Specifically, the Alliance and the Horde. A story that may be interesting to play through might be an expansion where the two primary factions break apart for some reason. If this happened, what do you think would be a good way to do it? What reason/reasons would cause the factions to break apart? And could they be brought back together again?
Perhaps the Earthen can create some political tension similar to the Blood elves and High elves? 
…wonder if we should humor that approach. 
Personally, I don’t think it would be mechanically possible. So much of WOW’s spaghetti code is built around whether your character is Alliance or Horde. From quests, to mounts and armor, to some dungeon/raid encounters being faction specific.
My guess is the level of work necessary to re-code the game to break the factions up they might as well go whole hog and make a WOW 2.
Sure, we’ve got cross-faction groups and guilds now, but your character is still flagged as either Alliance or Horde and there are limitations because of it.
I think the best people can see in regards to “break the factions” is story beats similar to MOP or BFA where there’s some inter-faction tensions between groups, but mechanically nothing changed.
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It feels like that’s where the story is going, at least in a narrative sense. Although, because two factions have been prevalent to the games franchise since it’s inception, I think they’ll always need some degree of separation unless they overhaul things like PvP systems and faction specific reputations, storylines & rewards.
I was going to type more but I see Degas pretty much summed up my exact thoughts, so I’ll leave it at that! 
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There is already a huge political landmine in the form of Dagran Thaurissan II, who should very nearly be coming of age in TWW. He is the legitmate claimant to the throne of Ironforge and Shadowforge. Add in a political marriage with the Wildhammers and suddenly you have a single high king of the Dwarves for the first time since the War of the Three Hammers some 270-ish years ago. That would forge a new power bloc within the Alliance itself which could cause serious instability.
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It would be too complicated to code in a real way.
Otherwise the player would remain their original faction and it would just described in story alone such as when Garoosh imposed Kork’kron rule over the Horde.
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This. I have wanted this for years.
One failing of Blizzard’s worldbuilding is that there are a lot of political groups and a larger world outside of the factions, it’s just that they never/rarely focus on it. The trolls, as an example, have a large interconnected community and political faction with Zandalar at the center, we see this in BfA as well as MoP (albeit the latter due to Zul being Zul). Northrend has the frontier colonies, which are distinct even if technically under the factions, and in the South Seas and the like there are probably a ton of disparate communities, confederacies, and factions that likely have tens of thousands of members of different races.
This doesn’t even touch on the goblin cartels, who collectively are powerful enough to rival the factions, or even the Venture Co, who have got to be selling all their stuff to someone.
So if the factions were to split apart, something would quickly replace them, or there would be a threat to force them to reintegrate, because they’re far from the only major powers on Azeroth, just together they’re the biggest and the ones who can pay the most murderhobos.
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Not to mention that the Venture Co went on like nothing happened after their leader was killed in the Motherlode dungeon. As they were seen on Mechagon from time to time.
By this point it seems WoW’s Evil Factions will never drop dead!
Scarlet Crusade, Venture Co, Scarlet Onslaught, Twilight’s Hammer, Cult of the Damned, Scourge, Burning Legion, Mawsworn, the Syndicate, the Naga, the Drust, Heartsbane Coven, the Nathrezim, Druids of the Flame, etc…
Yes they seem to descend to infighting among the leadership without their central leaders but they seem to still be going strong regardless.
This sounds like a better version of BfAs plot. Sylvanas orders an attack that splits the Horde and Anduin is too peaceloving to take action causing a new Alliance movement
I would note that there’s already a proof of sorts that it’s doable - the 1-10 quests in the old homeland starter zones also include flags so other races don’t get those quests until the first fedex to a real town.
In my own opinion, putting aside the games technical limits, I think it could be an interesting story to play through but one that would need to be carefully written. There would need to be a clear reason for why the factions would break instead of just because someone on the forums thought it might be cool. My bigger question at the start of the thread should have been do people think it would fun to play through and would it be a good thing for Warcraft’s overall story?
Don’t think its in the cards, but having more than 2 factions would be interesting and help with how they have been doing factions a lot.
This would be cool but Blizz doesn’t really touch anything like “power blocs” or politics unfortunately.
Wasn’t it the meme in vanilla that Stormwind’s survival was completely dependent on the bank of Ironforge
I would rather have fewer factions then more.
No. WoW’s world is far too volatile. People will tend to be more conservative in the sense that they will stick close to traditional allies. The only thing that could break the factions apart would be an unparalleled era of peace lasting for at least 3-4 generations.