Food for Thought: A Third Faction

So, some of y’all may remember these threads from back when the DotOrg was still a thing. Every week or month (depending on inspiration), I’d post a topic that would be related to Roleplay or the Warcraft world, and then set you free to discuss it. Sometimes it was character-centric, like a personality test to try on your mains, and sometimes it was more lore-related, like how we might incorporate Pet Battles into roleplay. To help get us back on the map as an RP server, I decided to start these up again here on the official forums! So without further ado, here we go…

Today’s Question:
If you were to give WoW a third faction, what would it be?
What would be their reasons for forming in-world? What playable races would be a part of it–including new races we might not be able to play yet?

Background:
So I got to thinking (dangeorus habit, I know)…a lot of World PvP games–such as Elder Scrolls: Online, Archeage: Unchained, and Dark Age of Camelot–make use of three PvP factions instead of just two, I imagine to help off-set the imbalance of any one faction being more or less popular than the others. Two of the three can make temporary alliances to help beat the strong third, and so on. Certainly we can see some of the problems of two-faction PvP in WoW, where Warmode is very Horde-heavy on Normal servers, but Alliance-heavy on RP servers.

Though adding a third faction would be a major undertaking that probably won’t happen in World of Warcraft, I got a curious about what this would look like for the game’s lore if it were to happen. Who would this new faction be? Why would they form, given either current lore or long-past histories? What do you think? Post below!

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After this expansion and all the cinematic talk of “breaking the cycle” and “tearing down barriers” I really thought there would just be a whole faction re-do. You’d have the “Champions of Azeroth” with all currently playable races and then the “World Dominators” or destroyers or whatever, and those would be comprised of the Naga, Old God minions, demons, Sethrak, elementals, consortium, etc. So you’re either fighting to save the planet or fighting to take it over because moar powah or some such.

If they really wanted to do it right, you would make all those races available and start faction neutral and just choose your faction either at character creation or at the end of the neutral starting zone.

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I agree (with Lana); this expansion’s ending really had me going for the ending of the faction system. My ideas for a third faction was a little different than yours though.

My first idea was it would be a neutral faction, for races that either were tired of the Horde-Alliance war or never got involved with it to begin with. So vulpera, goblins, Pandaren, the elf races (or, well, before they dug the hole so deep for night elves), and probably the various tauren subraces. Ogres and/or forest trolls could join the Horde to even out the losses of the tauren.

The other idea was that Sylvanas was going to be able to draw so many followers that we’d have a faction that was basically just Undead. and some of her other minions. There would be undead versions available for all the player races, kind of like how death knight is now. Naga, goblins, and some form of Shadow entity might also have joined them.

That, or just a faction of elves. Because elves. All the elves. EVERYWHERE. …stupid as it sounds, I kind of wonder if that would finally balance Horde vs. Alliance, if you just took away all the elves…

EDIT: didn’t realize I was posting on Eve. Oh well!

I’d always wanted a more neutral third-faction. It would likely have suited the Ishnu better from an RP standpoint, let alone many other characters and guilds. Always wondered how a neutral faction is how would it work from a player engagement standpoint? Would they be banned from all major faction cities, or perhaps allowed into only a single city? Maybe they’d be able to enter all cities on both sides, but have severely limited access to banks, auction houses, and so on. Perhaps they’d be stuck having to deal just with existing neutral camps and the Goblin cities.

What about pvp and battlegrounds? A lot of things would have to be figured out, and I really do hope one day something like that could happen.

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In all likelihood this would be an extension of Mercenary Mode, which allows members of the Horde to fight on the Alliance team in PvP (and vice versa), though that only works in the non-rated stuff.

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