With the expansion imminently launching, my guild had a conversation about factions and how well it had been implemented as it relates to playing with friends and guild mates.
First the positives:
Cross faction/realm guilds/raids - For progression we have more options and the “recruitment boss” is a little easier.
The RPG aspect of the game was enhanced.
The main negative for me:
No queue-able content - This one really hits hard. With a new expansion (and even more exacerbated as non queue-able content isnt going to be open for a long time still) we are going to want to go to heroics and likely in the first few weeks, Timewalking/LFR.
One of our group of 3-4 depending on the day was very excited to play a Draenai. The issue is the rest of us are Horde. We outright cannot do the only available content without trying to find other people, or spamming chat.
We simply cannot use a tool a solo player or same faction group would get because we wanted to use the newly opened cross faction play.
I really wish and do not see a reason why it couldnt just be an opt out if you don’t want to mingle with another faction.
I think overall its been very successful, but either hoping to fill out a group or telling people they cant come to something stinks. Ultimately, I just want to play with my friends without a needless hurdle.
2 Likes
I think they are working on that, it just takes time for them since it wasn’t possible for all of wow so they need to recode things and such. I hope we don’t have to wait until the end of the world soul saga for them to add cross faction queuing.
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It was already possible in MoP Remix and they patched it out. I do not believe it is a technical limitation anymore.
5 Likes
Maybe it’s a warmode issue. I know if I am outside a dungeon with an LFG group and there are horde members in warmode, I can gank them. Maybe it’s hard to make players peaceful with auto groups.
It really goes beyond this concern, too. There is no reason that chat should not be cross faction at this point in time. The lore from Vanilla- and the early xpacs- has been written out of the game. At this point in time, a player should be able to play whatever faction they want, and be able to interact- and que- with whomever they want for any content they want.
2 Likes
I agree. This is all about Blizz not wanting to force the few LFD players who care about faction stuff to play with each other in Queued content. Just add a toggle for those who want to opt out of Cross faction LFD/LFR.
2 Likes
Potentially I suppose, but seems like a situation you could just have the group not be flagged to each other. We can already do same faction mixed warmode/non groups and just phase.
Oh right, forgot about that. I wish they would just make it opt in so people who want the same faction queues who are willing to wait longer for queues can do that while the rest of us just queue up with both factions for quicker queues.
I want to say that I read in an interview that they are planning cross faction queuing sometime during TWW. It’s way overdue, especially in PvP when we already have things like Mercenary que.
It’s an easy way to cut down que times.