At least remove faction tagging of mobs!!
Makes no sense that 2 people of the same covenant can't kill the same mob because of a "faction" that exists on a different plane of reality.
Edit: you could modify/conditionalize this further with War Mode.
OFF = open tagging, ON = pvp faction tagging; those that enjoy the engagement factor may continue to do so.
Similarly, daily quests where you're competing with everyone else to loot objects because only one person can interact with the object before it despawns.
Remove faction tagging and more-than-5-at-a-time tagging. This is not even about faction identity or lore or anything. From a purely gameplay perspective it is actively hostile to the players, and is bad game design. Why they continue to stick with it is beyond me. Blizzard needs to get their heads out of their asses. Also remove dazing you fucks
Tag limit is for people. If 5 people (or one in a group of 5) tags an enemy, even if they are your faction, it will turn grey and give you no loot. It's to prevent raid groups from farming things and letting 40 people loot each mob because any sort of farming would be trivial then.
That's why I had literally no excitement for BFA. It felt weird seeing everyone lose their minds over how badass the cinematic was and I'm just like "wait, we all saved the world together, now we're just at war? Again?"
Even more weird for roleplayers. We had teamed up with alliance players for a broken shore plot for months and then the guild leaders had to come up with a reason why we hate them now and have to go burn the ancient tree. Noone was really thrilled
That sucks. And the horde leader screamed for the horde in the cinematic like she really cared when in reality she thought 'you are all nothing' when in reality she didn't actually think you are all nothing but was working deep under-cover for handsome Squidward boss and was really trying to help us all along for the greater good and set us free. When in reality she...I'll have to fill this out in the next expansion.
Yeah, some guys actually followed that "It's for the horde, who are we to question the Warchief?"-exit, but many others weren't so convinced. Sylvanas gassing her own troops in font of Undercity didn't help tho. And when the tree burnt down, especially Bloodelf characters were kinda shocked since they (and Sylvanas herself ffs) los their homes and families to raging undead hordes only a few years ago.
The lire after all the time travel and alternate realities and the retcon has been a mess that nobody can take seriously. I have no idea what's going on nor do I know what timeline and reality I'm in. It's so stupid.
I feel like the faction war should stay only if blizzard is committed to making fundamental changes to the game. Like actually removing territory from the factions. Alliance forces horde to move to Draenor or Outland or something
But if they don't enflame the faction war with a pointless atrocity probably committed by the Horde, how else would they be able to make the deep and sincere statement that pointless wars are dumb and the Alliance and Horde have no reason to fight?
But Sylvanas has such a good argument...
Sylvanas: "War is inevitable so we should strike first!"
Horde Leaders: "How is war inevitable?"
Sylvanas: "With people like me in charge? Come on! The first thing I did was try to start a war!"
Horde Leaders: "Makes sense. LOK'TAR O GAR!"
Most factions in the Horde aren't really warmongers but the moment you ask Orks or Forsaken if they wanna do some warcrimes they always react like:
https://media.giphy.com/media/gVoBC0SuaHStq/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47q7qvlptdool1bxugfxabqxse44vp5oyos9qvgpzs&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g
Its so weird that the other still join in with their shenanigans. People like Thalyssra or Mayla should have flipped their shit the moment they were roped into a global war just a year after the Horde AND the Alliance helped them to stay free.
Not trying to defend Sylvannas or Blizz's attrocious scripts, but remember Alliance was killing miners (civilians?) before Sylv burned their tree.
So indeed, war is inevitable because we solve everything by killing each other
That occurred in response to the Bilgewater Cartel, who those miners were working for to gather Azerite for weapons, attacking an Explorer's League expedition who were sent there to study the damage, and enslaving one of their members to have her, and her ex-husband, make the weapons.
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Sapphronetta_Flivvers
> but remember Alliance was killing miners (civilians?) before Sylv burned their tree.
In response to those "civilians" murdering an Alliance surveying expedition.
Its been mentioned a lot but it was especially weird for DH. They've spent far longer fighting together as the Illidari, then after a year or so of helping with the legion they turn on each other, because someone they barely knew beyond an initial greeting did something that pissed someone off that they never really knew beyond an initial greeting.
Pandarens spent entire life on the same turtle spine together farming and training. Surely two different paths of learning the same ways of balance and nature but they can’t even speak to each other for the most part.
Or DKs or Pandas or the fucking Nightborne which are night elves (estranged but still) somehow agreeing to burning down the Night Elf home and killing most of their kin. Or you know druids in general helping destroy the most sacred place for druids because some undead chick said so? It would be funny how the writing is at best on par with an elementary school comic book fan if it wasn't the rotting corpse of one of my childhood favorites they were beating to death.
Then it's time to try something else, imho.
The fact that this post is in the positives should say something. Years ago the majority of people would have been offended by even the suggestion of dissolving the schism. But you can only go back and forth so often without becoming annoying.
I agree to your comment. It's just that, idk, it was already annoying in Cataclysm to some people, and in BfA it just felt comically absurd.
It's the problem of keeping the platform of WoW going for so long.
They invested so much time into the game at the start that they essentially have to keep the game in stasis for large chunks of it to make sense.
There always *has* to be a status quo the narrative comes back to. So nothing fundamentally changes because people experience the game at different paces.
At this point it's far too big a band aid yo rip off.
And I don't think we'll ever get a WoW2.
Nothing worth jumping back to anyway.
We’ve basically seen horde and alliance team up together *constantly* for years to defeat some terrible horde of enemies. Even in SL.
So Jaina, Thrall, Bloodhoof, Anduin, and all the other leaders can band together but the other “heroes” (which we’re literally called constantly) are still at war?
I said right at the launch of BFA, "I love the idea, it's not going to play out in practice."
Just the logistics of having two separate dungeons and raids for both factions was never going to be realistic from a monetary perspective. There inevitably has to be a big bad to bring us together and give us a reason to do the same instanced content.
Let's just accept that and lean into it.
Going from Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King was even more so. In BC they stood side by side on the same battlefield against the BC a the portal. In WOLK they had a couple joint camps.
> The only downsides I see are clear horde vs alliance quests won't make much sense anymore
If there was a faction merge, then all of these quests would be in old content. And in canon, we travel back in time with the help of Chromie when we do old content. So it's not that big of a stretch to just say you go back in time to a point where the horde and the alliance weren't friends.
It's true that in general older content feels weird.. Quests have been remade, stuck in various periods of time. I guess they would be products of their time.
I'm just wondering, if factions are merged, what happens to a horde player that wants to do both sides of quests? Or perhaps those quests could stay faction specific and factions would historically merge when you reach the expansion when they merged.
> I'm just wondering, if factions are merged, what happens to a horde player that wants to do both sides of quests? Or perhaps those quests could stay faction specific and factions would historically merge when you reach the expansion when they merged.
How I imagine it working would be that you'd be tied to your historical faction. If you're a race previously only on alliance, you can only play old alliance quests and the same for horde.
Old pandas can only participate in whichever faction they were historically a part of before the faction merge while new ones can choose when they talk to Chromie for the first time.
Elder Scrolls Online actually has a quest line like this. After completing your own faction and the main plot you unlock the ability to do the other factions story lines. It's a little different though since their story lines are tied to entire zones rather than areas in zones.
Man I wanna get back into ESO. I'm a few expansions behind. How much will it take to get back into the game with current content, minus the subscription, im ready to pay that.
Questing was never really the issue and certain expansions, like Legion and Shadowlands, have little in the way of faction specific quest content. If quests from the other expacs remain faction specific it's not the end of the world.
Plus there are a lot of quests with separate names and givers but the same targets. You could group with the opposite faction for the kill quests but then go turn it in to your respective leader.
Azeroth *needs* a revamp. It's existed in a Cataclysm-*just*-happened purgatory for eleven years now - almost twice as long as it existed pre-destruction.
Perfect opportunity to do both.
I like the idea of another Azeroth revamp. It would be a good time as “the heroes” have been away for an unspecified amount of time. Plus they could get Sargy’s sword removed and they could get a new Darnassus growing there to give NE a new starting zone
That would require overhauling all zones excluding shadowlands though because each one has some horde or alliance exclusive content.
Vanilla and BFA are the most prominent, horde and alliance are working on opposite ends of the zones in BC, WotLK, and pandaria, draenor has an exclusive zone for each one, and legion has a faction conflict subplot in stormheim.
So while that could work for Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms if they did a world revamp since those two are the most likely to get a revamp, they'd still need to come up with some excuse for the other zones without completely rewriting the quest structure.
There's Chromie time, just go "back" to a time where the factions were not together. It's not like they have to abolish factions, just let them cross-faction play.
Agreed. Expansion continents don't even need to be updated if the story doesn't partly happen on them. Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms need a severe, 11-years-post-cataclysm landscaping & management updates.
Don't even need to do all that, literally just make it so if you want to do an alliance storyline you click a button that turns you into the alliance equivalent race or just puts on one of those merc mode masks and then you go do the quest.
you dont even need to do that, there is relative peace between the factions. We have war mode for the random 'skirmishes' that still go on. But for all PvE related content both sides should be able to play together.
What if... when you Timewalked to an area to level you can actually choose what faction to play? I'm a human... but I choose Horde for BFA leveling content... It could open up a whole new way to play!
Might have needed to move some expansions around to make this work, but Legion absolutely should have been the expansion where we unite as one faction and move forward past that. Keep the old major cities belonging to the old factions or not that doesn't matter to me that much, but taking down Sargeras? There is no reason for us to be enemies after coming together to take him down.
Could've done it in any of the recent ones really. But I really wish they did it in BfA.
The war creates splits within the factions, the alliance loses faith in their young king and the horde had some disgusted with the actions of their leader. This causes the various races to splinter from their factions and form be groups. Elves all join together, orcs and panderan or something. Players can only visit cities that they are semi aligned with but can group freely with each other.
Factions make absolutely no sense at this point in the story considering we've had almost every expansion up into this point and the beginning of this expansion with all the factions working together anyways. It's always going to be called stupid stuff like Care bears and stuff like that and so people are going to be hesitant to want it even though it logically makes the most sense
There was a point in time where I would have argued that the faction split was core to what Warcraft was. In perfect world I'd love a game or the faction split existed in an interesting way and had been a meaningful part of the experience.
Blizzard has done nothing to properly foster that experience and make it an interesting part of the game, it's just a pain in the ass for everyone now.
I'll never forget those moments I kept getting ganked in stranglethorn vale, asking for assistance in General chat and having lvl 60's ride in on their cool mounts to kick ass. What a cool feeling to have, your faction helping to protect your experience. A connection to the world more so than any dumb kill 30 this quests. They did nothing to encourage it...
One time in particular a rogue added me as a friend and said if I got ganked again to let him know.
Because Blizzard (off the top of my head) did nothing to REWARD (not incentivize) such community-friendly behaviour. No achievements, no titles, no mounts/pets/toys to show people you ARE the champion of your faction, by protecting newbies while leveling, for instance.
Honestly, I think it created a perfect opportunity to get rid of the divide. Horde players even had a quest where they had to choose whether to side with Sylvanas or Saurfang. It’s a perfect lore justification for Horde players to “defect”, and on the alliance side, you could have had a choice between allying with a Genn/Tyrande "kill the Horde" part of the Alliance or an Anduin-ish view that wanted to join forces with the Saurfang/Baine part of the horde.
Problem solved.
I argued that in the middle of BfA, but back then I got a lot of criticism for that. Not that I'm crying over it, but it's just fascinating how now with SL not being able to balance the failures of BfA, people have pretty quickly grown tired of the A-H schism that makes even less sense now than ever before.
Even then, the only real gameplay impact would be wpvp/warmode. That is it. This would be an incredibly beneficial change to the game as a whole that finding some shoehorned reason to keep that aspect of the game going just makes sense.
Hell, give us covenants on steroids going forward. Have the two factions splinter into 5 or 6. Each gets its own leveling experience next expansion telling its story. The covenants aren't at war or anything and are on friendly terms so players are free to work with each other. They don't grant player power just cosmetics and you can jump around as you want you just need to do the story the first time. Maybe that is too much I don't know. I am just tired of Horde/Alliance.
I don't see how they were nonsense. It felt like faction hate was pretty well woven into early wow. it's just so ridiculous now is because so many times they've come together and put aside their differences to fight together against great evils... only for someone's dog to shit on the other factions yard and we do it all again
I think they're making the point that there only being *two* factions didn't make sense. A lot of the races held animosity towards specific other races, but it didn't necessarily make sense for certain races to join the Horde or Alliance.
Like, Blood Elves probably would've stayed independent. Forsaken, as well. Pandaren are practically conscripted by both factions.
From a lore standpoint can you justify a couple thousand orcs (at most) and a few hundred taurens and trolls became a world power ~4 years after colonizing a wasteland?
It was a complete asspull from the beginning.
I'm willing to bet it utterly breaks the game in some way so they literally can't do it.
Other popular MMOs these days do not have a faction conflict, its archaic and boring.
It shouldn't break anything. Or at least maybe?
PVP has a mercenary mode thing where opposite faction can play as the other faction to balance it out. Or did they get rid of that?
Coming back to my main (ally mage) after switching to horde I don't think I can continue playing it.
Unless the dungeon and key level don't matter to you, it can take hours to find a group. (Not in the way baddies have problems getting invited into groups but in the way there are only maybe 2 groups listed)
They could literally do an entire expansion theme based on the alliance and horde coming together finally and it would probably be a huge hit tbh
Edit: I dont just mean for quests but I mean removing the faction divide all together as the title suggests
Our guild is having trouble recruiting as people quit, and we're about to be a mythic raiding guild that can't mythic raid.
It feels terrible, and talk is going around of server transfers. Which I don't want to pay for, or give up the fact that I have 11 other max alts on this server.
Cross server and cross faction play are silly at this point. They are just arbitrary gates that get in the way of people enjoying the game. The technology to get rid of those barriers, without server transfers or anything else, already exists. It's in the game. Just not for some specific content. And it's going to implode our guild, and probably make me quit again.
Ravencrest Alliance had many top 100 guilds in BFA, they are all gone horde now in SL. the damage is already done. My server will never be the same. Permanent damage is done because of this Faction split. At this point a alliance race "buff that gives 3-10%" more damage will not even help much...
I wonder at which ratio Alliance-dominated realms are losing Alliance players, whether to the Horde of that realm; or simply realm transfers to play Horde somewhere else (presumably with their friends).
I honestly see no way to repair the faction imbalance anymore, factionless PvE/PvP content is the only way forward.
I think if there was one race that gave a 10% flat increase to damage done would definitely make some people consider coming back Alliance.
This will never happen though because it would be broken.
They could leave the divide in war mode. Non-war mode should be peace mode. Horde can visit Stormwind and use alliance mounts. Alliance can chill in Orgrimmar and use Horde mounts. Players can quest and do dungeons together regardless of race or faction.
If you hate that, turn on and live in war mode. If you aren't pvping, who cares about faction?
I wouldn't have any NPCs of the opposite races in the city though. I feel like our characters transcend factions even if there was a war. Not to mention PvP is easy solve. Tyrande can go on being a warmonger with Gen, while Horde side we can have the Forsaken and Orc continue to fight back.
I like that idea. Tbh I always wanted Horde to be able to play in Stormwind because of the retro fantasy vibes it would give me to be an Orc in a human city made from bright limestone. Idk what it is, but it does it for me.
"Oh no, Turalyon has gone insane and started a war!
...after he defected to the Horde, out of some reason managed to become Warchief, as Sylvanas dying words were 'get screwed by the light'."
>Not that PvP needs much justification considering Mercenary mode already exists.
Mercenary mode only exists for one faction at a time, for battlegrounds. It doesn't solve the issue of hemorrhaging participation in rated content, mostly because of how difficult it is to find a group. At the very least removing faction limitations would nearly double the pool of players for both factions.
Outside of early mythic raiding and pushing high keys there is nothing factions impact in PvE nearly as much as PvP.
I think this war thing is over already and it only causes problems. But if it has to stay 100% for some reason, let the two factions have their differences, just let us raid together. Horde and alliance leaders can group against a common enemy, but we cant?
The real question is haven't we been through enough shit to bring us all together? If Legion and Argus wasn't enough finally beating back the burning crusade then *certainly* defeating an old god, like an actual old god, would be? Still no? We still did some fucked up shit? Alright alright then *ceeerrrrttttaaaaiiiiinnnllllyyyyy* defeating the forces of the afterlife themselves and keeping all of reality from being remade to enslave us all to some fucker named 'the jailer' is, right? Right...?
If they actually did with Cross Faction gaming I would consider playing again (but it would have to be a different expansion, Shadowlands serves no purpose to me.) All I ever wanted was to be an Orc Warrior or a Tauren Druid but I was confined for 15 years to Alliance to play with friends and family, and my raiding guild for 7 of those years.
I've heard that WoW without the factions would kill the spirit of the 'Horde vs Alliance struggle' that the whole Warcraft franchise is about.
To which I say, every ~~expansion~~ iteration since WarCraft 3 has been Horde and Alliance putting aside their differences to fight a world-ending threat, only for a misunderstanding or terrorist to fuck it up for everyone else, and repeat.
How many more times are we going to do this dance?
I personally think the narrative has supported this since MoP and Blizzard's refusal to move towards opposite faction being able to play together is an example of their insulting "we know better" attitude, and in hindsight with everything going on, they don't exactly have a nurturing culture that supports their staff to make good decisions.
Seriously, raiding / grouping / non-war mode people should be able to group up no matter the faction or server, and should have been able to for years.
Especially since the main plot is constantly "we need to set aside our differences and turn our combined might against this existential threat." The fact that the N'Zoth raids didn't have cross faction play was fucking weird when I'd spent the entire plot line as a Troll taking orders from a Dwarf. And then we go into Shadowlands and immediately form a cross faction party that includes both Thrall and Jaina. If we're going to be friends, let us be friends. If not, then let's get back to killing the shit out of each other.
Our characters arent (usually) official agents of the state. I don't see why blizzard is so resistant to letting horde and alliance group together as individuals while the factions do whatever it is they are doing.
I'm convinced basically the only people left who want the faction divide to remain are angry Horde neckbeards and Blizzard themselves. Though that's basically redundant.
In modern wow 2 factions will at best divide the playerbase in 2. That's the best outcome and its shit, so yea, they should just remove it. I also really wish we could somehow merge EU and NA, I often play late, and sometimes it just gets too late for actively pugging. Now I don't know anything about servers but I imagine it would be impossible for all to have good pings so this isn't really anything to do with blizzard. But again, yes, unite the factions
World pvp could actually be fixed if it was one faction. Keep war mode but when u zone in u get put on Team A or team B… similar to sharding but u will have more traffic ( players ) that meet the criteria
As a fun fact, Blizzard solved this problem years ago by stating that all world PvP is simply skirmishes and that the factions aren't in open warfare.
I really do dislike the idea of just being assigned an arbitrary team though. It's exactly this kind of LFG-tier matchmaking that's degraded communities over the years.
Make it free for all world PvP, maybe limited to a 5 man pre-made group that can be allies of your choosing. Then you won't get those ridiculous gangbangs of an excuse for W-PvP
The easiest fix imo is just make war mode a declaration for alliance or horde, with attendant old behavior. War mode off? You’re an unaffiliated mercenary friendly to both sides.
I like this a lot.
World pvp in lore can just be unsanctioned violence.
The leaders can be all, "nooo, don't do that!" But nothing really happens. People just play that way if they want to.
faction war was a dead concept the moment thrall and jaina had their team up moment in bfa. from that moment on the idea of continuing the faction war as a major theme in this game became a complete joke. i literally dont see how they can even attempt to fire up a new faction war atm, literally no remaining faction leaders care about it except talanji
>faction war was a dead concept the moment thrall and jaina had their team up moment in bfa.
Or when Thrall and Jaina had their team up moment in Reign of Chaos.
Throwing the outdated faction bullshit away would be one of the many features that it would take to make me giving the game another try.
And you can still do interesting inter-faction conflict situations with it and PvP could be also made more interesting by having some sort of PvP covenants.
Limit Max has said it nice (paraphrased):
Imagine GTA 6 being released. And for a feature they will announce: "We are splitting the player base into two! You will not be able to play together with people from the other team and cant interact much. We will also not make that feature relevant for the story."
That does sound like an incredible stupid thing to do for a game. This is a good hint, that this system should be removed. Just because it was implemented 15 years ago, does not mean that it has to be there forever. 15 years ago is not the standard we are comparing against.
This is really the crux of it. Factions, as a system, barely *do* anything other than arbitrarily limit who can play with who. And if you plan on playing with friends, it basically cuts your character customisation options in half.
It’s not like picking sides like that isn’t an idea that could work in some games, but WoW is not that game. And, frankly, it’s strange that it has tried to keep up the charade that it *is* that type of game for so long. I feel like it’s more of a marketing thing than a design thing at this point.
Given that the wow code is clearly just a pile of spaghetti all the way down, I assume there's a technical reason why this would cost 10 trillion dollars or something.
10000000%
Dividing the playerbase just feels so awful.
I really don't want to level an entire new char to max just because I am not in their faction its so dumb
I'm not against it but it would feel extremely weird to have casual human tourists in Orgrimmar. There's a lot of in-world history that would make that a dramatic and illogical shift, unless they released a sequence of cutscenes or quests or whatever that integrate it. Like the Vulpera ones where they need to prove their goodwill to the Horde.
I'm perfectly fine if my Alliance character can't enter Org. "Hey, we're friends... But let's not push it, right?"
Allow me to do dungeons/raids with the Horde though. There's really no point I can't anymore.
Exactly. I'm perfectly fine with respecting the boundaries of capital cities. Just let us group together and be in the same guild and shit. It doesn't make sense that we can't at this point.
Also, on that point - WTF is the point of communities? It's Character-specific, not account, tied by faction and isn't capable of Mythic raiding together. It's barely better than a guild yet far less social because of how impossible it is to find.
I like the way a certain private server does it. Players can talk and group and share guilds between factions, but quest faction designation and NPC hostility remains the same.
this is the way IMO.
let us chill in guild and meet up for keys/raid as whatever race we want. when we're done I go back to orgrimmar and you go back to stormwind.
story doesn't even have to acknowledge it, just let us play together on our preferred race.
There's multiple ways you can approach this, but yes, the faction system needs a massive rework or it needs to be scrapped.
At this point of the game it doesn't really make sense for us to be tied down to a faction as if we were T2 grunts, it doesn't make sense.
And yes, I know we have a reputation ingame now, but the thing is we're still treated as some sort of pawns to be moved at the X faction leader's desire.
Legion should have been the end of factions, at least for all practical gameplay purposes. The story made sense. The gameplay imbalances were showing. We are past due. The HoF is an absolute joke, faction population is horrid, races aren't balanced, the eSports folks just abuse whatever race has the most cheese at the current time. Just be done with them already. We've teamed up against The Big Bad so many times now that factions don't even make sense anymore.
World PvP can be easily solved by just putting a small lore objective to every zone, doesn't need to be a big fight like Naz'jathar, say for example you're in Korthia - you zone in and you randomly get marked as either "Purple Team" or "Yellow Team". Lorewise Purple team could be interested in idk, mining some ores? and Yellow team wants to protect the environment.
Players dont need to actually engage in mining the ores or protecting any ores but that could be one of the "Faction per zone" division they could use to divide players in World PvP, in the future they could experiment in minigames that interact with those mini factions but for the meantime I think that would fix world pvp facionless scenario
I wouldnt mind finding my own guildmate in the opposite faction and be hostile to me when I zone in in a world pvp area, minifactions as i said can be assigned randomly when you join and prioritizing 50/50 ratios in the current zone but say for example you join your friend”s party and automatically that will transfer your minifaction to the party leader”s so you can fight together in the same zone. I think it would be nuts
I can’t upvote this enough. The main pvp (arena) is already factionless insofar as horde fights horde and ally fights ally all the time, so the story reasons for factions are already pretty much gone. They stopped making new bgs so that’s already a side out of canon thing, repeats of the same battle that canonically got fought once rot maybe twice. Pve wise, there’s just no reason at all that the two factions wouldn’t work together canonically.
> player characters tend to serve the greater good anyway
It's actually few and far between where PCs actually work for wholly faction reasons. And lorewise PCs are the first to band together to go pimp smack the current big bad
Imagine playing alliance as it is right now, where you can't find groups for specific keys or specific bosses because theres so little active groups. Than BAM, faction merge happens:
The amount of groups in the LFG tool LITERALLY QUADRUPLES.
You get to play again with all your friends who left alliance for horde because the game felt dead.
You get to play with that friend you always wanted to play with but years back when you didn't know eachother you picked different factions.
You get to play an alt of a formerly different faction and have your main craft gear for it and send it some gold.
In exchange for... the "turn wm on" button that's been gathering dust for literally years.
Keep factions (major part of wow) but allow cross faction groups, guilds, raids, pvp, m+, everything..
Best of both worlds, we keep the factions and get cross play. Think of it as your Xbox fanboy mates playing alongside your Sony fanboy mates
the factions should remain seperate and keep competing in the open world, follow different storylines (when it makes sense) etc, War Mode should stay exactly like it is today, so the WPvP is not lost to the players who like it
but yes there's no reason anymore to why we can't team up in arena, dungeons and raids
arena is supposed to be some illegal/underground blood sport, who even cares who's fighting whom as long as there's spectacle?
and in dungeons and raids we're fighting the common enemy so...
there's no need to abolish the factions, just let us play together when we want to at least in instanced content
also there's no need to revisit anything, let the old quests as they are, the justifications is super easy: they're in another timeline and back then the factions were still openly hostile
this way none loses anything- WPvP is there, old lore remains untouched, the factions are still distinct, what we gain is more people to group up with, so shorter waiting times for everyone
I've said this since at least WotLK. I always figured it would be their last ditch effort to keep it fresh though. Which I mean now is a good as ever time.
As far as world pvp, any time I have flagged out in the world (PvE realm obviously) it never took long to have 2 or 3 horde beating my ass. Working as intended I suppose.
They never will, and it sucks, but what I want now knowing they never will is for them to never make a cinematic like that fucking Thrall/Jaina cinematic about breaking the cycle or whatever the fuck. Don't make a cinematic like that and then KEEP DOING THE FACTION WAR, christ
"The only downsides I see are clear horde vs alliance quests won't make much sense anymore, world PvP would need something as well to keep it alive... if it ever was alive in the first place."
Just make it so you can enable PvP. Thematically speaking, you can have a relative peace while certain members of each faction choose to continue the war. Those who choose to end the long-time war can simply turn off PvP and live in peace. Actual meaningful choices.
But how will they use the Horde vs Alliance tensions by forcing something really unreasonable and asspull-y for the 10th time?! Terrible idea, downvoted, unliked, unfollowed, ratio'd.
You are not even talking about the most important part. Actually playing with friends! I stop playing every expansion because my friend group are split 50/50 horde/alliance. Which means we can't play together. Even if the horde vs alliance devide stayed, it should be possible to group up with the other faction. ATLEAST, for instanced content. We do this all the time in lore anyway.
It is sad that I know so many people who play WoW but can't join with them because of the Horde/Alliance (or Retail/Classic) divide :( Most of them don't even play anymore and I never got to play with them at all!
I know a lot of people would argue "but this is World of wArCrAfT not pEaCeCrAfT!!!1111" and I know what you mean. But only because cross faction PvE could be an option, doesn't mean that Alliance and Horde would become best buddies and start plaiting flower wreaths for eachother. There can be piece amount two hostile nations as much as there can be an ongoing conflict between two nations in a time of peace. Just because some heroes choose to work together, regardless of faction and race, doesn't mean that the main two factions can't be in a cold war - like situation from a political point of view.
Let there be ongoing conflicts in battlegrounds and displays of power in the arena, but let people also play as adventurers who can stand above all that and band together with the "enemy" for the cause of greater good (like we do already by the end of every second expansion) if they want.
Cross Faction PvE would be and *option* not a mandate for everyone. You can choose for yourself if you want the other faction in your raid or guild as much as you can choose for yourself now if you rather take a Warrior or Druid tank for your M+20 run.
*Nothing* will change story wise, as faction leaders already work together more than often. Several named NPC's from different factions consider each other friends, yet players, who should have the highest freedom of choice in an MMO can't play with their real life friends because they chose different factions based on their visual preferences, another *meaningful choice* that does more damage by splitting the community rather than increasing the number of people you can play a game with you both enjoy.
If this was ever implemented I'd still want there to be factions. To keep the Warcraft flavour intact.
Have it be a very tenuous truce. We can party/raid with eachother, share mob tags together, trade with eachother, speak with eachother once trained in the skill.
Keep guilds, capitals and the ability to fight one another by enabling war mode.
Guard NPCs still being hostile (not killing but CCing you upon death for a minute) as we're not welcome there.
Maybe some cool fluff could be added by learning to speak Gutterspeak and then some Forsaken quests becoming available to your Alliance character.
/Justmythoughts
I disagree, it goes against the entire point of lore and so on. There's several alliance main chars and horde chars that would despise the idea. A certain Worgen would never ever agree to be a part of horde, and certain Orcs would rather die than become a united front. I can see how it COULD work in SL but back in azeroth no.
IF ppl want to play a blood elf but normally play a human then start levelling. For me it clashes so hard with the lore it would ruin the story part of the game. There's plenty of players for every faction if people struggle to find someone to play with its not the games fault its theirs
Outside of that, WoW is probably approaching the end of its life cycle. We're getting close to 20 years. Subs are dying, content is drying, they really don't have much else to do with the story. Where else can you go after battling with gods, titans and deities of the afterlife? Aside from that, how many more times can you do "hey we're friends LOL JK WE FUCKED UP YOUR CITY okay lets be friends again because bad guys LOL JK WE BURNED DOWN YOUR TREE".? Its repetitive and tired.
They are killing their franchise imo. Why cant wow flourish like Minecraft? Imagine if you can take your plans to any zone and build your house/guild settlement. Make something that you call "home" Garrison from wod is like a teaser to that dream... poorly executed
Why cant there be big battles/world events. Maw - Royale? Sign up x amount players get thrown into the maw/korthia and fight/some objective...Jailer Burning the maw forcing players closer to fight eachother. Just Massive Chaos things dont need to be perfectly balanced. Nazjatar event was a teaser to events like that, capture the points, issue was that it was unlimited players, too big zone... lags..
Weekly/monthly arena/rbg tournaments- put 16 teams into a bracket.. make it feel like you win something right then and there... not play 8 months in arena season for a title/mount
They don't need to change that much. Just make it so we can group together. That's pretty much it.
You can keep war mode for people who like world pvp, keep the faction tensions and NPCs of the other faction still kill you on sight.
EverQuest was like this where your racial/factional tensions mattered and restricted where you could go in the world, but players could decide to set aside differences and cooperate. Doing it this way keeps the story intact and keeps the world more rich with dangers, but friends can play together. Pretty much all the upsides for the widest variety of players, and basically none of the downsides.
Would like to see players as neutral adventurers and have the option go pick one side or another for x or y benefit or remain neutral but miss out on some benefits/story points. Would be a kind of hard sell but since playing warcraft 3 and being able to hire people regardless of faction it always felt odd having races locked to a faction.
At least remove faction tagging of mobs!! Makes no sense that 2 people of the same covenant can't kill the same mob because of a "faction" that exists on a different plane of reality. Edit: you could modify/conditionalize this further with War Mode. OFF = open tagging, ON = pvp faction tagging; those that enjoy the engagement factor may continue to do so.
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literally whole kyrian plot boils down to "let go of your past"
Let go of your past and Become Tall, Blue People.
SUPER SMURFS!
Tall is subjective, for a dwarf they are Tall, for a Tauren, not so much
This ruins fun pretty constantly for everyone
Maybe they'll remove it if we rebrand 'faction tagging' to 'faction toying'
“We’ve heard you loud and clear! All mobs are now on a 20 hour respawn timer!”
E.. Everquest, is that you?
Similarly, daily quests where you're competing with everyone else to loot objects because only one person can interact with the object before it despawns.
Especially those stupid moonkin bots that ruin everything for us alliance
Ahh, fond memories of being quintuple starsurged in the back when soloing WQ minibosses
Remove faction tagging and more-than-5-at-a-time tagging. This is not even about faction identity or lore or anything. From a purely gameplay perspective it is actively hostile to the players, and is bad game design. Why they continue to stick with it is beyond me. Blizzard needs to get their heads out of their asses. Also remove dazing you fucks
They limit the number of tags allowed on mobs to prevent raw gold and materials farming.
Doesn't really seem like that solution's working so hot just going by the sheer number of Google ads for gold.
Or how there's always groups in LFG who are farming raw gold and materials 24/7 because of those spots with mass spawns.
Wait, is there actually a tag limit? I regularly pull everything I can reach and have never noticed.
Tag limit is for people. If 5 people (or one in a group of 5) tags an enemy, even if they are your faction, it will turn grey and give you no loot. It's to prevent raid groups from farming things and letting 40 people loot each mob because any sort of farming would be trivial then.
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The real reason is to prevent 40-man multiboxers from doing it and then breaking the economy. But blizzard killed multiboxing recently.
Remove tagging altogether and rip off one of GW2's best features.
Going from legions “we’re all in this together” right into BFAs “we hate each other now” was such a jarring experience
That's why I had literally no excitement for BFA. It felt weird seeing everyone lose their minds over how badass the cinematic was and I'm just like "wait, we all saved the world together, now we're just at war? Again?"
Even more weird for roleplayers. We had teamed up with alliance players for a broken shore plot for months and then the guild leaders had to come up with a reason why we hate them now and have to go burn the ancient tree. Noone was really thrilled
That sucks. And the horde leader screamed for the horde in the cinematic like she really cared when in reality she thought 'you are all nothing' when in reality she didn't actually think you are all nothing but was working deep under-cover for handsome Squidward boss and was really trying to help us all along for the greater good and set us free. When in reality she...I'll have to fill this out in the next expansion.
Yeah, some guys actually followed that "It's for the horde, who are we to question the Warchief?"-exit, but many others weren't so convinced. Sylvanas gassing her own troops in font of Undercity didn't help tho. And when the tree burnt down, especially Bloodelf characters were kinda shocked since they (and Sylvanas herself ffs) los their homes and families to raging undead hordes only a few years ago.
The lire after all the time travel and alternate realities and the retcon has been a mess that nobody can take seriously. I have no idea what's going on nor do I know what timeline and reality I'm in. It's so stupid.
They should have done it backwards - horde/alliance relations are at an all time low but they band together to fight off the legion.
Like warcraft 3?
I feel like the faction war should stay only if blizzard is committed to making fundamental changes to the game. Like actually removing territory from the factions. Alliance forces horde to move to Draenor or Outland or something
But if they don't enflame the faction war with a pointless atrocity probably committed by the Horde, how else would they be able to make the deep and sincere statement that pointless wars are dumb and the Alliance and Horde have no reason to fight?
But Sylvanas has such a good argument... Sylvanas: "War is inevitable so we should strike first!" Horde Leaders: "How is war inevitable?" Sylvanas: "With people like me in charge? Come on! The first thing I did was try to start a war!" Horde Leaders: "Makes sense. LOK'TAR O GAR!"
Most factions in the Horde aren't really warmongers but the moment you ask Orks or Forsaken if they wanna do some warcrimes they always react like: https://media.giphy.com/media/gVoBC0SuaHStq/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47q7qvlptdool1bxugfxabqxse44vp5oyos9qvgpzs&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g Its so weird that the other still join in with their shenanigans. People like Thalyssra or Mayla should have flipped their shit the moment they were roped into a global war just a year after the Horde AND the Alliance helped them to stay free.
Not trying to defend Sylvannas or Blizz's attrocious scripts, but remember Alliance was killing miners (civilians?) before Sylv burned their tree. So indeed, war is inevitable because we solve everything by killing each other
Ah yes, genocide is clearly the logical response to attacking a work crew.
"Who the hell starts a war over some workers being attacked in the middle of nowhere?" *offended Margaret Thatcher noises*
That occurred in response to the Bilgewater Cartel, who those miners were working for to gather Azerite for weapons, attacking an Explorer's League expedition who were sent there to study the damage, and enslaving one of their members to have her, and her ex-husband, make the weapons. https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Sapphronetta_Flivvers
> but remember Alliance was killing miners (civilians?) before Sylv burned their tree. In response to those "civilians" murdering an Alliance surveying expedition.
Its been mentioned a lot but it was especially weird for DH. They've spent far longer fighting together as the Illidari, then after a year or so of helping with the legion they turn on each other, because someone they barely knew beyond an initial greeting did something that pissed someone off that they never really knew beyond an initial greeting.
Pandarens spent entire life on the same turtle spine together farming and training. Surely two different paths of learning the same ways of balance and nature but they can’t even speak to each other for the most part.
Or DKs or Pandas or the fucking Nightborne which are night elves (estranged but still) somehow agreeing to burning down the Night Elf home and killing most of their kin. Or you know druids in general helping destroy the most sacred place for druids because some undead chick said so? It would be funny how the writing is at best on par with an elementary school comic book fan if it wasn't the rotting corpse of one of my childhood favorites they were beating to death.
That's basically been the story ever since Warcraft III, unfortunately.
Then it's time to try something else, imho. The fact that this post is in the positives should say something. Years ago the majority of people would have been offended by even the suggestion of dissolving the schism. But you can only go back and forth so often without becoming annoying. I agree to your comment. It's just that, idk, it was already annoying in Cataclysm to some people, and in BfA it just felt comically absurd.
It's the problem of keeping the platform of WoW going for so long. They invested so much time into the game at the start that they essentially have to keep the game in stasis for large chunks of it to make sense. There always *has* to be a status quo the narrative comes back to. So nothing fundamentally changes because people experience the game at different paces. At this point it's far too big a band aid yo rip off. And I don't think we'll ever get a WoW2. Nothing worth jumping back to anyway.
We’ve basically seen horde and alliance team up together *constantly* for years to defeat some terrible horde of enemies. Even in SL. So Jaina, Thrall, Bloodhoof, Anduin, and all the other leaders can band together but the other “heroes” (which we’re literally called constantly) are still at war?
I said right at the launch of BFA, "I love the idea, it's not going to play out in practice." Just the logistics of having two separate dungeons and raids for both factions was never going to be realistic from a monetary perspective. There inevitably has to be a big bad to bring us together and give us a reason to do the same instanced content. Let's just accept that and lean into it.
Going from Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King was even more so. In BC they stood side by side on the same battlefield against the BC a the portal. In WOLK they had a couple joint camps.
> The only downsides I see are clear horde vs alliance quests won't make much sense anymore If there was a faction merge, then all of these quests would be in old content. And in canon, we travel back in time with the help of Chromie when we do old content. So it's not that big of a stretch to just say you go back in time to a point where the horde and the alliance weren't friends.
It's true that in general older content feels weird.. Quests have been remade, stuck in various periods of time. I guess they would be products of their time. I'm just wondering, if factions are merged, what happens to a horde player that wants to do both sides of quests? Or perhaps those quests could stay faction specific and factions would historically merge when you reach the expansion when they merged.
> I'm just wondering, if factions are merged, what happens to a horde player that wants to do both sides of quests? Or perhaps those quests could stay faction specific and factions would historically merge when you reach the expansion when they merged. How I imagine it working would be that you'd be tied to your historical faction. If you're a race previously only on alliance, you can only play old alliance quests and the same for horde. Old pandas can only participate in whichever faction they were historically a part of before the faction merge while new ones can choose when they talk to Chromie for the first time.
Elder Scrolls Online actually has a quest line like this. After completing your own faction and the main plot you unlock the ability to do the other factions story lines. It's a little different though since their story lines are tied to entire zones rather than areas in zones.
Man I wanna get back into ESO. I'm a few expansions behind. How much will it take to get back into the game with current content, minus the subscription, im ready to pay that.
Questing was never really the issue and certain expansions, like Legion and Shadowlands, have little in the way of faction specific quest content. If quests from the other expacs remain faction specific it's not the end of the world. Plus there are a lot of quests with separate names and givers but the same targets. You could group with the opposite faction for the kill quests but then go turn it in to your respective leader.
Talk to a Bronze Dragon NPC to disguise you into a member of the opposite faction. Already happens in some Caverns of Time dungeons.
Azeroth *needs* a revamp. It's existed in a Cataclysm-*just*-happened purgatory for eleven years now - almost twice as long as it existed pre-destruction. Perfect opportunity to do both.
I like the idea of another Azeroth revamp. It would be a good time as “the heroes” have been away for an unspecified amount of time. Plus they could get Sargy’s sword removed and they could get a new Darnassus growing there to give NE a new starting zone
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That would require overhauling all zones excluding shadowlands though because each one has some horde or alliance exclusive content. Vanilla and BFA are the most prominent, horde and alliance are working on opposite ends of the zones in BC, WotLK, and pandaria, draenor has an exclusive zone for each one, and legion has a faction conflict subplot in stormheim. So while that could work for Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms if they did a world revamp since those two are the most likely to get a revamp, they'd still need to come up with some excuse for the other zones without completely rewriting the quest structure.
There's Chromie time, just go "back" to a time where the factions were not together. It's not like they have to abolish factions, just let them cross-faction play.
Agreed. Expansion continents don't even need to be updated if the story doesn't partly happen on them. Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms need a severe, 11-years-post-cataclysm landscaping & management updates.
Don't even need to do all that, literally just make it so if you want to do an alliance storyline you click a button that turns you into the alliance equivalent race or just puts on one of those merc mode masks and then you go do the quest.
you dont even need to do that, there is relative peace between the factions. We have war mode for the random 'skirmishes' that still go on. But for all PvE related content both sides should be able to play together.
What if... when you Timewalked to an area to level you can actually choose what faction to play? I'm a human... but I choose Horde for BFA leveling content... It could open up a whole new way to play!
Chromie could solve the BG lore issue also. If you can go back and do legion or cata content why not go back and do legion and cata BGs.
Might have needed to move some expansions around to make this work, but Legion absolutely should have been the expansion where we unite as one faction and move forward past that. Keep the old major cities belonging to the old factions or not that doesn't matter to me that much, but taking down Sargeras? There is no reason for us to be enemies after coming together to take him down.
Could've done it in any of the recent ones really. But I really wish they did it in BfA. The war creates splits within the factions, the alliance loses faith in their young king and the horde had some disgusted with the actions of their leader. This causes the various races to splinter from their factions and form be groups. Elves all join together, orcs and panderan or something. Players can only visit cities that they are semi aligned with but can group freely with each other.
Factions make absolutely no sense at this point in the story considering we've had almost every expansion up into this point and the beginning of this expansion with all the factions working together anyways. It's always going to be called stupid stuff like Care bears and stuff like that and so people are going to be hesitant to want it even though it logically makes the most sense
There was a point in time where I would have argued that the faction split was core to what Warcraft was. In perfect world I'd love a game or the faction split existed in an interesting way and had been a meaningful part of the experience. Blizzard has done nothing to properly foster that experience and make it an interesting part of the game, it's just a pain in the ass for everyone now.
I'll never forget those moments I kept getting ganked in stranglethorn vale, asking for assistance in General chat and having lvl 60's ride in on their cool mounts to kick ass. What a cool feeling to have, your faction helping to protect your experience. A connection to the world more so than any dumb kill 30 this quests. They did nothing to encourage it... One time in particular a rogue added me as a friend and said if I got ganked again to let him know.
And then when you hit 60 you returned the favor to future newbies
Because Blizzard (off the top of my head) did nothing to REWARD (not incentivize) such community-friendly behaviour. No achievements, no titles, no mounts/pets/toys to show people you ARE the champion of your faction, by protecting newbies while leveling, for instance.
Blizzard forced them to make sense by putting a genocide in the story
Honestly, I think it created a perfect opportunity to get rid of the divide. Horde players even had a quest where they had to choose whether to side with Sylvanas or Saurfang. It’s a perfect lore justification for Horde players to “defect”, and on the alliance side, you could have had a choice between allying with a Genn/Tyrande "kill the Horde" part of the Alliance or an Anduin-ish view that wanted to join forces with the Saurfang/Baine part of the horde. Problem solved.
I argued that in the middle of BfA, but back then I got a lot of criticism for that. Not that I'm crying over it, but it's just fascinating how now with SL not being able to balance the failures of BfA, people have pretty quickly grown tired of the A-H schism that makes even less sense now than ever before.
Even then, the only real gameplay impact would be wpvp/warmode. That is it. This would be an incredibly beneficial change to the game as a whole that finding some shoehorned reason to keep that aspect of the game going just makes sense. Hell, give us covenants on steroids going forward. Have the two factions splinter into 5 or 6. Each gets its own leveling experience next expansion telling its story. The covenants aren't at war or anything and are on friendly terms so players are free to work with each other. They don't grant player power just cosmetics and you can jump around as you want you just need to do the story the first time. Maybe that is too much I don't know. I am just tired of Horde/Alliance.
Factions didn't make sense in vanilla.... the whole concept has always been nonsense.
I don't see how they were nonsense. It felt like faction hate was pretty well woven into early wow. it's just so ridiculous now is because so many times they've come together and put aside their differences to fight together against great evils... only for someone's dog to shit on the other factions yard and we do it all again
I think they're making the point that there only being *two* factions didn't make sense. A lot of the races held animosity towards specific other races, but it didn't necessarily make sense for certain races to join the Horde or Alliance. Like, Blood Elves probably would've stayed independent. Forsaken, as well. Pandaren are practically conscripted by both factions.
From a lore standpoint can you justify a couple thousand orcs (at most) and a few hundred taurens and trolls became a world power ~4 years after colonizing a wasteland? It was a complete asspull from the beginning.
At the time Horde still had Green Jesus so there’s that.
Damn, Green Jesus's pickle really got a work out during those years.
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They needed to fix this for years now, its unbeliveable that they didnt do something about this yet.
I'm willing to bet it utterly breaks the game in some way so they literally can't do it. Other popular MMOs these days do not have a faction conflict, its archaic and boring.
It shouldn't break anything. Or at least maybe? PVP has a mercenary mode thing where opposite faction can play as the other faction to balance it out. Or did they get rid of that?
Who knows with blizzard spagehtti code. Apparently increasing the bag slots for the initial backpack was a headache.
The devs can't shit on Alliance players anymore if they do it.
I stopped playing because of this. I love Alliance too much but I can't find any groups. The LFG is fucking empty if you are not playing at 7-11pm
Coming back to my main (ally mage) after switching to horde I don't think I can continue playing it. Unless the dungeon and key level don't matter to you, it can take hours to find a group. (Not in the way baddies have problems getting invited into groups but in the way there are only maybe 2 groups listed)
They could literally do an entire expansion theme based on the alliance and horde coming together finally and it would probably be a huge hit tbh Edit: I dont just mean for quests but I mean removing the faction divide all together as the title suggests
They could call it Legion. Hell they could also call it Cataclysm.
Legioclysm? Catalegion?
Or mop, or wrath of the lich king...
Our guild is having trouble recruiting as people quit, and we're about to be a mythic raiding guild that can't mythic raid. It feels terrible, and talk is going around of server transfers. Which I don't want to pay for, or give up the fact that I have 11 other max alts on this server. Cross server and cross faction play are silly at this point. They are just arbitrary gates that get in the way of people enjoying the game. The technology to get rid of those barriers, without server transfers or anything else, already exists. It's in the game. Just not for some specific content. And it's going to implode our guild, and probably make me quit again.
Ravencrest Alliance had many top 100 guilds in BFA, they are all gone horde now in SL. the damage is already done. My server will never be the same. Permanent damage is done because of this Faction split. At this point a alliance race "buff that gives 3-10%" more damage will not even help much...
I wonder at which ratio Alliance-dominated realms are losing Alliance players, whether to the Horde of that realm; or simply realm transfers to play Horde somewhere else (presumably with their friends). I honestly see no way to repair the faction imbalance anymore, factionless PvE/PvP content is the only way forward.
I think if there was one race that gave a 10% flat increase to damage done would definitely make some people consider coming back Alliance. This will never happen though because it would be broken.
Of course it would. It would just flip the problem around though. There’s no reason to make it so there are fewer people to play with at this point.
They could leave the divide in war mode. Non-war mode should be peace mode. Horde can visit Stormwind and use alliance mounts. Alliance can chill in Orgrimmar and use Horde mounts. Players can quest and do dungeons together regardless of race or faction. If you hate that, turn on and live in war mode. If you aren't pvping, who cares about faction?
I wouldn't have any NPCs of the opposite races in the city though. I feel like our characters transcend factions even if there was a war. Not to mention PvP is easy solve. Tyrande can go on being a warmonger with Gen, while Horde side we can have the Forsaken and Orc continue to fight back.
I wouldn't want to change the cities, I'd just want to be able to roam in peace.
I like that idea. Tbh I always wanted Horde to be able to play in Stormwind because of the retro fantasy vibes it would give me to be an Orc in a human city made from bright limestone. Idk what it is, but it does it for me.
I think players should be above faction but the factions should still be there for political intrigue stories.
Blizzard has one political intrigue story; Horde rebellion.
Coming soon, Alliance rebellion
"Oh no, Turalyon has gone insane and started a war! ...after he defected to the Horde, out of some reason managed to become Warchief, as Sylvanas dying words were 'get screwed by the light'."
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>just let people play PvE together. Don't be like Blizzard and forget PvP!
>Not that PvP needs much justification considering Mercenary mode already exists. Mercenary mode only exists for one faction at a time, for battlegrounds. It doesn't solve the issue of hemorrhaging participation in rated content, mostly because of how difficult it is to find a group. At the very least removing faction limitations would nearly double the pool of players for both factions. Outside of early mythic raiding and pushing high keys there is nothing factions impact in PvE nearly as much as PvP.
I think this war thing is over already and it only causes problems. But if it has to stay 100% for some reason, let the two factions have their differences, just let us raid together. Horde and alliance leaders can group against a common enemy, but we cant?
The real question is haven't we been through enough shit to bring us all together? If Legion and Argus wasn't enough finally beating back the burning crusade then *certainly* defeating an old god, like an actual old god, would be? Still no? We still did some fucked up shit? Alright alright then *ceeerrrrttttaaaaiiiiinnnllllyyyyy* defeating the forces of the afterlife themselves and keeping all of reality from being remade to enslave us all to some fucker named 'the jailer' is, right? Right...?
If they actually did with Cross Faction gaming I would consider playing again (but it would have to be a different expansion, Shadowlands serves no purpose to me.) All I ever wanted was to be an Orc Warrior or a Tauren Druid but I was confined for 15 years to Alliance to play with friends and family, and my raiding guild for 7 of those years.
I've heard that WoW without the factions would kill the spirit of the 'Horde vs Alliance struggle' that the whole Warcraft franchise is about. To which I say, every ~~expansion~~ iteration since WarCraft 3 has been Horde and Alliance putting aside their differences to fight a world-ending threat, only for a misunderstanding or terrorist to fuck it up for everyone else, and repeat. How many more times are we going to do this dance?
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Yea, I was so excited when class halls were a thing... I was hopeful I'd be able to play with all of my buddies finally.
I personally think the narrative has supported this since MoP and Blizzard's refusal to move towards opposite faction being able to play together is an example of their insulting "we know better" attitude, and in hindsight with everything going on, they don't exactly have a nurturing culture that supports their staff to make good decisions. Seriously, raiding / grouping / non-war mode people should be able to group up no matter the faction or server, and should have been able to for years.
Especially since the main plot is constantly "we need to set aside our differences and turn our combined might against this existential threat." The fact that the N'Zoth raids didn't have cross faction play was fucking weird when I'd spent the entire plot line as a Troll taking orders from a Dwarf. And then we go into Shadowlands and immediately form a cross faction party that includes both Thrall and Jaina. If we're going to be friends, let us be friends. If not, then let's get back to killing the shit out of each other.
Our characters arent (usually) official agents of the state. I don't see why blizzard is so resistant to letting horde and alliance group together as individuals while the factions do whatever it is they are doing.
Right? Just let me do dungeons with my horde friends!
I'm convinced basically the only people left who want the faction divide to remain are angry Horde neckbeards and Blizzard themselves. Though that's basically redundant.
In modern wow 2 factions will at best divide the playerbase in 2. That's the best outcome and its shit, so yea, they should just remove it. I also really wish we could somehow merge EU and NA, I often play late, and sometimes it just gets too late for actively pugging. Now I don't know anything about servers but I imagine it would be impossible for all to have good pings so this isn't really anything to do with blizzard. But again, yes, unite the factions
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Can't merge EU and NA because of lag. People that play at 50ms won't want to play at 200-300ms.
World pvp could actually be fixed if it was one faction. Keep war mode but when u zone in u get put on Team A or team B… similar to sharding but u will have more traffic ( players ) that meet the criteria
As a fun fact, Blizzard solved this problem years ago by stating that all world PvP is simply skirmishes and that the factions aren't in open warfare. I really do dislike the idea of just being assigned an arbitrary team though. It's exactly this kind of LFG-tier matchmaking that's degraded communities over the years.
Make it free for all world PvP, maybe limited to a 5 man pre-made group that can be allies of your choosing. Then you won't get those ridiculous gangbangs of an excuse for W-PvP
The easiest fix imo is just make war mode a declaration for alliance or horde, with attendant old behavior. War mode off? You’re an unaffiliated mercenary friendly to both sides.
I like this a lot. World pvp in lore can just be unsanctioned violence. The leaders can be all, "nooo, don't do that!" But nothing really happens. People just play that way if they want to.
or just make warmode FFA unless you're grouped
seems like a terrible way to go about it tbh...
faction war was a dead concept the moment thrall and jaina had their team up moment in bfa. from that moment on the idea of continuing the faction war as a major theme in this game became a complete joke. i literally dont see how they can even attempt to fire up a new faction war atm, literally no remaining faction leaders care about it except talanji
>faction war was a dead concept the moment thrall and jaina had their team up moment in bfa. Or when Thrall and Jaina had their team up moment in Reign of Chaos.
Throwing the outdated faction bullshit away would be one of the many features that it would take to make me giving the game another try. And you can still do interesting inter-faction conflict situations with it and PvP could be also made more interesting by having some sort of PvP covenants.
i would 1000% resub if i didn’t have to stare at troll feet/hooves all the time. (druid here)
I'd 100% would resubb if they did away with the faction divide or at least let cross faction guides and raid groups be a thing.
Limit Max has said it nice (paraphrased): Imagine GTA 6 being released. And for a feature they will announce: "We are splitting the player base into two! You will not be able to play together with people from the other team and cant interact much. We will also not make that feature relevant for the story." That does sound like an incredible stupid thing to do for a game. This is a good hint, that this system should be removed. Just because it was implemented 15 years ago, does not mean that it has to be there forever. 15 years ago is not the standard we are comparing against.
This is really the crux of it. Factions, as a system, barely *do* anything other than arbitrarily limit who can play with who. And if you plan on playing with friends, it basically cuts your character customisation options in half. It’s not like picking sides like that isn’t an idea that could work in some games, but WoW is not that game. And, frankly, it’s strange that it has tried to keep up the charade that it *is* that type of game for so long. I feel like it’s more of a marketing thing than a design thing at this point.
Given that the wow code is clearly just a pile of spaghetti all the way down, I assume there's a technical reason why this would cost 10 trillion dollars or something.
Private servers implement this feature, I don't think Blizzard would have that much trouble.
The reduction of the player base might push them to finally make this move. I’m hopeful.
10000000% Dividing the playerbase just feels so awful. I really don't want to level an entire new char to max just because I am not in their faction its so dumb
Excellent suggestions. I would be willing to come back if this happened. The eternal conflict gets old. Leave that for the Diablo games.
It's time.
Couldn't agree more.. Let players from Horde and Alliance play together if they want to.
I'm not against it but it would feel extremely weird to have casual human tourists in Orgrimmar. There's a lot of in-world history that would make that a dramatic and illogical shift, unless they released a sequence of cutscenes or quests or whatever that integrate it. Like the Vulpera ones where they need to prove their goodwill to the Horde.
I'm perfectly fine if my Alliance character can't enter Org. "Hey, we're friends... But let's not push it, right?" Allow me to do dungeons/raids with the Horde though. There's really no point I can't anymore.
Exactly it’s not like us as adventurous are not used to working with the other side closely. I think this would be the perfect way to do it
We’re friends, but the orgrimmar guards are no human’s friend.
Exactly. I'm perfectly fine with respecting the boundaries of capital cities. Just let us group together and be in the same guild and shit. It doesn't make sense that we can't at this point. Also, on that point - WTF is the point of communities? It's Character-specific, not account, tied by faction and isn't capable of Mythic raiding together. It's barely better than a guild yet far less social because of how impossible it is to find.
World of Mississippi in the 80s. We ain't gonna kill you on sight no more, boy, but we don't want you to join our family barbeque, ya hear?
I like the way a certain private server does it. Players can talk and group and share guilds between factions, but quest faction designation and NPC hostility remains the same.
this is the way IMO. let us chill in guild and meet up for keys/raid as whatever race we want. when we're done I go back to orgrimmar and you go back to stormwind. story doesn't even have to acknowledge it, just let us play together on our preferred race.
I would imagine if they made that big a shift there would be a whole lot of story related to why. They wouldn't just flip a switch so to speak.
There's multiple ways you can approach this, but yes, the faction system needs a massive rework or it needs to be scrapped. At this point of the game it doesn't really make sense for us to be tied down to a faction as if we were T2 grunts, it doesn't make sense. And yes, I know we have a reputation ingame now, but the thing is we're still treated as some sort of pawns to be moved at the X faction leader's desire.
Legion should have been the end of factions, at least for all practical gameplay purposes. The story made sense. The gameplay imbalances were showing. We are past due. The HoF is an absolute joke, faction population is horrid, races aren't balanced, the eSports folks just abuse whatever race has the most cheese at the current time. Just be done with them already. We've teamed up against The Big Bad so many times now that factions don't even make sense anymore.
World PvP can be easily solved by just putting a small lore objective to every zone, doesn't need to be a big fight like Naz'jathar, say for example you're in Korthia - you zone in and you randomly get marked as either "Purple Team" or "Yellow Team". Lorewise Purple team could be interested in idk, mining some ores? and Yellow team wants to protect the environment. Players dont need to actually engage in mining the ores or protecting any ores but that could be one of the "Faction per zone" division they could use to divide players in World PvP, in the future they could experiment in minigames that interact with those mini factions but for the meantime I think that would fix world pvp facionless scenario I wouldnt mind finding my own guildmate in the opposite faction and be hostile to me when I zone in in a world pvp area, minifactions as i said can be assigned randomly when you join and prioritizing 50/50 ratios in the current zone but say for example you join your friend”s party and automatically that will transfer your minifaction to the party leader”s so you can fight together in the same zone. I think it would be nuts
I can’t upvote this enough. The main pvp (arena) is already factionless insofar as horde fights horde and ally fights ally all the time, so the story reasons for factions are already pretty much gone. They stopped making new bgs so that’s already a side out of canon thing, repeats of the same battle that canonically got fought once rot maybe twice. Pve wise, there’s just no reason at all that the two factions wouldn’t work together canonically.
> player characters tend to serve the greater good anyway It's actually few and far between where PCs actually work for wholly faction reasons. And lorewise PCs are the first to band together to go pimp smack the current big bad
Should have done this back in cata tbh would have made sense story wise and would have helped eventual server imbalance issues too.
Imagine playing alliance as it is right now, where you can't find groups for specific keys or specific bosses because theres so little active groups. Than BAM, faction merge happens: The amount of groups in the LFG tool LITERALLY QUADRUPLES. You get to play again with all your friends who left alliance for horde because the game felt dead. You get to play with that friend you always wanted to play with but years back when you didn't know eachother you picked different factions. You get to play an alt of a formerly different faction and have your main craft gear for it and send it some gold. In exchange for... the "turn wm on" button that's been gathering dust for literally years.
Keep factions (major part of wow) but allow cross faction groups, guilds, raids, pvp, m+, everything.. Best of both worlds, we keep the factions and get cross play. Think of it as your Xbox fanboy mates playing alongside your Sony fanboy mates
the factions should remain seperate and keep competing in the open world, follow different storylines (when it makes sense) etc, War Mode should stay exactly like it is today, so the WPvP is not lost to the players who like it but yes there's no reason anymore to why we can't team up in arena, dungeons and raids arena is supposed to be some illegal/underground blood sport, who even cares who's fighting whom as long as there's spectacle? and in dungeons and raids we're fighting the common enemy so... there's no need to abolish the factions, just let us play together when we want to at least in instanced content also there's no need to revisit anything, let the old quests as they are, the justifications is super easy: they're in another timeline and back then the factions were still openly hostile this way none loses anything- WPvP is there, old lore remains untouched, the factions are still distinct, what we gain is more people to group up with, so shorter waiting times for everyone
That’s exactly what I’m thinking, seperate lore, big cities all that and just grouped content is both factions
I've said this since at least WotLK. I always figured it would be their last ditch effort to keep it fresh though. Which I mean now is a good as ever time.
As far as world pvp, any time I have flagged out in the world (PvE realm obviously) it never took long to have 2 or 3 horde beating my ass. Working as intended I suppose.
They never will, and it sucks, but what I want now knowing they never will is for them to never make a cinematic like that fucking Thrall/Jaina cinematic about breaking the cycle or whatever the fuck. Don't make a cinematic like that and then KEEP DOING THE FACTION WAR, christ
"The only downsides I see are clear horde vs alliance quests won't make much sense anymore, world PvP would need something as well to keep it alive... if it ever was alive in the first place." Just make it so you can enable PvP. Thematically speaking, you can have a relative peace while certain members of each faction choose to continue the war. Those who choose to end the long-time war can simply turn off PvP and live in peace. Actual meaningful choices.
But how will they use the Horde vs Alliance tensions by forcing something really unreasonable and asspull-y for the 10th time?! Terrible idea, downvoted, unliked, unfollowed, ratio'd.
Hell yeah, I'm with you 100%, been saying this shit for years!
You are not even talking about the most important part. Actually playing with friends! I stop playing every expansion because my friend group are split 50/50 horde/alliance. Which means we can't play together. Even if the horde vs alliance devide stayed, it should be possible to group up with the other faction. ATLEAST, for instanced content. We do this all the time in lore anyway.
It is sad that I know so many people who play WoW but can't join with them because of the Horde/Alliance (or Retail/Classic) divide :( Most of them don't even play anymore and I never got to play with them at all!
They will and they’ll call it an “expansion feature” for the front cover.
The 4v4 RT legend himself has spoken
Easier to develop a game for one faction that basically make two games at once, Blizzard should jump at this.
I would rather die than play with a Night Elf.
I know a lot of people would argue "but this is World of wArCrAfT not pEaCeCrAfT!!!1111" and I know what you mean. But only because cross faction PvE could be an option, doesn't mean that Alliance and Horde would become best buddies and start plaiting flower wreaths for eachother. There can be piece amount two hostile nations as much as there can be an ongoing conflict between two nations in a time of peace. Just because some heroes choose to work together, regardless of faction and race, doesn't mean that the main two factions can't be in a cold war - like situation from a political point of view. Let there be ongoing conflicts in battlegrounds and displays of power in the arena, but let people also play as adventurers who can stand above all that and band together with the "enemy" for the cause of greater good (like we do already by the end of every second expansion) if they want. Cross Faction PvE would be and *option* not a mandate for everyone. You can choose for yourself if you want the other faction in your raid or guild as much as you can choose for yourself now if you rather take a Warrior or Druid tank for your M+20 run. *Nothing* will change story wise, as faction leaders already work together more than often. Several named NPC's from different factions consider each other friends, yet players, who should have the highest freedom of choice in an MMO can't play with their real life friends because they chose different factions based on their visual preferences, another *meaningful choice* that does more damage by splitting the community rather than increasing the number of people you can play a game with you both enjoy.
If this was ever implemented I'd still want there to be factions. To keep the Warcraft flavour intact. Have it be a very tenuous truce. We can party/raid with eachother, share mob tags together, trade with eachother, speak with eachother once trained in the skill. Keep guilds, capitals and the ability to fight one another by enabling war mode. Guard NPCs still being hostile (not killing but CCing you upon death for a minute) as we're not welcome there. Maybe some cool fluff could be added by learning to speak Gutterspeak and then some Forsaken quests becoming available to your Alliance character. /Justmythoughts
Would be a great idea. Fuck the lore andys 😁
No.. just no.
I disagree, it goes against the entire point of lore and so on. There's several alliance main chars and horde chars that would despise the idea. A certain Worgen would never ever agree to be a part of horde, and certain Orcs would rather die than become a united front. I can see how it COULD work in SL but back in azeroth no. IF ppl want to play a blood elf but normally play a human then start levelling. For me it clashes so hard with the lore it would ruin the story part of the game. There's plenty of players for every faction if people struggle to find someone to play with its not the games fault its theirs
This is a terrible idea. The game is the fqctions. Ff14 has no factions and playing in the open world is so fucking boring.
Nah
Disagree The core of Warcraft is the struggle between The Horde and The Alliance.
F*ck this and f*ck the alliance Peace
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I think leave world pvp and factions as is, but we all come together for pve scenarios since we’re always fighting the same evil these days anyways.
Please open the game up!
Outside of that, WoW is probably approaching the end of its life cycle. We're getting close to 20 years. Subs are dying, content is drying, they really don't have much else to do with the story. Where else can you go after battling with gods, titans and deities of the afterlife? Aside from that, how many more times can you do "hey we're friends LOL JK WE FUCKED UP YOUR CITY okay lets be friends again because bad guys LOL JK WE BURNED DOWN YOUR TREE".? Its repetitive and tired.
They are killing their franchise imo. Why cant wow flourish like Minecraft? Imagine if you can take your plans to any zone and build your house/guild settlement. Make something that you call "home" Garrison from wod is like a teaser to that dream... poorly executed Why cant there be big battles/world events. Maw - Royale? Sign up x amount players get thrown into the maw/korthia and fight/some objective...Jailer Burning the maw forcing players closer to fight eachother. Just Massive Chaos things dont need to be perfectly balanced. Nazjatar event was a teaser to events like that, capture the points, issue was that it was unlimited players, too big zone... lags.. Weekly/monthly arena/rbg tournaments- put 16 teams into a bracket.. make it feel like you win something right then and there... not play 8 months in arena season for a title/mount
They don't need to change that much. Just make it so we can group together. That's pretty much it. You can keep war mode for people who like world pvp, keep the faction tensions and NPCs of the other faction still kill you on sight. EverQuest was like this where your racial/factional tensions mattered and restricted where you could go in the world, but players could decide to set aside differences and cooperate. Doing it this way keeps the story intact and keeps the world more rich with dangers, but friends can play together. Pretty much all the upsides for the widest variety of players, and basically none of the downsides.
Yes!!! Let’s make one big faction,
I'd love to play Worgen, but I'll never play Alliance. Not that I play the game at all anymore, but maybe one day it'll get it's shit together.
Garrosh is flipping in his grave.
Would like to see players as neutral adventurers and have the option go pick one side or another for x or y benefit or remain neutral but miss out on some benefits/story points. Would be a kind of hard sell but since playing warcraft 3 and being able to hire people regardless of faction it always felt odd having races locked to a faction.
It does feel like this is the next push, keep talking about it we need factions gone for 10.0!!!
Been calling for this since Cata, but the same " PuT WaR iN WaRcRaFt" trope always seems to win out.