Not everyone was as pleased with the WoW Forever reveal as I was - which, to be honest, was to be expected. They did manage to hit a lot of the right notes, but considering the sheer amount of crazy theories and expectations people had expressed by now, disappointment from some corners was very much unavoidable.
People are entitled to their opinions on that and I'm not here to argue why anyone who doesn't care about WoW Forever should like it - but there is one topic I'd like to take a closer look at: the most frequent criticism I've seen so far, even among those who are generally positive about the whole thing: that people don't like the Skyborne a.k.a. the sky/wind elves.
I do get the initial knee jerk reaction, because even I said in my last post that their reveal seemed quite weird. Here's a trailer that manages to hit beat after beat of nostalgia with familiar characters and locations - and then there's that sudden moment of confusion: Where's that? Why is there a blue elf? Who is she? What is she?
For me though, once they got to the part where they explained what we'd just seen and what WoW Forever is meant to be, it all made sense. Oh, so they are high elves that made a pact with the elemental wind lords to live in Skywall? That's fine, that totally sounds like something Chris Metzen would come up with. Let's go!
So I was somewhat surprised to see how many people instead dug their heels in and doubled down on that initial negative reaction, telling everyone that sky elves are bad. I feel like a lot of the discourse around this is honestly quite muddy, but after some browsing, I think I've distilled it down to four basic arguments, which all come from slightly different directions.
They just don't fit
The main argument here seems to be that the lore explanation for this addition is too far removed from original vanilla content. Sure, elves in general exist, the elemental wind lords are a known force, but... there's never been as much as a whisper about these particular elves! They haven't shown up in retail in over twenty years either! (Though at the same time, I've seen people argue that they look like "something out of retail", presumably because the poster hasn't logged into retail in at least a decade - let's hand-wave that contradiction for now.)
Their models are basically recoloured blood elves, so at worst they look like something out of Burning Crusade, which is not that far removed from Vanilla aesthetically. As for how well their lore will actually fit in - I feel like this is something we won't actually know until we play the content. Could it be done badly? Sure. But it could also be done well, and there's no reason to just assume that it will be bad.
I kinda get the grousing about a lack of connection to existing lore, but at the same time, the whole point of Classic+ is to let us discover some new things. People can't help how they feel, but I do think this immediately highlights the extreme tightrope fans expect Blizzard to walk in terms of what they are and aren't allowed to add to this mode. Don't you dare be too creative! Zero surprises please!
I want elves, but not these elves!
This segment of the player base likes elves, but they need to have the right label. "Why couldn't they have just given us high elves?" For the same reason they didn't give high elves to the Alliance back in 2006, but instead opted to give blood elves to the Horde: population balance.
I'm old enough to remember when Horde was considered the "ugly" faction, with Alliance being considerably more popular. Before Burning Crusade came out, I remember someone telling me that the Horde needed the blood elves added to even out the population imbalance - and it worked! Blood elves remain the most popular race to this day, even with all the additional options modern WoW has added over the years.
If they took Vanilla as a starting point and added high elves to the Alliance, population balance probably would've been shot forever, sorry. This isn't some hypothetical by the way, it was absolutely the case on Turtle WoW for example - they just didn't have to care, because they made the auction house and all grouping cross-faction anyway.
There are some variations of this that try to acknowledge the above problem by coming up with some sort of workaround to have different elves (as long as they aren't these elves), but every single one of those then just introduces a different problem or thing to complain about, e.g. "They could have just done blood elves again!" → "How lazy to make Classic+ just Burning Crusade all over again."
Elves suck, period.
World of Warcraft has always included elves, but in Vanilla, you didn't have to group with any if you were Horde at least. Again, I remember a time when people complained that the addition of blood elves "ruined" the Horde because it brought all the airheads who just want to play a pretty character over to the other faction. You can probably still find people who think that today!
And as petty as it may be, I kind of feel like this is probably the most genuine and heartfelt complaint, and the one I have the most sympathy for. No, I don't think elf aficionados are dumb and childish (and not just because I've played some elves in my time), but I actually do think there's some truth to it that the Horde's vibes definitely changed when the blood elves were introduced, and having pretty blue elves in Orgrimmar may well do something similar. Sorry if this is an absolute deal breaker for you. You get to stick with Classic era. You're probably also part of an absolutely tiny minority, though.
They cost money, which is evil.
Now this one is interesting, because while I don't want to judge anyone who might feel that way, I do also get the vibe that this is the most "bad faith" of all the arguments listed here, possibly pushed by private server players who just hate Blizzard and anyone who gives them money, ever.
The reason I say this is that there was never going to be a world in which Blizzard introduces a second version of WoW that receives continuous development while not expecting to make any additional money from it. There had to be some kind of new income source on the horizon.
I suppose the obvious alternative could've been to charge a "box price" for WoW Forever, but in my opinion that actually would've been much weirder, considering that Blizzard waived the box price for regular World of Warcraft in BfA eight years ago. Having Forever be the only version of WoW that requires a purchase beyond the subscription to even access would've been strange.
I think the way they've done it, with Forever being part of the existing subscription and the sky elves being an optional extra purchase is actually about the most benign way an MMO can do monetisation. It means the barrier of entry to convince your friends who are already part of the WoW ecosystem to at least try it out is very low, and if you don't care about sky elves, you don't have to pay for anything new at all. Wins all around.
We'll see what other ways to monetise they'll come up with in the future. Could there be some bad ones? Sure, but this isn't one of them.
Ultimately, I think this "controversy" is going to end up being a storm in a teacup - there will be a lot of people who'll enjoy playing as an elf (I'll definitely make one to check out the new starting zone if nothing else) and even those who grouse about them now will mostly find that it's not enough to make them stay away or spoil their enjoyment in the long run. If anything, I feel like this being the biggest complaint that most people could come up with shows how well Blizzard has managed to hit the mark with everything else.
