I want to get to know my faction leaders intimately

No, not like THAT (though Lor’themar, if I was into guys…).

There was a low level quest in Cataclysm where you rode alongside Sylvanas and she talked to you about her past and her struggles in life. It was the most exposition about a faction leader I’ve ever seen inside the game itself (I shouldn’t need to chase down lore for a game outside the game!).

My point is, it makes the game much more enjoyable when you have an emotional connection to major characters, and you could strengthen that connection with minimal resources by adding something like the following…

Allow players to talk to a faction leader and just…chat with them. Give us a deep dialogue tree in which we can ask them questions about their life, where they grew up, what hardships they faced, etc.

It could be a simple dialogue tree, or you could add a reputation climb to it by allowing us to talk to only one faction leader per week and only get so many branches deep before they want to spend some time thinking on our conversation. Reach best friend status and they’d stop referring to you as the cold and informal “champion” and start calling you “my friend”.

Reach best friend with all faction leaders and earn the “Advisor of the Horde/Alliance” title. Becoming best friends with each leader could also award an achievement along with a mechanical battle pet version of them (think the lifelike mechanical toad but actually lifelike).

OR…

If you wanted to go super hardcore into this, you could have faction leaders take advice from players that will be weighed into their future decisions (aka. players are voting on where the story goes next). This might be a bit much, but no harm in suggesting it.

Any way you slice it, you could build player investment AND offer a great deal of exposition about these faction leaders, and we could do it IN game in a fun and rewarding way.

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