Yes, Warcraft was made back when they wrote lore and manuals for video games:)

Just make a thread on WoW's forums, ask for one, and I'm sure someone will give you an invite. Thanks to the nice mount they may get as a reward, the players now give invites all the time.
Seriously?

Wich I kind of enjoyed reading as a teenager and I still have them and their boxes somewhere. That doesn't answer my question though.
It's the most lighthearted and cartoonish franchise Blizzard has ever made, why is it too serious to have humanoid pandas but not murlocs, furbolgs, gnomes and jamaican trolls?

Yeah. It evolved from a generic medieval/fantasy setting to a fantasy cartoonish freakshow. And when even Metzen doesn't remember his own lore, that should tell you something about the care that was put into it.

Wow, there's nice people on WOW's forums these days (I mean, I know it's "nice" that stems from self interest, but I'm not even used to that)? I'm shocked.
It's not that Blizzard's themes have never had lighthearted stuff, but it was all bound together by a dark undercurrent. This seems to lack the darker themes we are used to.

Well, I dunno how the US WoW forums are, but I've more or less always had a good time on the EU WoW forums. Even in-game, don't think I've met more than a handful of jerks, but that most likely depends on the server.

The EU D3 forums on the other hand... that place is like Inferno, full of bad elite jerks trying to pwn your ass.

The WoW forums have always been a crapshoot. The class forums were always very helpful, civil, and usually also very funny, but were somewhat prone to trolling. The general forums were usually decent. The server-specific forums were both super-friendly and cool and also full of elitist PvP retards trash-talking at the same time. The quest-help and support forums were almost always awful, you were damned lucky if your question got an answer instead of 173 people telling you how stupid you were.

The raid forums were the worst, but the ePeening in the Warrior forum was always awful (many guild main tanks, which obviously will be hard core even by WOW standards in there). Now, I did get helpful replies at times, but you were always a "scrub" even if someone didn't understand you or the level of raiding you were asking the question about. Post Armory, if you had good gear, clearly your guild "carried you" and you still suck. EJ forums, despite the name, tended to be a much better resource.

I haven't felt that since Warcraft 2 at least, but to each his own, I suppose. Maybe because Wc3 was a huge letdown for me, I didn't like the campaigns nor could I take the plot seriously. I also heavily disliked how the main villains were sistematically introduced, defeated and then redeemed in an endless cycle.

The first Warcraft was about an orc-human war for survival. Ok, you may have heard something like that before but it was alright, not much room to mess up at least.

The second game introduced a few more classic races and the first plot twist: the evul wizard who brought the orcs into human land wasn't actually evil, he was just corrupted by the devil Sargeras while still in the womb!

At the start of the third game the orcs stand defeated, and everyone's happy. But WAIT! The orcs aren't really evil, they were just corrupted by demon's blood! The demons (aka Burning Legion) then try to take over the world, but are ultimately defeated by the power of friendship™.

But WAIT! What we discover in TBC? That the leaders of the Burning Legion haven't always been evil, they were just corrupted by the devil Sargeras! Some of them are still pure, and are now a playable race!
Goddamn Sargeras, always running around corrupting everything. Actually, waitamminute. What did we learn somewhere before in the timeline? That Sargeras was once a noble creature, champion of the Titans, but was then corrupted by some ancient, immortal, godlike entities? HOLY COW, WHAT A TWIST.

Yeah, no, excuse me if I don't drop my jaw in amazement...

I liked the trailer, mostly because it's Blizzard and they always do these things so well. I will however hold off judgement until I play the game. I still don't really like the theme overall and as I've posted on here before most of the new content they've previewed looks so childish to me. One of the bosses in the new instances for example is a giant rabbit named Hoptallus with the ability 'carrot breath'. It makes me cringe.

As for the forums, I see them as a war between two factions. One faction despises Blizzard and will unreasonably argue to the bitter end against anything they do, and the other is made up of white knights charging to Blizzard's aid against any imagined argument against them, even those which haven't been made.

Given how both sides lack the eloquence to begin to express themselves, yet still try to make their opinions known in every other thread, it ruins a lot of what could have been decent discussions and it makes the forums an exercise in frustration to me.

Plus even without that there's the constant animosity from arrogant players as a result of massaging the ego of the WoW community en masse. Allowing people who seemingly can't even spell whatever the current raid instance is to eventually fail upwards through it clearly makes them think they're kings of the world.

Some sub-forums are ok though. Sometimes.

Warcraft lore was the richest and most interesting out of the whole Blizzard repertoire of games. It had different eras of lore, from history before the games started to current state of WoW, the pre-history's kinda like reading the first Age of Middle Earth in Tolkien's works.

Warcraft lore starts tracking back to the creation of the world by the Titans, the creation of the great Dragon Aspects, the great battle between the Titans and the Old Gods, the coming of the Elves, the turning of Sargaerus, the formation of the burning crusade, the long battle of the Elves and Burning Crusade. Fast forward to the corruption of the Orcs and destruction of their homeworld, then the battle between the humans and Orcs (Warcraft), then the Alliance vs the Horde (Warcraft 2), destruction of the Dark Portal (Warcraft 2 expansion), Nerzhul becoming the Lich King, starts the epic tale of Arthas becoming the Lich King(Warcraft 3 onwards), great Thrall Orc Chieftain saves the Orcs from corruption by the Burning Legion, defeat of the Burning Legion yet again, Arthas becomes the Lich King (Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne). After that it's mainly WoW, where the story is still quite solid at the start, then Blizzard started to destroy more and more of it, and so now we have most of the villains including Illidan, Arthas, 2 of the great Dragon Aspects and the 2 of the mighty Old Gods killed, also we have Pandas in the upcoming exppack.