I’ve been seeing a lot of Horde VS Alliance threads lately.
I think after 15 years… it’s time to settle the issues between factions. We can “war” against other things.
We’re all about to go visit the afterlife together. I think that should break some barriers down and open some eyes.
In PvE, factions shouldn’t really be a thing. If needed for PvP, fine, whatever.
But I dream and hope for the day MY characters can work together. My alliance can send my horde materials and share gold, and vice versa.
And that both factions can join together and slaughter the newest bad guy.
Are you for this? Against this?
What are the pros and cons you can think of?
I’m hoping they relax faction restrictions for pve but retain the divides for pvp.
Internally, they probably do some kind of analysis on a streamlined pve experience that is similar for both factions and how much this would save on developer resources / time. Then, they’d offset this gain by the expected loss of subscription revenue from the hardcore faction-only crowd that would quit and the loss of revenue from services such as faction changes.
…although it’s something I want, I don’t think it will happen. Faction change revenue losses on its own would likely put that proposition to bed.
Blizz has already clearly said that won’t happen. The two factions are a central thing to WoW in every aspect. Even during an armistice they have no plans to remove the barrier and combine them. And I kind of agree, can’t really see it happening. It wouldn’t make sense anyways.
Let factions group up for dungeons and raids. The story supports this every single expansion. Keep the factions separate but allow cross faction grouping for dungeons/raids. It would be one of the greatest things to happen.
I definitely want it. And I think they’ll have to do it, at some point.
And it’s terrible. Artificially splitting your playerbase in half so they can’t play together may have worked years ago when we had 12 million people to choose from, but not so much anymore when we’re dwindling. We’re already seeing the effects at end game where the serious alliance players feel forced to faction change just to have anyone to raid with. It’s a problem. And the more alliance players feel ignored and let down, the worse it will get.
I don’t PvP so IMO there are no downsides to this. If peeps have to PvP then make two “factions” that anyone can join, like the Aldor and Scryers. About time the races were united. People might even stop complaining about racial balance.
And there we will find the thousands of civilians the Horde killed when they invaded our homelands and burned Teldrassil. It should open some eyes but not in the way you think it should.
It would still work fine if Blizzard didn’t mishandle the factions. However that doesn’t mean I’m up for the easy cope out of those deleting the core system.
How is that “deleting the core system?” Literally the only thing that should change is letting us group up. The factions still exist, PvP still exists, you still can’t make a horde night elf.
But there is no good way to handle the factions. Story-wise they’re a massive crutch because no plot about faction conflict will ever be resolved in a way that is satisfying to everyone, so they’re always going to take the cop-out and pin it on one crazy Warchief or hand-wave away other issues to maintain the status quo. And gameplay-wise it’s not good for the health of the game to keep the playerbase split like this. Factions can stay as a concept but it’s long past time to loosen the gameplay restrictions and shift the focus away from faction conflict stories permanently.
They handled them just fine during half the lifetime of the game. And there are a lot of ways to make engaging storylines, but Blizzard only cares about focusing on one side which is why it ends up being so poorly. So far both faction wars in the game have been more horde internal struggle than actual conflict stories.
The divide goes away the moment you can group and interact and so on (obviously raid together would imply be able to hand the other side items and such as well). It ends up being purely decorative as it is in other games.
