The original premise was orcs vs humans and company.
BFA was a necessary war and so was mists. Our faction wars brought out the sha.
Point still stands though, were we not at war with the Lich King or Deathwing. Were we not at war with the Iron Horde. The war with the Lich King and Deathwing happened before those expansions too.
You can still have WARcraft without focusing on faction conflicts.
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Still supportive of it. When Blizzard is showing story that supports it, willingly, then it should be part of the game. If they didn’t want to or weren’t thinking about it, they wouldn’t continue showing how possible it is (in now two different expansion narratives).
The only way the story will improve is if the faction war is dropped. Especially with how it has been written up to this point, finding a way to continue the faction conflict will require extreme levels of sub-grade school level writing. Which I’m not putting past Blizzard, but I like to hope adults know how to write narratives. Up to this point I’ve been questioning it.
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Team-ups are rare, though. We only get 1 per expansion. Let’s go through the list:
Castle Nathria - Nope.
Nyalothia - Nope.
Eternal Palace - Yes.
Dazar’alor - The opposite, we’re trying to kill each other.
Uldir - Nope.
Legion - Only to the extent that the Horde was written out of Legion and it was all Alliance Alliance Alliance Alliance Alliance Alliance Alliance Alliance Alliance Alliance. So it wasn’t really “the factions coming together” as it was “we’re going to forget the Horde even exists for 2 years”.
Hellfire Citadel - Depends on whether you consider Khadgar as Alliance or neutral. If he’s neutral, we weren’t working together. If he’s Alliance, it’s another “everybody serves the Alliance narrative” and still isn’t a “we’re working together”. (Where was the Horde character that Alliance players worked with?)
Blackrock Foundry - Nope.
Highmaul - Nope.
Siege of Orgrimmar - Yes.
Throne of Thunder - Nope.
Mogu’shan Vaults / Heart of Fear / Terrace - Nope.
Dragon Soul - Same problem as Hellfire Citadel. Thrall was there, but who was the Alliance NPC that Horde players were working with? There wasn’t one.
Firelands - Yes. (Hamuul + Malfurion)
Blackwing Descent / Bastion of Twilight / Throne of Four Winds - Nope.
So we get 1 raid per expansion at most of Alliance & Horde working together. Most of which are Lor’themar and some Alliance character(s), btw, which is an interesting note.
Or, as Lor’themar put it last expansion:
The story is going in that direction, and in fact Blizzard themselves put out how it keeps happening and questions what’s different, to Jaina responding with “We are.” The whole arc for Saurfang in BfA was to emphasize how stupid, pointless, forced, and poorly done the faction war is and has been, especially when both factions have reasonable individuals in charge.
Ever since Warcraft 3, the factions work together against large threats. Regardless of going raid by raid to try and prove a point (and in fact, if we want to get technical and until they state otherwise, many of the raids don’t canonically even have one or the other faction participating in it and it’s only there for gameplay reasons), the factions always end up working together. The idea that this continued to happen, even now that the Horde has lost a majority of their backwards thinking, moronic, simple minded leaders while the Alliance just has a couple left, leads the story in the direction that the faction divide isn’t even supported in the lore of this very game anymore.
For as much as Blizzard continues to howl like monkeys to the heavens, swearing it matters, the narrative suggests moving away from it. I doubt they will, because they make far too much money on the single-tract minded tribalism that oozes out of this game like the slime in Plaguefall, but if they cared about it they would stop writing the lore and narrative as heading in that direction.
This is exactly why BfA was so bad. It’s all smoke and mirrors with them. They say one thing, yet write another. They claim one way is the foundation of the game, but keep trying to burn it with their stories. They’re looking to appease both sides, but they only really care about jerking people around and having a laugh about it.
Honestly, the best news I’ve seen from the WoW dev team in the past three expansions has been Ion saying the team is considering cross faction grouping. It’s not the extent I want, but I’d at least take it. Maybe we can finally see some positive growth in WoW rather than the sheer regression we’ve seen because they have to keep shoving some horribly written war story down our throats every single expansion.
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There are games where this is literally the case that make you look very silly when you say things like this.
If faction rivalry were core to the entire game, it’d be unavoidable in all aspects of gameplay. We’d likely have some form of RvR mechanic, World PVP would be more than just a fun but pointless side-activity, with actual objectives to fight over and conquer.
… Yet time and time again, the factions end up as mere set-dressing, to create the ‘feeling’ of a conflict without any of the actual gameplay associated with it. We’re at war because the story tells us we are, rather than because the game itself is tailored around us fighting one another.
If my given faction, their territory, and ‘the war’ mattered more than fighting the Big Boss of the Month - as in, at all - I’d buy this. As is, however, it’s just silly. Why segregate players if the only thing you’re going to do with said segregation is have them experience the same PvE story anyway?
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You want an end to the war ? Fine. End WoW as it is and create a new game.
World of Peace, love and hippiecraft
Alliance does plenty of raids and M+.
You chose to be a “stupid cow,” not blizzard.
I love how this is always the first response when there’s plenty of war without the HvA side story. Because that’s what it has been, a side story.
In The Burning Crusade, we fought the Burning Legion.
In Wrath of the Lich King, we fought the Scourge.
In Cataclysm, we fought the Elemental Lords.
In Mists of Pandaria, we briefly fought the other faction-oh wait, we fought the Horde.
In Warlords of Draenor, we fought the Iron Horde.
In Legion, we fought the Burning Legion.
In Battle for Azeroth, we fought the other faction and then ended teaming up together against N’Zoth.
In Shadowlands, we’re fighting the Jailer.
Not a lot of peace, love, or hippy stuff going on. In fact, I dare say we’re fighting many other, more important, world ending wars than petty faction squabbles!
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People like you are the ones who praise “interesting” stuff like edgy, dark, anti-hero and suddenly put on a surprised_pikachu_face when those characters become evil.
Bfa was trying so hard to make the whole theme about the warring factions(at the beginning) We’re right back to where we were before. Idc anymore 
In a game where both factions are populated by human players, it’s always going to go back to where we started. The status quo has to be maintained, else someone gets the short end of the stick.
You’ll never see the entire kingdom of Stormwind crumble like Lordareon did in WC3 (or even Stormwind itself in WC1…) - because people would riot. They’d be out an entire city and a large swath of playable area, even if it’d make the story more interesting.
Moving from the RTS format has just made interesting war stories almost impossible. Not completely impossible, but the sort of epic, total war type of stories they seem to want to tell just don’t work when you need to keep everything at least mostly the same.
… And hell, even in WC3, they were starting to move away from Orcs VS Humans. Likely because they saw they couldn’t keep that interesting forever.
Ironically, the faction war storylines in WoW could be much more interesting if it were a singleplayer RPG - and by that point, being seperated from your friends by faction lines wouldn’t be an issue in the first place.
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Yah true I personally wouldn’t care about cross faction, but are you for or against it?
Ironically they couldn’t even keep it interesting for half of WoW’s life.
In the beginning, people could only have the same faction on a server. That died pretty quickly. The faction story has almost always played as a side story, which really means it hardly adds a lot of value to the world. And after MoP, which I think is the true end of the faction divide and where it should have stopped before we got the abomination that was BfA, their drive to make us “CHAMPIONS OF AZEROTH” makes no sense when we’re only champions of half of it. When every neutral faction in the game is singing our praise and we’re alone standing against the tides of evil and darkness, but only for our faction. It’s so…stupid.
If they cared about the faction war, they shouldn’t have pushed the Chosen One narrative that they have since Legion, and they shouldn’t have written the lore as almost every neutral faction and even our faction leaders questioning what the purpose even is.
I’m for cross-faction gameplay because I genuinely believe it wouldn’t change the story or the gameplay to any appreciable degree. There’s basically no reason not to have it.
If this game were designed around faction conflict from the very beginning, instead of PvE content like quests, dungeons and raids, it’d have a real purpose. But right now it’s just a needless barrier to playing with friends.
Hell, given the existence of neutral and sub-factions, the war stories could continue exactly as they are.
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That is not cross faction. Its literally swapping your race to a alliance one. If it was cross faction you would keep your horde race while fighting under a alliance flag.
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I have no problem raiding as alliance. So…
Cross faction pve seems fine, they can still build a story of a Cold War between the factions… but the adventurers grouping up for raids and dungeons seems fine.
Anyway decentralization of the Ally vs Horde conflict is fine… they can never write a story around that theme were there is a satisfying outcome for the players.
You won’t have to. Options are nice aren’t they.
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It proves my point that as a video game, WoW creates it’s lore for gameplay purposes.
Something in the LORE will change to adapt to gameplay. This is not a genuine fantasy world that comes first, then WoW gets changed because of that genuine story. It’s the other way around. Which is why we have an equal number of races in the lore joining both factions etc. etc.
It proves my point 100%. PVP servers no gameplay function inside this game where the lore serves the game primarily… therefore factions should follow suit.
Faction pride isn’t my point. Having cross-faction doesn’t ruin your faction pride unless you’re toxic and care about other people too much. We don’t have to act like babies and insult other people when we don’t get our way.
NO HE LITERALLY DID!
In the interview AFTER Ion said it’s something they’re looking into he went like “that’s… not going to happen though chuckles I mean Horde and Alliance fighting together?”
Ion: “Ummm! No. Actually I would say I don’t know the future and…” Proceeds to defend the idea… -.- which is kind of um… “doubling down” on a statement??? 
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