new and improved version of a beloved classic, the launch was filled with a ridiculous amount of bugs and some brain-dead decisions from the Blizzard devs, leading it to get review-bombed with a ferocity that makes what happened to TLJ look almost tame by comparison. Patches and updates were promised of course, but a blunder like this is a hard thing to forgive (which is probably why most folks haven't).
* Everything having to do with Sylvanas Windrunner from Legion/Battle for Azeroth onwards. On that note...
* Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands: Two expansions that managed to annihilate what goodwill still existed between the fans and the developers faster than dropping Tyranids into an "all you can eat" buffet. To keep it short, Sylvanas turning into a genocidal psycho, Horde players being forced to go along with it, Alliance players (especially Night Elf players), feeling like they were once again being shat on, and an absolutely convoluted mess of a story in the setting's afterlife that involved a bland, underdeveloped villain, an unsatisfying end to Arthas' story, and giving Sylvanas a redemption she didn't earn.  And none of that's even mentioning the stories of other characters and the numerous hated gameplay elements (grinding, timegates, etc.)

Now we know what you're thinking: "Oh God, here we go again, another case of fans hating the new thing while critics love it and accusations of SJW and /pol/ flying back and forth between the two, someone please get me a scotch". But in this case, many gaming sites/online journals actually ''agreed'' that Shadowlands' storytelling was bad, or at least sympathized with the fan outcry. So there's nowhere near the battle-lines between critics and fans that you see in some other recent stuff.