I can not wait for this feature to be implemented. Today I am running around ZM and my friend is also running around the exact same zone. We can’t group up and play together because I am Alliance and she is Horde. Yesterday, several of my friends were raiding SFO together. I sat and watched one stream because of the faction divide. Earlier in the week, I wanted to run Keystones with a friend and it would require me to create a completely separate and in many ways isolated character from my main.
The faction divide has caused so much friction when I want to enjoy. It is for this reason that I do not see why guilds are still being separated across the faction divide. The logistics of setting up a separate guild and the a community to overcome this division seems small enough to be trivial in the long run; but at the same time, aggravating enough to annoy players who have to do it.
I would like to gain some understanding of why this barrier will remain.
I would like to add: Please don’t forget about Epic Battlegrounds! A checkbox to let me queue for either side would potentially speed up matchmaking a lot, while not being stuck to the mercenary race change. I’m not sure what the random battleground queues are intended to function like, though seeing we already have mercenary mode I feel like this would be a good first candidate to implement it with as well.
I think it would actually be pretty cool if there was cross-faction guilds in the future! I haven’t played Alliance in a very long time. But have been considering it just for the Alliance Allied-Race achievements as I’m an achievement hunter in-game.
Would be nice if I could put my Alliance characters I may create into my current Horde guild. This way, I could speak to my guild members on my Alliance character(s).
One really big cross faction item I really, really need is the ability to send BoA items to my same server, opposite faction alts.
This has always been possible to do, ever since heirlooms were introduced. Although, I am unsure if it applies to all items simply labeled as ‘bind on account’ or if it is just those with the heirloom quality. Needless to say, it seems like anything can be sent cross-faction now, regardless of whether it is BoA, BoE or non-binding!
Edit: faction mailing restrictions are no more on the PTR only at the moment, not on live.
BoA item worked. I believe they are all Heirloom quality, can’t find one that isn’t quickly at any rate.
BoE green item I could not mail.
Some non-binding cloth I could not mail.
Gold I could not mail.
This is what I really want lol.
I should clarify: faction restrictions on mail are no more on the PTR. I’ve tested this myself, being able to send both BoA items (as always) and also crafting reagents and gold!
Okay, I was gonna just leave it at my one post about how it’s unfair to exclude queued content, but I need to elaborate:
How can you exclude cross-faction from the most widely used part of the game? If the intent is to let us play with our friends, I’d wager most of the people with this complaint just want to do casual stuff with their friends. Most of the people who want to do hardcore stuff already changed factions at one point or another so they could. (I am well aware there are some who haven’t, but I have no doubts the majority just wants casual stuff for friends, or to work up to the hardcore stuff with them, which would require access to the casual stuff)
Like, how do I tell my RL friend, "Hey, they added Cross-Faction play in WoW so you can play Horde and I can play with you on my Alliance toons! …but only in content I don’t participate in. So sorry, we won’t be playing together after all. Maybe next time.
The entire system, as Blizzard has said, is being designed as opt in to not force people to cross-faction if they don’t want to. What is preventing you from making the queue system opt in for cross-faction?
And going on that thread, by allowing open door content and even rated pvp with cross-faction, this inherently removes the opt in for the people not involved.
Say you are vehemently against cross-faction play. But you queue for rated bgs with some friends, and… the opposing team is cross-faction. You’ve now been forced into cross-faction play, against your desire. Even if it’s not your team, it’s ruining your immersion to see a cross-faction opposing team. I assume they didn’t make it so cross-faction can only match with cross-faction to remove the ridiculous queue times that it would create, but in the process, they decided the other team’s opt in option didn’t matter, for the sake of a better play experience for the rest. Likewise, if you’re out in the open world and see a horde and alliance questing together, how does that not ruin their choice to not participate in Cross-Faction play?
Why is this logic not being applied to queued content?
Again, just make it an opt-in, like you are with the other cross faction stuff. But by not doing it for queued content, you are directly telling the players who use queued content as their main source of play that they aren’t as important as the ones who do hardcore endgame stuff. This should not be done by a business, ever.
Also, you’re introducing cross-faction for communities, which is great. However, you aren’t increasing the member limit, which is already staggeringly low at 1,000. Please increase the limit for communities (and guilds, as they have the same restriction). If I’m reaching the limit in my communities and my guild has gotten close on Alliance, which is reaching the point of being a dead faction, I don’t even want to know how full the Horde ones are. (I made a thread about the community/guild issue a while back in this forum, which details things like there’s no “Last Online” for communities so we have no way to track who is no longer playing to remove them, guild controls are significantly less since the update, etc.)
And one last note, you say you want to make it as opt-in as possible, but you left the entire option for cross-faction communities to the owner. Which means if you’re in a 900+ member community and have been for years, then the owner decides it’ll be cross-faction, all those 900 members have no say in it and are forced into cross-faction play.
There comes a point when you have to understand you need to make changes that force players out of their comfort zone in order to make the game a better environment for everyone - which is why I assume you did this with communities. So why, as I said before, isn’t this being done with things like queued content?
I think the expectations here are a little high for a .5 patch. Them not adding cross faction to queued content yet is probably more of a resource issue (i.e. more of an expansion timeline thing) than a priority call to specifically exclude your type of play. I think focusing small and iterating on feedback is better than wholesale changing to crossfaction in everything. I don’t think you should feel this slighted, tbh. Faction is probably a huge part of the back end and getting it to work in more features is probably just on a longer timeline.
They could always opt to NOT do that content if not killing someone cross-faction ruins the immersion that much for them. Why not treat it like they are a “traitor”?
I don’t think that’s what they’re saying. Casual people want the ability to play with friends without having to faction transfers, too. It’s not just “hardcore” people that want this.
Does that not apply to everything and anything with a community of 900 people and only 1 person who owns that community?
Emphasis on ‘yet’ here, 9.2.5 is really just adding cross-faction play to premade groups and it was never advertised as doing more than that. It’s been stated pretty clearly that this is the first step and additional moves are being considered for the future.
There’s a couple of technical things to consider for queued play, too. They’re going to need to filter queues so that there’s one for Horde only, one for Alliance only, and one for both. They’ll need to make adjustments to queue times, which can already be very long, and likely even longer if the community splits. What if it turns out the only viable way to queue is through cross-faction, because queue times are absurdly long otherwise? They’ll need to figure out some good solutions to that.
I think we’ll get cross-faction queues sooner rather than later, but not in 9.2.5. Maybe we’ll learn more about it next week during the expansion announcement :>
There is already mercenary mode for honor BGs. That is queued content and I suppose technically if there was ever a surplus of ally, ally could use it; but that never happens. Every BG is a mixed faction BG already, just that only the ally side is being mixed.
I have to admit it was fun seeing the reaction of an ally team seeing my nightborne hunter show up in the BG as a nightelf wearing the nightborne allied races transmog 
From my own personal experience from playing BGs on my horde toons (most of my honor BG time is ally side) the ques are a ton faster using merc mode and the honor/hr higher in most cases just chain losing BGs with 4 min queues to gear up. Which of course tends to load up ally teams with under geared players, stacking the deck in favor of horde. This leads to the much longer ques (15-30 mins in my experience) making the organizational hassle of forming premade groups (with generally more progressively geared players) worth the effort. Of course progression players of both factions use premades for the same reasons, they are just much more common horde side due to the queue time differences and the ability for one faction only to use merc mode for solo queues. It’s certainly a fun and beneficial game function for horde but it is definitely at the expense of game enjoyment for ally.
Also, just got to love that the merc recruiter is standing behind a buch of boxes in the shadows in the PvP vendor room. As ally you can barely notice that he exists
One thing I haven’t really thought about that is just going through my mind right now, is that it just feels like cross-faction instancing isn’t enough.
I’ll talk about my specific situation when it comes to cross-faction stuff, but I have a feeling this resonates with a lot of other players.
I’ve played WoW as far as I can remember with my significant other. We’ve played as Alliance for a very long time (I even have a handcrafted Alliance flag in my room!), but like with many other players, we eventually found ourselves forced to go Horde in order to play with other friends and in general just have more opportunities to play more endgame content.
Now, since then, I’ve learned to appreciate being a Goblin, but he is still really attached to Night Elves. He will race change his main character to a Night Elf the second 9.2.5 hits, and that’s fine, but at the same time I don’t want to race change. I’ve grown attached to being a Goblin.
With the current limitations on cross-faction content, we will pretty much only be able to raid and do M+ content together. I haven’t really thought about it until then, but the current limitation means one of us would likely have to race change to once again have both characters in the same faction for us to do open-world content together.
To level in Dragonflight together.
To learn about Dragonriding and grind the new factions together.
Now, we have discussed about it at length and we’re both okay with temporarily faction changing to play together in Dragonflight, but I don’t really think this is something we should need to think about at all.
I would really appreciate if we were able to do open world content together as well while in a cross-faction group, and I’m sure a lot of other players would as well.