They can enjoy their racial capitals.
I think everyone should be able to enjoy any capital they want.
There’s nothing really disrupting your ‘peace’ when having a random Horde playing running through it collecting transmog or doing new content.
Like, I’m not talking about adding a bunch of Horde NPCs everywhere…
I’m talking about, like, Horde players being able to go wherever they want to check out the new content, or act as ‘visitors’ or ‘diplomats’ to these cities.
I don’t necessarily disagree (though I wouldn’t be quite as certain). But it is worth remembering that they said they are going to revamp the old zones. Neutral storylines might be in the works for everywhere.
And I disagree. You can go make a character on the opposing faction if you want to enjoy those cities
Okay ? And I said I heavily dislike this direction, for the aforementioned reasons, so that doesn’t solve it to me.
A differentied experience depending on the faction halves the number of races expected to receive screentime during that experience, making it mechanically more likely for everyone to get some focus. A fully neutral narrative experience cannot afford to advance everyone’s lore. It won’t.
I like you. I agree with you.
However…
This is the gosh dang Story Forums!!! Where you see a tree root growing out of the ground, I see proof of old god corruption!! Where you see a flavor NPC wandering around, I see the next expansion’s big bad!! Where you see the normal day-night cycle in-game, I see the prelude to WoW apocalypse!!!
I shall speculate wildly, and I do not even need little to go on!!!
Ahem. But yes, I like you. AmyDrussel and her current welcoming mat to the Horde player and two tauren is not likely a sign of opening every city to neutrality.
Then we just fundamentally disagree and there’s no middleground here.
I feel that as active heroes of this world we should be allowed to play diplomat or visit wherever we want, and that doesn’t ruin anything.
We should also be able to experience all the content we’d want to without having to jump through terrible gameplay hoops because of arbitrary reasons stemming from an outdated system.
Well, that’s the definite direction the game is currently heading… So?
There’s already things like crossfaction guilds and groups…
We’re allies and working together both in lore and within actual gameplay.
Heavy faction divide is something of the past.
And in my opinion, good riddance.
There’s so many different races to juggle at this point, all with their own goals and motivations that even with the factional split this happens anyway.
Like I said, whether there’s a factional split or not, Blizz isn’t gonna write for races like Darkspear Trolls if they don’t want to.
I should mention I am in no way against speculation.
I mention it mostly because this forum sometimes has trouble with “speculation” vs. “this is what is going to happen”. 
So it’s bad and they need to change it. Period.
Except they may be more willing to give Darkspear Trolls focus in a Horde-centered narrative, simply because such a narrative would be a better suited context for Darkspear Troll focus. There’s just more room for Horde racial development in a Horde narrative. That’s not something you can really deny.
I think the neutral city system is fine, but it needs to be more robust than it is right now. For example any time someone from the other side attacks anyone in an alliance city, the guards should automatically trigger to attack the horde PC, even if an alliance member started it. Of course this would go the other way as well. NPCs should be unfriendly and occasionally jeer at you. If anyone will sell you anything it should be stupidly expensive.
You should feel unwelcome but tolerated, with obvious bias against you.
That’s your opinion.
I think it’s good and makes the world feel like it’s evolving and changing and not staying politically stagnant for outdated gameplay reasons. 
Has that proven true in the past?
There was heavy faction divide in expansions like BC and WotLK…
What new lore did Tauren or Trolls receive then? Nothing.
Are there?
Like, it seems to me that Blizzard only writes for these races when they feel like they want to and the faction divide doesn’t make them any more willing to do it.
Rather, it feels like they’re more likely to butcher lore under this system when they feel forced to write for something they don’t want to write… Like in Bfa, where they needed to write for all the different factional leaders in the Horde but decided to either ignore them or have them act wildly out of character.
Otherwise, they just ignore them until they can come up with something.
That’s… wrong, actually. As late as in WoD, and even with how much of a narrative trainwreck WoD was and how alien Trolls would supposedly be to the main storyline at hand, Darkspear got Shadowhunter lore and characters. Why is that ? Well, because the questing experience was differentiated : there were Alliance towns and quests, and Horde towns and quests. Simple as that.
Shadow Hunters came from the RPG and War3.
Trolls might’ve received certain things from WoD, but it’s because Blizz felt like they themselves wanted to write things for them… Not because the factional divide acting as ‘narrative training wheels’ that brought them to do it.
I’m also not saying there shouldn’t be faction specific questing hubs, either.
I’m saying that having a heavy faction divide doesn’t amount to anything and not everyone gets a spotlight because there’s different faction hubs.
Again, Tauren didn’t receive anything from TBC nor did they get anything from WoD either.
To jump to an Alliance-orientated example, Draenei received literally nothing past TBC.
Like, literally nothing.
There was one short story in Cata but Draenei had 0 focus until the latter-end of Legion.
Why is that? Because the writers didn’t have anything they wanted to write for them.
That’s my point, if the writers want to write something for a certain race they’re going to write it regardless.
And if they don’t have anything they want to write for them? They just ignore them or have them cameo in the background.
I don’t get this mindset.
No, the reason there’s lore for these races in past expansions isn’t simply because Blizzard added an arbitrary faction division with quests.
There’s nothing stopping Blizzard from creating a Troll village in a ‘neutral’ expansion, just as there’s nothing stopping them from making a Blood Elven village in the same expansion.
These races can still receive the same amount of lore development regardless of whether or not the expansion is ‘neutral’ or not.
I mean, Tauren had their own little questline in this expansion, didn’t they? And this expansion definitely falls into that ‘neutral’ category, doesn’t it?
And before you say, ‘well, it’s because of the work of a singular writer that wanted to get that questline in!’… The questline still made it into the game and fit within the expansion with no issue at all… So who cares if it was the work of one passionate writer?
Most questlines are the explicit work of one writer.
Draenei too, although they have 0 focus within this expansion got their own new lore and story pieces too (regardless on how much I actually like the contents of it). Something that even within expansions that had heavy faction divide, never happened.
The point is, whether races receive their own narrative tied to them regardless of the size, the expansion being ‘neutral’ or not doesn’t effect that. They can still receive their own narratives regardless because at the end of the day it has nothing to do with an arbitrary factional division system, but rather the desire that Blizz’s writers have for writing anything about that race.
I am kinda curious if a new PTR build will go up today, as the PTR is down and a new build was pushed to the CDN last night. Perhaps one final push to stabilize and get a few more tweaks in before christmas. Might show us more what they are thinking with the neutrality stuff.
I don’t entirely trust Blizzard not to ruin the inevitably neutral Silvermoon with egregious Alliance influence, but Bel’ameth is so uniquely night elven and blatantly Alliance-aligned despite its tolerance of the Horde PC that for the first time in a long time I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Yes Tauren may not have gotten much from WoD, but 1) they had just gotten stuff in MoP, 2) Horde-side, Orcs have, Darkspear have, Belves have, freaking Goblins have (hell, WoD is also the only time we ever saw a Horde Taunka again after WotLK smh. Sure, that’s just trivia, but trivia that confirms that the Taunka have indeed stuck with the Horde after Wrath, so that’s valuable trivia from a lore standpoint). That’s a pretty decent record. No one would expect this from an expansion like SL or DF, because the way they’re designed and conceptualized is just not racial lore-friendly, outside of very specific cases like the Kaldorei… who have been central to the MSQ in every expansion since Legion.
Anyway. Feels like we’re running in circles here. You’re saying the writers are going to write about whoever they feel like writing about ; I’m saying “whoever they feel like writing about” is greatly determined by the narrative context, and building faction-specific stories and questing experiences increases the chances of the various fanbases getting content they care about, because doing so mechanically restricts the array of characters, themes and plotlines who may be involved in said questing experience. If you’ve got a Belf outpost, you’re likely to get Belf lore bits. If you’re questing with a Dwarf party, you’re likely to get Dwarf lore bits. If the leading cast of your main storyline is Thrall, Talanji and Gazlowe, you’re likely to get Thrall, Talanji and Gazlowe chardev. Which is why faction relevance (please note how I’m not saying “faction conflict”) is the right narrative design philosophy. That’s literally all I’m saying.
Yeah at some point they figured the Tauren would prolly have one or two things to say about spending half the expansion being chummy with Centaur. More than a Tauren questline, this was rather a Baine questline though, and for what it’s worth I didn’t like it (mostly because Baine is completely toast as a character, he is beyond saving).
Now compare this to what Nelves got from DF and you’ll understand what I meant when I said “neutrality hits different whether you’re an Alliance/Elf player or not”.
Provided Silvermoon is the expansion hub city—Which I think is anything but assured—I expect the strongest alliance influence in Quel’thalas to be windrunner spire and village. I can imagine them giving the high elves a small embassy in silvermoon ala dalaran, but their major enclave being out there.
Except for… Warlords of Draenor, which was pretty much all Draenei if you were an Alliance player.
How did you know?!
What… I mean thats crazy talk, complete and utter nonsense.
Just because the narrative is surrounding Nelves atm doesn’t mean the narrative can never shift to focus on another race.
They’re just the race that’s most relevant to Dragons, considering the Green Dragonflight and the Emerald Dream explicitly tie into their lore and the Worldtree.
They’d also get the same amount of focus even if there was a large factional presence within DF as an expansion, considering how central the Worldtree is to both Dragons and Night Elves.
Then we have a misunderstanding.
I don’t think having a player able to freeroam in Alliance and Horde territory is destroying ‘faction relevance.’
I also don’t think it’s a bad thing for Blizzard to shift towards a more ‘neutral’ way of telling the story, I think we should encourage Blizzard to experiment with their storytelling considering how dry, dull, and continuously retreading the same ground the story is.
My argument from the start has never been to remove factions from the story.
My argument has been to remove them as a gameplay function and to not have them so divided as to make certain areas not freeroam.
I have nothing against faction specific questlines or anything like that, I just don’t think Alli or Horde should be KOS in the opposite city’s walls.
Especially when we’re moving further and further away from the hostile relations these factions once had with each other.
Guess you’re right with that one, forgot about WoD.
That just leaves Wotlk, Cata, MoP, then.
Expansions which all had faction divide as a major part of the story.
Which one? I think there have been like six in the last century.
The apocalypse needs to figure out its proper final form already. I suggest…
