Blizzard likes to say that “Gameplay First” is one of their core values. The unfortunate reality of that is that the way they mean it often comes across as completely toxic toward other important considerations, like community immersion and quality storytelling. I agree with your sentiments, universally – and I am also in a position where I am so desperate for this direction to finally be embraced that any news is “good news.”
But they seriously need to drop the “Gameplay First … At All Costs” mentality. Story and Character and Immersion need to be the drivers of an experience like an MMORPG. The earliest promos of World of Warcraft promised us the ability to “enter a world” over and over again.
They need to remember and deliver on those promises.
Please make guilds NOT tied to faction! Please! Let me join my guild on my favorite druid race (worgen druid) and my favorite shaman race (vulpera shaman)! I want to raid with my guild on characters I want to play and get guild achievements! And see the guild roster!
Communities are the cross-realm guilds. Guilds are the same server communities.
7 Likes
I like this change. I would love to play Alliance. The one thing I don’t like about this as-written is that it doesn’t sound like guilds will be cross-faction. It’ll be kind of annoying maintaining two separate guilds and having them be unable to communicate with one another seamlessly without relying on the community feature/third-party things like Discord.
5 Likes
They absolutely need to. Remember to go back and LIKE every single post demanding Cross-Faction or Factionless guilds.
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It hasn’t been done. No one has changed wow guilds to work with both factions. That’s just a fact.
I’m not defending that they haven’t done it, after years of customer’s asking and games evolving - but it very likely isn’t just something they can whip out without some design, development, and testing.
IMO it should be in the next expansion, full stop.
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You need to research that. I quite promise you that you are very, very, very mistaken.
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Now that the “because we say so” inertia is broken, there’s no reason not to open guilds to cross-faction membership.
We’ve all literally been to hell and back to fight the same bad guys with a cross-faction group of NPCs all working together. It’s time.
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Nope, I don’t. In pirate servers they don’t have to deal with the back end, so that doesn’t count. If that is what you are referring to.
Blockquote we’ve seen Alliance and Horde finding common ground and working together ever since Warcraft III
Only because you guys are coding on the cheap… It is much cheaper to create a story line where there is only one quest, one set of mobs vs. two quests and two sets of mobs/objectives.
Sadly for many of us this is Blizzard singing the death knell of their game.
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Absolutely, 100%! This is the time for progress!
In servers where the volunteer teams care more about the happiness of the community than the paid developers at Blizzard, yes. That’s what I’m referring to.
The impact of letting guilds be cross-faction is more complex. This is a great start-- let them implement this, and let’s re-evaluate including guilds in this feature once we actually have it in our hands.
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I wish it also included random queues, but I’m really happy. I don’t play alliance but some of my friends do, so I’ll be able to play with them.
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Strange. I’m more convinced that it might actually be saved than I have been in years. To each their own, I guess. They’ve been doing it “this way” since the beginning, and it’s only led the game to the brink of death.
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Yea - the game isn’t exactly thriving, hard to call this a death knell.
In reality it has… I started on a low pop server back in BC and never had a problem finding groups… Might have taken time, but they still happened. Today the population is a small fraction of what it was back in BC and Wrath. And this is just one more thing to ‘make the world feel less dead’
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Thank your, Blizz. I’ve been asking for a neutral faction for the longest time. This seems to be the first step in that direction. The game mechanics for PVP are radically different that PVE and not everyone has the time to learn both. I, personally, do not like PVP but understand that there are a lot of players that love it. But when you’re out simply questing in the environment, not being able to assist another player, regardless of faction, hinders the game play. Many times, I’ve helped characters of the other faction and foregone any possible loot simply because they are having a tough time on their own. Maybe now we’ll get world tagging when not doing PVP so we can all enjoy the game regardless of faction or how little time we get to play.
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I think there’s a lot more to unpack than just queue times. The story has demanded this shift from the beginning. Creating unnecessary and illogical obstacles / barriers to entry is not a good business model. Binary factions were never an intelligent design choice for them, and they never should have included them. The game would be in a dramatically healthier state if joining a faction and participating in that faction’s activities had been opt-in and driven by player choice from the beginning rather than being a mandatory assignment on the basis of your preferred race.
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