Why do people think this is a good idea? It will only increase the issues many players have about representation and the racial narrative. Blizzard already struggles to tell a compelling narrative with 2 factions being equally balanced, but by breaking down the factions into 20 different independant nations will just make it worse. Blizzard’s Neutral writing often works by making you work with a single organization, often dominated by a single races theme. We saw this in Legion were most order halls were either Human or Elven, and the vast amount of different priest (Loa Priest, Priestesses of the moon, Goblin Tevangelicist, Forgotten Shadow Cultist, Whatever the hell a gnome priest is) all operated from a Draenei themed Church.
I hate the faction war, don’t get me wrong. I find it a pointless plot that takes away from the setting and turns players into ravenous animals, but, i find a faction based story telling intriguing. It makes it so players will be able to relate to a few NPCs, no matter what. Even if you more heavilly identify with your characters race, a night elf would probably enjoy the gnome lore were getting more then say, helping the goblins exploit the environment to find a new vein of kajamite.
If they dismantle the factions, I wouldn’t care about any race but my own. I don’t now, but am dragged along on Human adventures nonstop because they are the only important race in my faction.
So for you, it wouldn’t make any difference. And for Horde, it would slightly increase the amount of time they were dragged along on human adventures vs orcish adventures.
I think this is attractive to some people for meta reasons rather than story reasons. Specifically there seems to be some fans out there that think the toxicity in the community would be greatly reduced if the faction divide were removed: be that from dissolving the factions or unifying them, the thought process is if you remove the artificial divide of red vs blue then you remove one of the big reasons players have for hating one another.
The problem is, this really would not effect anything except maybe these forums. Most of the toxicity in the GAME tends to be players bashing players in their own faction. Even when it comes to something like griefing or camping in PVP, that sort of thing would still happen because removing the artificial divide of the factions does nothing to remove the incentives of tormenting your fellow player i.e. ‘it’s funny’.
Ultimately just as you say OP, fans would end up identifying more with their race of choice and gripe even more when that race isn’t catered to by the plot, but I don’t think that is what people are thinking about.
I think part of it is that some races don’t make a lot of sense even being on a faction to begin with, let alone the faction they are on. Imagine if the Forsaken weren’t on the Horde back in Vanilla. Would we see anywhere near the same level of conflict between the Horde and Alliance? I’m not saying the Forsaken are responsible for the conflict, but they do add a lot to it. By the same token, the Forsaken themselves are restricted in what they can do by the Horde.
If the Alliance and Horde were reduced to the races that make up their core and outlying races remain Allied with them but not a part of them, I think it could help significantly. So if the Forsaken haul off and raise an entire battlefield of humans to replenish their numbers, the Alliance doesn’t really have an issue with the Horde. For that matter, races like Night Elves don’t need to have an issue with the Horde either, in that scenario.
I don’t buy the basic premise here that writing quality is some fixed amount of water that is currently being poured into two buckets, but would suffer form being poured into more than two. That’s just not how it works.
The Horde and Alliance are both incoherent messes. They have no ideologies, no common culture, no basic elements of unity and yet the storywriters insist on writing them as though they were nations. Their existence, in their current form, is parasitical. They preclude good storytelling.
Because Blizzard can’t write for 2 factions. Every time they try the story takes a massive nose dive. Which is honestly impressive considering how bad their writing normally is.
Its attractive to me for the exact opposite. Or both. Definitely not rather than story reasons. Faction framing binds hands and makes races shoe horn behaviors to the point of absurdity and I hate it. The Tauren went from “We’ll accept the Forsaken into the club we helped found if they promise not to be evil!” to “Guess we’ve nothing to do but serve the Dark Lady!” in fewer years than it takes some people to realize late night talk shows are really lame.
i think that is a bit silly, even if you dismantle the factions in the story, you are still playing as a race that was part of this faction or another. also the individual races have hatreds between each other, like the worgen and the undead and that will always be part of their story, so you would still have “red vs blue”
I don’t mind the factions sticking around, but I’d like an option for a neutral faction that you could defect to. I admit it’s for purely selfish reasons - my guild RPs as having left the Alliance and Horde and has basically become the Azerothian Peace Corps. I want to be able to RP and join a guild with the opposite faction just for that.
Admittedly, I also just don’t really care about the Alliance and Horde conflict, but that’s secondary to my own RP goals.
I’m still disappointed there hasn’t been a big Tauren backlash over this situation. They’re a more peaceful Horde race, sure, but that doesn’t mean they should be complacent or blindly obedient. Baine has voiced objections, but he’s still gone along with stuff.
I miss when the Forsaken were just beleaguered, undead humans trying to find their place in the world of the living rather than cartoonishly evil. The Forsaken stopped being interesting to me when Brill was completely changed in Cataclysm (although it gave me a good excuse to have Mal here decide to defect from them).
At this point most Tauren likely feel they don’t have much choice. Sylvanas started this war with something that one cannot ever be redeemed from. The Tauren, like other Horde races, find themselves in a very uncomfortable position. They’re in a war that will dictate the survival of their nations now, because they have no reason to think the Alliance is going to stop until the Horde is destroyed for good this time.
No doubt that’s a point of view Sylvanas does everything to encourage.
The Horde at large may not be happy about the War, about how it started, but I imagine the average member of the Horde doesn’t think the Alliance is going to stop at just Sylvanas or just the Forsaken.
Purely from a business standpoint, I’m sure that Blizzard wants to dismantle the factions because it’s easier and more cost effective on a purely technical level to have just one faction.
Some of the actions they’ve taken in the game’s development makes me think they may be aiming to do just short of that… not dismantling them, but making them irrelevant to your gameplay experience.
From an RPG standpoint and as it pertains to the lore of the game, it’s an awful idea.
From a myopically PvE/Raiding point of view that prioritizes that aspect of the game over the dwindling number of RPG elements, it’s a great solution to an ever-present problem.
There are growing rumours around the possibility of something happening to the faction system. I don’t know how much credence to give these; it would obviously be a massive change to the game. I also find myself trepidatious: on the one hand, the story possibilities are exciting; on the other, I worry about what will happen to my guild.
I doubt any alterations to the faction system would negatively impact guilds. I can’t see Blizzard moving races between factions or any situation where a character cannot be in a guild, party, or raid, with characters they already can do so with.
![:smiley:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")