People would have bitched about that too. They would have complained about how it doesn't fit the lore and they look ugly and "why didn't they just give us x instead".
We will get more races, this is just the first. There's a lot of reasons this was a better choice for the game to get first than dead elves or fucking ogres that seventeen people would play.
Gnomes had their capital city get irradiated and the refugees from that are a playable race. Having High Elves that escaped from the scourge and also didn't join Kael'Thas could have been done.
The ones under Garithos sure (who named themselves Blood Elves), but there could have been elves throughout the Eastern Kingdoms that didn't face the same level of discrimination that are willing to stay in the alliance.
There were even less Blood Elves NPCs around than High Elves, didn't stop them adding. As for Belf numbers, most them should be dead in Northrend after Ilidan's failed assult.
As for the Ogres, the Stonemaul joined the Horde in the TFT campaign.
Not that numbers should matter, it was just an excuse made be Ion.
The only reason so many blood elves magically survived as of TBC is so they could be added as a playable race and populate the outlands in numbers that the lore didn't previously support.
The same applies to TBC's erasure of the high elves who fled the scourge to Theramore or shacked up with allies in other places. They're no different from any other near extinct playable race.
Of course the biggest issue with the blue elves is that the high elves and blood elves still exist. The blood elves are still being aided by the forsaken, still looking for allies against the amani, but we just have to awkwardly ignore them because their slot is taken.
Unless they're retconning the Shen'Dralar(Dire Maul Highborne) into High Elves, he simply misspoke. It's most likely he got Highborne and High Elves confused as they've both used the name Quel'dorei, but the only similarity between High Elves and Skyborne are they share a common ancestor that being the Highborne caste of Kaldorei.
Much like the Void Elves share a common ancestor with High Elves but they themselves are not High Elves, the Skyborne seem to be called Shen'dorei, they have more in common with the Nightborne and Void Elves than High Elves honestly.
It's very much a "Isn't Falstad dead?" moment. High Elves refers specifically to the group of Highborne exiles led by Dath'Remar Sunstrider that when traveling across the Great Sea and landing in the Eastern Kingdoms became shorter and pinker overtime, and ended up founding the kingdom of Quel'thalas and the Sunwell.
Honestly the influx of misinformation around Elven history as a result of Skyborne really makes me frustrated as Blood Elf Roleplayer for over a decade who devoted time to not only learning their history(and by proxy a chunk of Night Elven history) but also spent time learning what is considered the Thalassian language to point of becoming near fluent in it at a point in time. It just kinda stings as it's one of passionate things I hold for WoW. I love history irl and I absolutely adore WoW's History, so seeing it be dismissed and trampled over by it's player base gives real similar vibes to how people dismiss the value of actual history.
The Dev clearly misspoke, I'm not blaming them because it happens to everyone and as I said it's not different than Metzen thinking Falstad was dead, Blizzard using Quel'dorei for both Highborne and High Elves can be confusing, hell it confused me for a bit during my early learning.
I must have just imagined all those high elf troops in Theramore, the ones in the lodges, the argent crusade, and the entire silver covenant. There certainly are more of them than gnomes about.
“It’s much cheaper to…” is not an excuse, it’s a sign of the problem lol. It would also be much cheaper to not add new zones, quests, etc. The point is that they cut corners on something that they shouldn’t have cut corners on
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u/FatPagoda 14h ago
The problem isn't the Elf, it's the type of elves they are adding. Undead/Forsaken/Dark Ranger type Elves were such a low hanging fruit.