This was beautiful and put words to a lot of my feelings
This is especially true. All of Azeroth is too vague to rally around. Yelling “For Azeroth” never gets my blood pumping because “Yeah, literally everything we do is for Azeroth, we flippin’ LIVE HERE! Give us something specific and personal please.”
Story aside segregating players leads to all sorts of logistical and playability challenges. There’s a reason why people don’t raid competitively on the Alliance anymore, and server populations change. Also what the hell is wrong with people being okay with others not being able to play with their friends because you want to keep this antiquated manufactured drama knob? There’s already instances of losers physically assaulting people at BlizzCon for the faction they happen to play on.
https://www.icegif.com/wp-content/uploads/haters-gonna-hate-snow-white.gif
I dunno, I never liked the faction divide and thought it was dumb for the longest time. People should be able to play with whoever they want regardless of the faction someone is on
There is edgy/actual edgelord content and characters in WoW (akin to what stepped out of those comics you cite, and I saw a lot in comics from the 1990’s), but as Onotay said; Ragnaros, Arthas and Gul’dan aren’t that.
Three locations that only flagged players could cap. Gave a zone-wide PvE buff. Zangermash had two locations really spaced out, so no one bothered with it.
Nagrand had the town Halaa where you capped Wyvern flightpoints and bombed NPC’s. Since Nagrand also had the place you qued for arenas and some decent rewards, it got a lot of action.
Also shout out to the floaty sky islands where you could duel someone.
Anya, I do not apologize for thinking Burning Crusade is the unloved middle child of the OG trilogy of Vanilla-TBC-Wrath. Burning Crusade has its moments, but the story? It is just so all over the place that it ends up with the expansion’s poster child big bad being relegated to some weird semi-final raid, Kael going from raid to dungeon boss, and the Sunwell gets saved because of a draenie and a dead Naaru.
It is weird and you are weird for loving it!!
Nobody likes TBC for the overarching story. They like is for the alien world, old characters from the RTS games, magitek theme, and the delightfully edgey blood elves in their brand new, RP Capitol.
Time for another delicious Demonic mocha latte with mints.
Oh no, there are absolutely weird people who do.
Never underestimate people’s weird loves.
You and I are thinking of very different things. The stuff I’ve had the misfortune of being exposed to the last few years makes everything Blizzard has every put out, including the early Diablo stuff, look like Disney movies.
The actual truth.
(I said it that way to kid. I do agree, though. Well said)
I don’t doubt that in a complete alternate universe the faction conflict could have been written well.
But since Blizz has shown time and time again that we don’t live in that universe, they should honestly just stop and should try to deliver us something new and experiment with things they can write.
Obligatory ‘Christie Golden bad’ take 
Unironically the biggest based take on this thread.
People should be able to choose whom they want to play with and shouldn’t be held to some weird outdated system that forces them to only interact with half the playerbase.
Regardless of opinion on how it interacts with the story, at this point in the game it simply detracts from gameplay and makes the game incredibly unfriendly to new players who don’t care about the faction conflict like oldheads do.
I’m a bit of a broken record on this point, but my go-to example is the first half of the Wrathgate.
Bolvar and the Alliance soldiers lined up - here because of their own history with Arthas.
Saurfang and the wolf riders charging in, all For the Horde.
Even the Forsaken, in the seconds before the twist, have an epic looming moment full of their palpable hatred for the Lich King who made them what they are now.
The factions were working together to fight a PvE boss, but their major NPCs, appearances/styles/themes, backstories, motivations, and combat units were all clearly their own and not shared. I loved that. That’s my gold standard for neutral/joint operations against a PvE threat.
What stuff are you talking about, specifically?
Start with Trouble by Mark Millar. Now keep in mind that that’s actually restrained for him.
I will say however, it IS more meaningful when the factions aren’t friends. It should hold more meaning than a friendly sports rivalry.
Every time the Alliance and Horde do something together they lose a bit of their identity. Because Blizzard has to mental gymnastics their way into figuring out how these two could conceivably coexist and the answer every time is “take away their personality”.
The Dragonscale Expedition springs to mind. Both Explorer’s League and Reliquary flanderized all the way down to “the archaeology guys” in a lazy attempt to justify these directly opposed organizations working together. I mean, they’ve been doing that to the Explorer’s League for a while now, but I was hoping the Reliquary would be safe from the ongoing blandening of Azeroth.
You preferred the sinister “We look for artefacts to give us POWERRRRR” version?
The Reliquary is (IMO) actually the poster child for why Blizzard doesn’t do well at making Horde equivalent organizations to established Alliance ones. The Alliance versions have usually scooped up all the positive themes (like “sheer joy of knowledge” in the case of the Explorer’s League), so when the writers are called upon to make a Horde version, in their attempt to make it thematically distinct, they wind up making it separate-but-evil. (And it doesn’t help that we haven’t seen the negative, imperialistic side of the Explorer’s League in several expansions now.)
I was thinking about this, and it’s why I specified how, to me, the issue is in making a generic 3rd-party neutral organization that both factions participate in without much, if any, explanation. I don’t think these issues are inherent to neutral content vs generating factional alternatives, but they recur often enough that they may as well be.
The Reliquary had very little story, and it wasn’t that great… and now it doesn’t look like it will get a chance to expand, to get fleshed out with new NPCs and zones and interactions with their Alliance equivalent, because that time is spent on the Dragonscale Expedition instead. The most we get is the Indiana Jones villain expy getting softened and hanging out with his daughter (which I enjoyed).
I do like how swathes of the Dragonscale Expedition still keep the visual style of the Explorer’s League and Reliquary, so at least they have that. But I was hoping for a bit more of their competing philosophies to be showcased (and in doing so, to have the competing philosophies fleshed out), to explore what their different mindsets and motivations are. I think there might have been some of that in questing, but if so, I don’t remember it.
I know what you mean, I’ve heard of Wanted. Rivals The Boys for superhero genre edgelordery (in fact the author of The Boys makes Mark Miliar look tame).
The BfA cinematic has 29 million views and was widely regarded in a positive light. The faction war concept is incredibly popular becuse it’s what Warcraft is. Horrible writers ruining the narrative doesnt mean the concept is hated.
Legion cinematic: 13 million views
BfA cinematic: 29 million views
Despite releasing 2 years earlier the Legion cinematic has 16 million less views. The narrative sold to us in the BfA cinematic is obviously what the playerbase wants the narrative of WoW to be.
The universal hatred of the Shadowlands and DF narrative just further proves that the faction war is necessary. They had to bring Metzen back because of how bad things got.
If you don’t read comics, you have no idea hoiw true this really is. Garth Ennis is the ultimate edgelord writer.