Posting on my Horde character to bemoan how I can’t believe I can hold hands with gnomes now 
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OUTTA MY WAY JERK OFFS I’M HERE TO PET ALL THE WORGEN!!
/10charsvroom
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Very exciting stuff here. I saw in an interview with Ion that they were also considering cross-faction guilds as well!
I just pray mass invite guilds do not or are not able to abuse that if/when that comes about.
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The move towards cross-faction content has always been one born more of practicality than any regard for lore.
From the outset, it’s been pretty standard for lots of endgame zones to be available to both factions, full of neutral NPCs and shared quests. It’s easier than developing endgame for both factions. And lately, they’ve been doing more in terms of faction-neutral leveling experiences. The auction house went cross faction a while back too.
I figured this would become a thing when subscriptions inevitably got low enough that a mismatched Horde/Alliance population would actually start to impact queues. I wonder how actual implementation will actually work, though.
Will this only be available via the default queue system, or will this be an opt-in thing, and/or will it be possible to form cross-faction parties and then go into an instance?
Will Horde characters appear as equivalent Alliance races and vice versa like in the Drazar’alor raid? Or do we get to keep our usual appearances?
I’m curious to see how it plays out!
…
On the other hand, the faction hostilities, as flimsy as their justification often seems, are often the only real motivation Blizzard seems to have to give the Horde (and by extension, Orcs, Trolls, Goblins, Forsaken) their own content with a focus on their own unique characters, aesthetics, institutions, traditions, etc.
Whenever the experience tends towards neutrality, the aforementioned races often get sidelined. Often in favor of stuff more amenable to Humans and Elves.
Shadowlands has been a particularly egrigious example: with classes traditions like Shamansim, characters like Baine, Talanji, Bwonsamdi, and races like the Forsaken having relatively little to do despite being among those with the greatest thematic connection to dealing with the afterlife. Ironically, they all got more focus in the last expansion during the Horde experience. During the faction war.
It’s a double edged sword, really.
I can only hope that this reduced focus on the faction war doesn’t continue to result in a reduced presence of non-elves and non-humans in our experiences.
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If you need two screens side by side to have both of the character’s shoulders be visible, you’re fighting the Horde. If you only need one, you’re fighting the Alliance.
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Through the portal in Stormwind that’s behind the gate no one can open.
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I don’t think BfA’s faction story was very good but it is true that the fact that it was a “faction war” expansion meant we got a lot of faction-specific lore. We got this grand Troll city, a cool new human culture, various race-specific questlines for heritage armor, etc.
That stuff was quite good, and Shadowlands demonstrates just how empty the story can feel when you don’t focus on the civilizations our characters are part of.
I do hope we get another BfA style expansion where we’re adding more stuff to the cultures we already know about rather than exploring some new land we know nothing about. I wouldn’t want it to be a faction-war expansion, though, and hopefully we can have it both ways.
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Next expansion better be about us getting Magical Amnesia from the Pantheon of Death because A) The trauma of Torghast and knowing what happens after death breaks us and B) Mortals aren’t meant to know this stuff for a reason and magical bonk on the head.
We wake back up in Azeroth in a massive crater with a faux Sylvanas head and memories of a place where we fought Sylvanas and her lackies, made peace with each other and resolved to rebuild the Horde and Alliance away from war economies and to seek out ways to help restore Teldrassil.
Onwards to the Dragon Isles while building bases, dealing with old threats that rose up while we were in a ‘pocket dimension’ and dealing with nagging feelings we’re forgetting something important.
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Something something all characters, including our own, are ‘killed’ in the final battle (that we win thanks to our sacrifice) and having them resurrected with (incurable) amnesia but “oh we are standing shoulder to shoulder as allies with notable figures from many races and also all these champions are here” to conclude Sylvanas has been dealt with, let’s deal with this sword embedded in the planet too now and whatever other fallouts/uprisings have started.
That would be very cool and sexy of Blizzard.
I think it’s neat that they’re letting factions mix in some ways. I do not approve of mixed faction PvP teams, but that’s just my old man fist shaking at the clouds. I never really liked merc mode for the same reasons. For RP and PVE, though, throw those doors wide open.
I would have liked this idea way, way more if it was opening up mixing of the factions but only the people on your server. But again, I will always want to move back to limiting things to server only. We gained a lot of convenience with x-realms and can never go back, but I do feel we lost a lot of that sense of community in that trade-off, and I think we got the short end of the stick tbh.
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I personally like the whole “we never left Ny’alotha” idea that Shadowlands was all just a crazy fever dream we experienced while taking a very long nap.
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But what if you completely skipped Ny’alotha patch and did none of the 8.3 content?
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I saw a pretty decent idea post on the wow subreddit recently about timey wimey magic going on and erasing the player character and their accomplishments from the timeline resulting in a reset of the game that I would be down for. I tried to find it but I gave up after having to sift threw everyone’s annoying Dragon Isle takes.
Now we’re back to pre-TBC Azeroth. The orcs are confused at what the heck is a Vulpera and the humans are confused at what the heck is a Draenei. Yet they shrug it off because we got caves full of spiders and murlocs on our beaches that need to be taken care of! For the factions!
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I thought of something like that myself but the way I explained the existence of pc that were not available originally as “Time shifted in such a way that certain things happen earlier and in different contexts but more or less basically the same” So you’d still have Gilneas getting worgenized and fleeing to the NE, but this happens in a context that Sylvanas attacks pre-TBC kinda thing. Just for an example lol.
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I admit I wouldn’t really like a total back to vanilla WoW because it’d honestly be a bit boring if that means the next handful expansions are just re-takes on Wrath and TBC and Cata etc.
Definitely like that idea with events shifting around though like you said, Gilneas still falling and becoming dog city but maybe this time they keep the beautiful zone and it’s reinforced with Night Elf reinforcements.
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…in the back of a cart, with our hands tied and HEY, YOU. YOU’RE FINALLY AWAKE. You were trying to cross into Shadowlands, weren’t you? Walked right into that Mawsworn ambush, same as us and that thief over there.
Mathias: Damn you Accordians. Azeroth was fine until you came along. King Anduin was
nice and lazy. If they hadn’t been looking for you, I could’ve stolen that Gryphon and been half way to the Dragon Isles. You there. You and me — we shouldn’t be here. It’s these Orcs the Empire wants.
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I initially missed this nugget from the blue post, but they are going to allow xFaction communities. So that helps for a bit…until we get the xfaction guilds.
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Oh that’ll be great for RP.
It was brought up so I am just reminding everyone that Azshara and N’zoth should have been two expansions not two patches.
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Right? RPers ain’t even going to use it for the grouping (I mean we will…), we gonna use it for the gathering of RP events without having the need of a Discord. It’ll be a nice filler as a ‘guild’ so to speak.