Decisions do define an RPG. It’s a shame that when we pick our race, we are never given the decision to choose which faction we want to join / play in. No, that’s assigned for us on the basis of what race we want to choose. What a great design.
As for “the most important thing in the game” that is being taken out? You and your camp got an entire expansion dedicated to your “Faction War,” and it damn near killed the game it was so unpopular. Twitter is exploding with content creators, world firsters, and other unsubbed influencers celebrating and applauding this urgently needed change … so don’t be too shocked when you watch from the sidelines as your traditionalist ideals are destroyed and the game is saved as a result.
As for your final point? Nah, fam. I want to be factionless so that I can kill everyone. I’m tired of all the Faction Carebears hiding in their bluewalled capital cities and clinging to the Safe Spaces of their sanitized little world. Destroy the factions. Enable completely open world PVP where you can attack and kill anyone at any time. Your old world love of “Team Blue versus Team Red” doesn’t make you hard, so stop pretending that it does.
Anyway. We’re not the ones crying, like you say. Enjoy.
Well, unless you’re a Pandaren. Or a Thalassian Elf.
Honestly, the idea of races being monoliths and defining a faction is an old crutch the developers need to move past. Nations defining a faction, sure, that’s fine. The problem is Blizzard would actually have to develop nations, while they don’t even want to develop playable races.
Stop pretending like alliance isn’t dead with 95% of the population being horde. There’s literally zero reasons for factions to even exist anymore other than Blizzards extremely lazy writing because every single expansion the big bad always requires both factions to work together anyways. World PVP is 100% dead and has been for literal years. There’s no legitimate excuse for the wall to exist.
According to the statistical website Statisa, in 2019 the factions were almost identically even.
On Oceanic, for example, I believe there are more Alliance than Horde and the speed at which Alliance get into pvp queues would seem to support this. I admit, Oceanic isn’t the largest segment of the US playerbase, but to say that 95% is Horde is inaccurate.
This is insanity! No one wants Lovefool in their group! Will I actually have to start playing again? Will Lovefool soon be coming to a group near you?!
Can you explain what you mean by “Cross-Faction Communities?” Is this a new feature coming with patch 9.2.5 as right now you cannot create a community outside of your faction.
Bold prediction, but cross faction guilds will be a 10.0 expansion launch feature, just like I think cross faction grouping was originally intended to be. The dev team decided that they needed a free win, so they made the late decision to accelerate that bit of tech, and see what issues it causes.
Guilds will remain single-faction, and random matchmade activities like Heroic dungeons, Skirmishes, or Random Battlegrounds will all remain same-faction (both because there is less faction-driven pressure around random groups, and to avoid compromising the opt-in nature of the feature by randomly placing a queuing orc in a group with a night elf).
So overall the change is good and will help slow the decline of the less dominant faction. I figured this is the route that you would take since it seemed the easiest to implement (sort of like mercenary mode for PvE).
I still think long-term the guild problem will still force some players to have to faction transfer as a result. Especially if you bring back guild ML at some point (which you should).
Even in the current game though, it would create wonky scenarios, in the same way that trying to be a cross-realm guild would (basically it doesn’t work and your best bet is to create a “community”).
One of the things that makes life so interesting in general–and we can for sure apply this to games–is that TOUGH, HARD choices need to be made (i.e, will i play my fav ally race or play with my horde friend)
what you’ll find is that sometimes when you do make a compromise (O.K… i’ll play with my friend, sigh) … You might just be rewarded and blessed in a way you weren’t expecting: Wow, these orcs and their starting zone are actually kinda AWESOME… and orgrimmar is amazing… I might like this better than stormwind lol!
Here’s the Tea: If you give someone everything on a silver platter you have in essence spoiled them and simultaneously ruined them… you’ve taken away so much from them by way of giving them so much
I doubt anyone but world first players will care about racials. Do people min max within factions right now? no, and they will continue to not care I think
