My Raid Team Died on the Altar of Faction Identity

Well, the title really says it all.

I played on a team, Alliance side, that was 9/10M, progging Sire. We’d had some bumps that slowed us down both IRL and in game. And we just couldn’t get ahead of the recruiting curve. As a recent example, a few weekends ago some of our officers spent hours reaching out to candidates that were within the interest and skill range that would help us finish out the tier. Of the 20 that they made contact with, 18 of the potential recruits were an instant “no” based on faction alone. Attrition took it’s toll, and we’re now done.

I recognize that there’s a lot of viewpoints here with regards to the RP and story. But there has to be a better solution to this fracturing of the player base. Some sort of compromise between keeping the illusion of faction hostility, while not abandoning those on Alliance side with a rapidly dwindling population. Continuing to ignore this problem causes raids to collapse, guilds to breakup and friendships to slip. And I think we could all use more good friends in these times.

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Blizzard’s answer to this is:
No.

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I really don’t know why there even needs to be faction hostility at this point. Like, we killed a Titan together.

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There is no reason we shouldn’t be able to do content cross faction.

From a content standpoint it would make grouping and recruiting 100 times easier.

From a lore standpoint the factions have already worked together numerous times throughout expansions.

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Personally I agree, but this one seems less universally agreed upon. There’s a lot of players who still really cling to Horde vs. Alliance. Which is fine, they’re welcome to imagine the game how they want. I just want to play the game how I want too

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IMO the main reason for blizz refusing to do cross faction pve has nothing to do with lore. I suspect it has to do with optics and how it would look to people as a move of “desperation” further lending credence to wows dwindling subs. It’s likely the same reason they haven’t shut down the 20? Or more servers that really should have been shut down years ago. So instead they keep trying to link them in a vain attempt to maintain the illusion. Meanwhile all they end up doing is further damaging the playerbase that remains by maintaining the barriers that seperate those few that are left.

But that’s just my theory.

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That’s not exactly true. Ion said it was on the table during Blizzconline

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I mean without numbers, I don’t see how you can think they’re doing well. Fastest selling PC game in history last year. Yet other genres regularly break WoW’s numbers in terms of overall players. CoD has over 100 Million, Minecraft has over a billion, and League has over 100 million.

It’s like we’re on a ship where everyone can see and notice how the game is flailing but the problem is this is World of Warcraft–we had a movie, and an emmy winning South Park episode about us. We can’t fail or even give an inch.

It’s like Trump during the peak of COVID-19 saying we’re going to reopen now. Or like when he lost and just couldn’t accept it because he’s Trump. WoW has a similar mentality. They are the only older MMORPG who broke out and got 12 million active subs at one point. That’s great. But games now have broken 100 million, and if you’re just comparing yourself to other MMORPGs and not PC Games as a whole, then you’re really not trying for growth just domination over a ever shrinking and divided pie.

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this was my group.

we held it together as long as we could, but eventually the “no alliance” responses to the majority of people we reached out to did us in.

so at the end of mythic BoD, we went horde. recruiting hordeside is much, much, much better.

people are gonna come in here and tell you there’s no problem. they’re wrong, or they’ve never tried to recruit for a not-top-tier mythic raid alliance side.

there’s a HUGE disparity in the number of potential people interested in mythic raiding alliance vs horde, and blizzard is very, very, very slow to respond to issue like this.

best advice to you, if you want to mythic raid? just suck it up and go horde.

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9.1 is too late to add cross faction. So earliest they could do something about this is probably 9.2 that’s likely going to be 6 months to a year from now. And maybe they don’t want to do something about faction till 10.0 so maybe 2 years down the road. And that’s based on they will fix it. If they are not willing to do it in 10.0 so maybe 11.0 that’s probably 4-5 years from now. We can complain all we want but this problem will likely take another half decade to be fixed. Hope your guild will still be there.

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Imagine if they made it so you could only raid with people of your covenant!!

wow that would be meaningful!!!

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So…nightfae would be the only real raid squad? I think NF is literally like 60-70% of all DPS.

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Sorry OP. My mythic raiding guild recently transferred and switched over to Horde after finishing the tier a couple days ago.

Have you guys tried borrowing people even from other Alliance guilds or servers? Our 20 for mythic Sire composed of a couple fill ins from outside.

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Remember… the titan?

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But OP! Think of the people that just sit around org and silvermoon all day roleplaying they may not ever see a single alliance player in their entire time playing wow since that’s all they do but think of their faction identity!

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I once thought it was pvp reasons that they don’t break the faction wall, but then I found the guy in Oribos that lets you join bgs as alliance when you’re horde, and how rated BGs put horde against horde…

There really isn’t any excuse anymore. Just let people play together.

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The murder hobos don’t care; we will ally with anyone if it means purples. We will also straight murder the allies we just fought with if those allies have purples. They don’t even need to be better purples; they just have to be purples.

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It will definitely need to be addressed at somepoint. There are already mechanics in place to PVP as the other faction, why is it so hard to do in PvE as well?

Allowing players to mix-and-match races on either side would only allow raid leaders to plan even better strats for bosses as well. Some of the alliance racials are useful in raiding.

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right? they’ve already blasted past the faction wall for PvP so PvPers could find games.

There’s no logical reason other than people’s feelings to not do the same for PvE players.

“I like the faction divide” is a selfish, silly reason to want to hold an entire faction back from having a good experience at mythic end game. you can still fake-hate the other faction, even if others can group with them.

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We’re getting to the point where if the faction divide continues into the next expansion that I’m not sure I’m going to stick around. It is a problem, and you can easily fix it. And it’s growing worse at an accelerating rate.

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