Could there be room for another faction?

With the coming developments easing the barriers of play between the 2 factions could we see a new faction? This could give us access to races and stories that normally would never come with the alliance and the horde.

Maybe they can finally give options to separate fans of the old horde or the scourge from Thrall’s horde. I guess this essentially would be a new grouping of allied races with their own territory. Allied race “reskins” should be a reasonably simple way of populating a new faction.

The death knight intro and the different races of Warcraft 3 mostly gave me the inspiration for this idea.

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There certainly could be. People like to cite the need for PvP, but there are PvP systems that work just fine.

It would be best to have “hold overs” (ie and option to play someone who remained loyal to one of the old ones), That way guilds could decided how they want to handle it. Though cross faction gaming is making that issue irrelevant.

Three factions would allow more nuance on how they interact and help break up the “them vs. us” which has become increasingly toxic.

I don’t think so. It would be too much work for Blizz.

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Doubtful. We’ve seen MMOs try fir 3 factions before and the Yellow team usually gets the short end of the stick. That was the case for Team Instinct and the Aldmeri Dominion at any rate. I also think it’d be particularly disasterous for WoW who’s factions have a nearly two decade head start.

Any new faction would have a hell of an uphill battle to even get their foot in the door, and would almost certainly never be as popular as the originals. Which would make WM an even bigger headache. To say nothing of how their economy would operate starting from scratch or where you’d put their capitols and so on. It’d be a change to the game’s very foundation for a feature that most players aren’t going to care about.

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The new faction is Murlocs. that’s it just murlocs.

For a third Faction to even have a chance, it would require Sylvanas and Illidan working together. I think only their cooperation could bolster a third Faction.

I am not even talking about story or gameplay - just pure ability to pull in numbers that could compete. Other than the sheer star power of those two… I do not know what could carry a third Faction.

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my name is creditcard white i am lvl 60 human monk on aldmeri dominon (3rd faction) f(rom skyrim) here 2 destroy all alliance and hoirde players in pvp combat. i spawn in the middle of av valley and my faction big city is the charred vale is stonetalon mountains. also we have x wings

Two factions can’t even stay balanced, three would be completely borked. People will just migrate to whichever faction has the most players at the time. Nobody wants to play on a dead server or a dead faction. Everyone sticks to the servers where everyone else congregates.

I don’t believe factions are necessary at all.

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Once we get cross faction guilds I believe the factions will not matter nearly as much as they do now on a game play level.

I believe you are correct that a third faction would need ridiculous star power. Depending on the faction I think Azshara might be able to play a leadership role.

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Assuming that happens. That would be nice but there isn’t a lot of indication that it will be the case. Would basically mean factions don’t mean anything anymore.

Personally, I think WoW would have been better served with its rep system than a two faction system. Picking reps would mean roleplaying the kind of character you want to be.

For example, the Silverwing Sentinels and the Warsong Outriders. Instead of it being locked to Alliance and Horde, the faction divide could be drawn between whoever you want to go with. Say the Silverwing Sentinels are radical Night elves who want to protect the sanctity of nature despite some allowance by Darnassus for Orgrimmar to log some of Ashenvale, whereas the Warsong have several lucrative economic contracts with several other races, and need Ashenvale for land development but have been doing more than their fair share. Already there is a complex decision about who you choose to back, neither of them invalid.

As it stands right now, and as it has always been, if you’re team blue=red team bad. If you’re red team=blue team bad. I don’t think the two faction system was really all that necessary, you should be able to choose who you want to be friends with and who you don’t want to be friends with.

It wouldn’t be impossible for Blizzard to add another faction, no. But it would require a lot of work, and that I don’t see Blizzard doing, not for WoW. That’s something they’d need to have at game launch.

I mean, right now if they wanted to add a new faction with Dragonflight for example, they’d need to add quest/story content for almost every single zone, both from the base game and all expansions. That’s thousands of quests and a story to connect everything together, because let’s face it, no one would accept being able to play a third faction if doing so meant most of the world was empty for them because all the bases, storyline beats and random quests were for Alliance/Horde only.

Blizzard is actually already facing that issue with the implementation of the Dracthyr, because they can only be Evokers, which means a HUGE chunk of Legion content is completely unavailable for them. They have no artifact weapons, they have no class hall, and no campaign that comes with that class hall.

So yeah, I just can’t see it happening in WoW. It could, but the work required to pull it off would be insane.

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I’d rather they remove factions altogether than add another.

In the future I think factions won’t matter that much in gameplay with the potential of cross faction guilds. Factions will probably continue to exist in the story due to how iconic they are and how important they are to the franchise.

The biggest reason to add another faction is to add more diversity to the moral alignment of playable races. A new faction would give us access to races and cultures that would ordinarily never be within the grasp of the Horde or Alliance.

Three factions need less balance. The weaker faction can always cooperate with another one against the stronger until things shift.

It has advantages for Blizzard. But it would require investment. So I’m not holding my breath.

Who would the third faction include though? Besides the Pandaren and maybe them reigniting their friendship with Kaldorei again.

What are you looking for? An outright evil faction, like the Burning Legion or Scourge?

There could be a number of ways to do it. You can have new races, races unhappy with how the old group is treating them, it even splitting off factions of a race (which Blizzard has already done to some degree in creating new races)

That’s true. Though, if say a third faction does become a thing down the line, who would you include in that faction?

Not sure. There are threads on this now and then. The Night Elves and the Dark Iron trolls are probably the least enthusiastic members. Probably start with the Night Elves. Maybe the Night Elves tell the Tauren they are sorry they didn’t care if the Centaurs wiped them out and form an alliance of Earth/Forest nature lovers.

Or maybe the Night elves/Draenei and the Blood Elves/Forsaken decide there is no future in alliances with people on another continent. They both leave and cooperate just enough to be called an Alliance. Maybe you stick the Nightborne in there to mediate old greviences between the Blood and Night Elves.

I don’t think theres a need for another ‘faction’ like Horde and Alliance per se BUT the factions dividing the playerbase needs to stop.

PvP can be refactored through secondary faction system (think aldor and scryers), while letting players otherwise play PvE together.

Story wise there could be any other factions this way without impacting PvP as much