A discussion to the effect of “Should the factions still exist” popped up in Wolf’s dance thread recently. In an effort to not derail it further, but still discuss something I find curious… I want to see what people think.
Should the factions exist? Should there be an Alliance and Horde anymore? If yes, how can it stay relevant without becoming MoP 3? If no, how can PvP continue, and what should the non-faction game look like, in your opinion?
Personally, I wouldn’t mind going back to more of a cold war setting. Occasional skirmishes in certain theaters, and a lot of competition as each faction wants to establish itself as the dominant economic/political force, but not want to engage in open warfare with the express goal of wiping the other off the map.
You can tell a million stories against that backdrop. The backdrop itself is a natural source of tension.
Edit: That said, I do consider the elimination of factions a likely eventuality when it comes to queuing for PvE content. All MMO populations decline with time. WoW just had way more than anyone else before it’s decline started, nd they’ve been enough to sustain it over the past decade when most other games have thrown in the towel.
But when numbers become such that queue times become truly untenable, I don’t see Blizzard wouldn’t implement a “Mercenary Mode” for PvE. And at some point, yeah, they’re going to slow down content for both factions to the point where they’ll just make everything universal anyway.
I say naah they don’t have a place anymore. I say this as someone that also plays Alliance and finds doing content annoying with an over abundance of Horde players tagging mobs and longer queue times.
So in PVE content I just don’t see a reason for it anymore. How many raids and dungeons have we done with Horde and Alliance lore figures fighting side by side to defeat the big bad. I know it’s always a fun narrative trope for enemies to become allies in bleak times but WoW does it so much that it seems pointless these days.
The only other problem I could see is leveling in past expansions, would faction towns and cities in old zones remain hostile to opposite faction characters or what? Or do we make them all neutral and then laugh a lot when I do some old zone quest on an Alliance character going to a Horde town to pick up quests to kill Alliance NPCs and then run over to the Alliance town and do the quest to kill those same Horde NPCs hahaha.
PVP is easy, when you hit warmode the other faction is red. Battlegrounds stay the same as they are now and that’s that.
I truly wish the factions remained in a cold war state: always trying to get ahead without open warfare. Conflict and skirmishes, sure, but not really much more than that.
Some Night Elf or Human Paladin will say that the Horde should be destroyed immediately.
P.S. I’m frankly surprised I’ve seen two folks that share my cold war sentiments so far.
Yes, they should.
But the idea of factions as they are now is ridiculous. I would prefer to see everyone stick together as they are, but shift from rigid “factions” to organizations.
I’d prefer to see Orgrimmar and Stormwind open up to the other factions, for grouping between them to be enabled and for communication to be standardized.
I think there should be a lot of benefits for being in your organization beyond just mounts, fashion and more. There could be stuff you could access in the open: Goblin auctioneers if you’re Horde, Night Elf travel cloaks that turn you invisible for the Alliance, stuff like that.
I like the idea of factions, but I’d like them as an expansive feature.
the horde and alliance have a place, but they shouldn’t be the only factions.
there needs to be a lot more, and a lot more with power.
Yes. Death to the Blue Team!
< Mic drop. >
I think the question is should only two factions exist. How long can the “us vs. them” dynamic be realistically kept up in a world that has be decimated by war after war? Do the two factions even have enough resources and population to continue to exist as they are - also taking internal friction into account? I really don’t know. I think if they do, then a “cold war” type status is the best they could manage for now.
However, I could see both factions breaking down and new, smaller factions forming. I would favor this, but I don’t see how it could work within Blizz’s structure.
You cannot derail a thread that was never on the tracks to begin with.
To answer your question though, no. At least, not in the way the way they exist now.
I’d like this game more if there were more factions that had more power and gave players more choice to join. It’s why class halls in Legion tickled me so much, because it was less about factions and more about personal allegiances within a class spectrum and that was fun to think about.
I think the Alliance and Horde should stay a thing, if only for the practical and pragmatic reason that I don’t trust Blizzard to shake things up that much and not have it crash and burn narratively and mechanically.
Addendum: The one place I would like to see factions dissolve is the Maw. It’s the absolute definition of survive at any costs, and being able to help out a blood elf or an orc for the sake of pure survival works in that enclosed setting. Cross faction CO-OP in the Maw, please.
That’s what I really liked about Legion.
I know some class halls weren’t as great as others but overall I liked taking part in the story with (mostly) lesser known characters that were usually a lot of fun in some way. You also got to adventure to different parts of Azeroth which made the actual Legion threat seem like a global threat to some extent.
Meanwhile Sylvannas and I guess Genn? Are busy fighting over some towers which was super easy to ignore and I never once did any of the PVP WQ. I guess the closest we got to faction conflict with Genn yeeting an airship at Sylvannas in Stormheim but you immediately get wrapped up into doing viking quests that loosely tie into whatever they were fighting about.
Anyway, I didn’t really write my take from a narrative perspective and mostly just from a mechanic.
Yet I agree, I think a cold war setting would likely fit best. The actual groups within the Horde and Alliance are not on good terms and occasionally skirmish with each other (battlegrounds) or put differences aside differences to deal with the newest DBZ villain.
Meanwhile player characters have more freedom to interact with the other factions (players), maybe cities and towns won’t let others from different factions come waltzing on in (old content). Yet out and about in the world doesn’t stop people from interacting, especially in neutral locations or in PVE content.
Anyway I’m just still salty that during my rare farming it takes like no time to form a Horde group in custom LFG while Alliance I’ll sit around for 30 minutes until a Horde player shows up and immediately forms a group to kill the rare I’m waiting on lmao. We all want the same thing, so why can’t we just group up and do it ugh
I would say yes, but as more of a Cold War style setting where the factions are effectively political blocs now.
It would work well, you’d have people in both camps pushing for war with the others and, in turn, would also have people in both pushing for not war. Not to mention that after the giant dumpster fire of BfA, I imagine intrigue and other such things would be better received than just more flat war.
Does this mean everything is peaceful? I’d first ask when if ever Azeroth was actually peaceful since someone as always been trying to pee in someone’s cheerios. The primary difference is that given Azeroth is more interconnected, the factions have their fingers in these smaller conflicts trying to make the other slip up.
More importantly, thanks to how Blizz has set it up, having a series of flash points where it looks like the factions are going to throw down again, but gradually and slowly back off, would be fresher than more war (and not to mention would serve as proper build up for the time faction war comes back and the build up this time was actually organically made rather than because of WOOOOOOOONS)
I don’t know. There’s no easy answer for me, not because I believe the factions are integral to the setting, but because there’s just so much bad blood between the Horde and the Alliance at this point. I can’t imagine how they’d go about dissolving the factions, or even reverting to a state of cold war, after everything that’s happened.
Not that Blizzard has ever cared much for consistency or verisimilitude when it comes to their creative decisions, but there’s a limit. I mean, even people who barely pay attention to the story were taken aback by what went down in BfA.
You can’t just have one side go to war on what is explicitly a genocidal premise, have them succeed, and then let them carry on without so much as a lick of remorse (at least until their zombie mommy said something meanie weanie before flying away on a fart cloud) and then be like… y’all are working together now! Woo!
That’s insane!! It’s stupid!!! It doesn’t make any sense!!!
But at the same time the factions are just so staid and boring and literally every expac ends with the Horde and the Alliance joining hands to defeat whatever cartoon supervillain is currently threating the status quo, so it’s like… what’s even the point?
I don’t know. Maybe a timeskip really would be for the best at this point.
I just want to play on my cutie pie vulpera with my alliance friends 🤷
I think any drastic change to the factions needs to happen with the end of WoW and whatever comes next is introduced in WoW 2. Y’all love to talk about how the factions don’t make sense anymore and they don’t, but not because it doesn’t belong in the story or this world, but because the story is written so poorly.
To me this is just a game mechanics question. You can argue however you want about whether or not the factions make sense from a story perspective (they don’t), but I don’t think there’s much question that they’re bad from a gameplay mechanics perspective.
Players are arbitrarily prevented from communicating or grouping based on their race choice, which for many players is just an aesthetic choice. That is bad. In return, this gives us… what? World PvP, the least supported and most pointless activity in the game?
Even if the story was very well written with good justifications for ongoing conflicts between the factions it would still be bad to have the mechanical divide. It just doesn’t add anything of value. Maybe it would be justifiable if world PvP was the most important activity in the game and all the game’s systems revolved around it, but obviously that’s not the case.
The story can tell whatever tale it wants and mechanics don’t necessarily need to get in the way. There was a whole section of MoP where Orgrimmar “canonically” was under martial law with orc fanatics driving non-orcs from the city but that had no bearing on the game mechanics, because it would’ve been dumb to prevent Blood Elves from checking the AH for a few months.
To offer my own opinion… I’m big on keeping the factions. I believe they’re central to the setting at this point - for better or for worse a lot of people identify as Alliance or Horde, ICly AND OOCly. Within the factions, the alliances have been so enduring and longlasting that there’s a certain intra-faction attachment as well, outside of the lunatic extremists. A lot of Darkspear Trolls would feel fondly about their Tauren allies. A lot of Blood Elves might well appreciate the Forsaken coming through for them at Tranquillien in their time of need. The list goes on and on as the factions grew. Enter into an alliance for long enough, and you do grow attachments I’d suggest.
In terms of how to prevent MoP 3, I’m on board with the Cold War idea - just enough tension to restrict inter-faction travel so that our capitals remain faction specific. PvP could be explained away as warmonger vigilantes, clinging to old hatreds on both sides. That allows people to run around killing the other guys ICly, but they’re basically terrorists for doing so. But the Cold War doesn’t even need to be fleshed out in depth - just an interesting background setting.
I think the best thing though, what we need most, is something I’ve been saying for a while: Faction LORE, NOT Faction WAR. I found Kul Tiras and Zandalar intensely refreshing in that we had a faction specific questing experience, relevant to our faction’s goals, out there in the world. That provides meaningful difference between the Alliance and Horde experience without necessitating a war. Furthermore it gives opportunity to do something that I feel WoW has lost… fleshing out of the cultures and peoples of Azeroth. Give us a questline, or zone, or quest experience, regarding the reclaiming of Gilneas, or the resettlement of Forsaken Lordaeron. Give us time to see the new Night Elf society build and prosper in Nodrassil, and the struggles of making that happen. Let’s see what happens with the “troll empire” now that the Zandalari have joined the Horde - can we convince the Amani, Gurubashi, and others to join the Horde too? Are the gnomes still working towards rebuilding Gnomeregan, or is Mechagon becoming a grand Gnome capital? The list of potential plot hooks regarding our plethora of playable races go on and on. I LOVE those races and cultures, and frankly I don’t mind the two key alliances they’re involved in… But damn it all rather than just fighting each other in a really superficial way… let’s look inward! Let’s see what’s going on with the peoples and cultures of Azeroth. THAT’s what I’d like to explore.
I want to see this too but I want to see a glorious pan-human nation of both undead and living humans 
like ive written pieces of an AU in the past and seen plenty of aus written by friends that either completely rip apart the horde and alliance and replace them with what they actually want, or change the alliance and horde to the point that they’ve practically been defanged and broken into pieces.
i think, by and large, nobody’s quite happy with exactly what theyve got but do want to keep the alliance and horde as entities. it’s hard to get rid of the driving force of the franchise, even as its grown very bland and substandard. in bfa, it felt as if they started to lay the seeds for a split of the major factions. even still that fracture feels like a possibility, and i’d say its an extreme possibility if not for the game we’re talking about.
in the leadup for bfa, a few people probably got a feeling that the two factions had two sides to each of them. for the alliance, there were hawks and doves. in the horde, there was the original horde and thrall’s horde. if you ask me, pulling on those threads would be interesting. it could lead to entire new faction s forming, or even the foundations of entire brand new plotlines for wow.
when i went to make my ultimately failed guild project, that was sorta what i had in mind. something distinctly alliance yet not alliance at the same time, a force that had decidedly separated itself yet built itself on a similar foundation. a force that is so ideologically opposed to its source that it could not stand remaining.
i had the idea of alterac’s humans and the frostwolves helping each other out, opening the path for the horde and alliance to have a lot of crossover in their membership, to the point of having the human kingdoms rebuilt by the living and dead and those who lost their homes.
ive had a lot of ideas for where the horde and alliance are pushed into the background, still as powerful political, narrative, etc forces but they aren’t the only predominant names. and not like the kirin tor, the ebon blade, the argent crusade, or anything like that. these new factions aren’t just neutral finger puppets that the alliance and horde still are focal points in.
no theyre new factions. theyre their own thing. there’s new leaders, new nations, new governments entirely.
a separatist alliance that strikes against the laboring behemoth that is the original alliance. a shadow horde that grows hateful of the central horde for denying itself and not claiming azeroth like it was formed to do. a splinter faction that cares little for warring against its predecessor, but seeks to do something that the original refused to do or was incapable of doing. a troll empire that stands on its own. an elvish land beholden to no human kings or orcish warlords. a hardy group of survivors that have been forced from their original lands for disagreeing with the status quo.
yknow.
fun political stuff that you can do with an extremely varied world of monsters, men, and magic.