I hear you guys dont treat the High Elfers all that nicely (ICly) anyway, so like the treatment of the Void Elves in lore, it would make sense. Speaking of Void Elves, I am pretty sure there are more of them pretending to be High Elves right now, could be wrong but it is what it is.
Anyway you don’t have anything to worry about anyway because Blood Elves are getting blue eyes as well. Anyone who wants to stay can stay anyone who wants to leave can leave.
I’m definitely curious to see how this plays out.
I’ve RP’ed with a lot of blood elves and while there are some blood elves that hang out in Orgrimmar and RP with all the other races on occasion, there is a not so insignificant number that I only really see either in Silvermoon. I rarely see them at any Tauren/Orc/Troll/Forsaken/Goblin themed- and when venturing out of Silvermoon, tend to go to neutral areas for cross faction events.
So yeah, on some level I do wonder what exactly would be keeping such players Horde-side when they could RP what is essentially the same character on the Alliance.
I haven’t heard back from any of my friends on the matter yet, though. And eve if they do have something in mind, it’s a long ways off and there’s so many factors involved, that I don’t expect anyone to have a definite answer.
My predictions? We’ll see a couple Elf centric RP guilds and players that already have some cross-faction RP going on will continue in that direction until they are mostly Alliance.
And I don’t expect any as many newer players coming in to roll Horde Blood Elves over Alliance Void Elves once they see the customization options either. Shadowlands is doing away with the grind.
And of course a continued push for the elimination of factions altogether as players of both races will wonder why their characters, who look virtually identical, speak the same language, and already cross-faction RP can’t go into Silvermoon/Stormwind respectively to RP without getting stabbed by the guards. Having to hop onto their Horde/Alliance alt to do so will eventually come to be too much of a hassle.
How right/wrong am I? Probably a lot. I think it opens up interesting possibilities for the future, though!
Which is great because now we’ll see them be able to wear non-plate gear while sporting the eyes. Namely the Legion Hunter set because…you can’t beat it I’m sorry. It is peak Quel’dorei garb. The paladin Plate set from the last raid of Legion is a top contender as well.
The Pandaren RP circles have been dealing with this issue for over 5 years and we’ve still maintained a community in-game and cross faction barriers that thrives fairly well.
Challenges aside, if youre creative, youll be alright.
There will be shake up whenever a popular new race becomes playable. Always will be. Remember the Furocolypse of Orgrimmar when Vulpera were first available. It happens. I imagine quite a few people will make High Elves on Alliance now.
But it’s also perspective, and why someone is on a given faction. In my old guild, I had a lot of Horde mains that stuck around A - Side because of the guild and community. One or two people may move on their own, but odds are the community will move together.
The people you have that are most likely to move are those that hate the Horde story and direction (and play just for the race), unhappy with the community, or if they find a very, very good community A - side.
This isn’t the end of the world for blood elf RPers and communities. What it does mean is if you have competition.
FWIW, Stormwind is shockingly empty at just about all times. Not like, raw volume, but definitely comparatively over the course of the expac. Place was poppin’ in Legion. It’s sad to see.
I am glad for the people who wanted this. I dunno how it’s gunna effect the playerbase, it definitely feels like a “Break Glass” situation. Especially with as adamant as Blizzard (Ion) has been about it not happening.
Edit: @Blizzard Playable Horde Man’ari when?
To be fair, so far as I know, Ion said there would be no High Elf allied race. There technically isn’t–it’s just a Void Elf skin. This could have been on the docket but not mentioned because of the “don’t make promises, look at what happened to WoD” sort of dealio.
I was pretty sure there was a no blue eyes period quote floating around after they datamined the blue eyes customization for belfs. I could be wrong.
They were literally saying 2 weeks ago that these blue eye colors were not for players and now all of a sudden they are. It just screams that they had to give into the backlash.
Imo the Man’ari are more likely to end up on alliance than horde. The horde’s entire identity was built upon rejecting their past of being enslaved and manipulated by eredar, after all.
It’d take a lot of new lore to make people swallow a race that is effectively eredar on the horde, whereas with the alliance they could just give Velen a tearful reunion with his eredar family members or something
But do the Alliance really need 3 flavors of Draenei? Really?
Also I think there’s too much bad blood for any amount of tears to fix. But a renegade faction of Man’ari throwing off all former Legion bonds and joining the Horde. I could see that.
No, we don’t.
We’re also still missing Broken, so we need four flavors of Draenei.
Gimme some red team waggle and you can have all the Broken you want.
Honestly, I love the idea of political opposites of the “same race” being on opposing factions, so Man’ari going Horde would be pretty great - especially if we got Broken at the same time.
Same goes for stuff like High/Cursed Arrakoa. Themeatics suit the factions, and both are requested.
But yeah, my stance of “Alliance is literally bleeding right now and we deserve nice things, and if people transfer from Horde to get it, that’s the point.” still stands hard.
These are the sort of things that can be done for the casual community to assist with imbalances. Now, we just need to see if they do anything for the raiding population to entice them back over too. 
Literally the faction imbalance could have been solved if blizzard did several things.
Stop letting people roll Horde/alliance on imbalanced servers if you don’t already have a character there. Yes it blows. But it should have been done in MoP. It’s far too late now.
Allied races are a terrible idea and should have been scrapped entirely. Most of them could have just been extra customization options. Give alliance broken and horde ogres already. You don’t want to give alliance high elves? Fine. Give them an ascendant version of high elves that have embraced something that makes them even higher beings than high elves that didn’t embrace the void. But fully embrace the ley lines that run through azeroth. Void elves are crappy edgy “OC donut steals”.
FFS just start merging realms. It’s been like 2 years since blizzard connected a bunch of realms together. Moon Guard and Wyrmrest are the only active RP realms now. The only reason they haven’t is because “it looks bad” to have dead realms being merged into live ones. They can’t make money off people transferring if all their realms are lively and active. I mean if you look at some of them they’re like 99.9% Horde which is ridiculous.
Merge existing allied race characters into current ones. How? I dunno. Just do it.
All races/all classes, faction is picked at character creation or after a short intro to either option. Boom. Done.
Or just remove faction restrictions and all this becomes a non-issue
I think a good chunk of BEs will probably head over. Anecdotally, a number of people’s main beef was the blue skin. Now that they look flesh-toned, I expect an exodus of some kind. I hope the population isn’t effected too much. I know the makeup of some RP hubs may take a hit.
For the moment, we can only hope for the best.
I can assure you that you guys are going to be fine.
Horde is almost double the population of Alliance right now.