Not sure how that would work, or even feel, in game. Personally I don’t, won’t, and never have played Alliance in retail (tried them out in closed beta, 2003). If factions only existed in the lore, I’m not sure I would want to keep playing.
It’s really, very, simple. Player A is Alliance. Player B is Horde. Observe.
[A] whispers: Ey bruh you wanna do Ny’alotha we need a tank
[B] whispers: yeah sure inv
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That’s how it would work. But how would it feel?
WRONG. 
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I don’t really care how it would feel, because it would save my faction from extinction. 
I mean, fine, keep the factions. Expand on Mercenary mode.
Take PvP for example: make the queue universal. Take the first 20/30/80 players in queue to fill the appropriate battleground. Assign half to one faction, half to the other, regardless of player faction.
For PvE, let a player Merc out in the world to play with the opposite faction in any capacity at any time.
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If WM is off, of course.
Nah, Merc mode should force war-mode. What’s the fun in being pseudo-Alliance if I can’t get close enough to a faction leader to stab them?
If you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem…
Blizzard established the rules and you’re looking for special favours.
Your guild could always switch over to Alliance then switch back, but doesn’t want to go that extra mile, so Blizzard’s hands are tied.
Blizzard has no incentive to not unlock cross-realm Mythic on day 1 of Mythic.
Cross-Realm Mythics are typically done by PUGs. The Hall of Fame is filled by hardcore guilds. Why should the existence of PUGs rely on 200 hardcore guilds succeeding? Those two communities are unrelated.
Blizzard, as usual, just doesn’t want to admit that their idea was a spectacular dumpster fire. They thought relying on prestige was going to remove the need for them to do balance. Go look at Crucible of Storms hall of fame. It closed with 42 Alliance guilds on it. Balance achieved, right guys?
The general population does not cares about the Hall of Fame. 99.9% of players probably couldn’t tell you who got World First any time it isn’t Method and most of the ones who could tell you are just guessing Method because it’s the only guild they know the name of. I’d be willing to bet that 100% of players couldn’t tell you who world third and below is.
I only PUG. There are usually not enough Alliance to do Mythic PUGs on my server. I’m not going to keep raiding Heroic just to keep raiding. If Mythic isn’t available when my sub runs out, I’m going to let my account expire until Shadowlands.
Considering Horde still needs 43 and Alliance needs a whopping 92, I guess Blizzard stops getting my $15 in 20 days.
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I can agree with that, since it’s just world PvP. I’d also say that the rest of the queued content outside of random battlegrounds should be based off the group leader’s faction choice, whether actual or Merc.
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If people are already Horde, where the robust population is for raiding, and there is no reason to go Alliance because racials are no longer important or impactful in any way, people are not going to go Alliance. That’s a lot of $$$ to switch to a smaller player pool for no added benefit. People are on Horde for opportunities that the Alliance does not have.
As has been said, both factions should be able to play together in a PvE environment. That way EVERYONE is included in the player pool for BOTH factions.
That is a false premise. I am not part of the problem. I am a paying subscriber of a video game that has no role in the development. Your thinking however is a part of the problem because you are blaming a non developer for a developers decisions.
Your subscription allows you access to their servers and nothing more.
You don’t even own your character.
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So your solution is to force 60+ people to pay blizzard extra money or else they are part of the problem? Nice logic there
But cross-faction makes little sense. Sure there are players who would group with Alliance friends, or Horde friends, etc. But there are also players who wouldn’t do that, because faction identity is just enough of a factor to stop them. Also, because as you say, Horde has no problem finding other Horde to group with.
So while I see it as a solution for small Alliance populations, and certainly for “friends” who are stubborn / established enough to not change sides for their friends’ sake, I don’t see this solving the larger problem. What incentive, other than “friends’ sake” would Horde players – who have an abundance of grouping options – have to group with Alliance players?
You’re using the word “force”… i’m suggesting that they choose to do it.
That they opt not to do it, is up to them.
And how is it 60+ people when mythic is only 20 people to a raid? Only the 20 wanting to go Alliance would switch i’d think… not the entire Horde guild… surely they’d find other Alliance raiders on the other side to fill up backups?
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You’re making a huge assumption that faction identity will be a huge hindrance to this proposed system. Do you really think guilds who want good players are going to care what race that potential recruit plays, even if they are a dwarf? I highly doubt it. There is no other solution Blizzard can possibly implement at this point to help this insane faction imbalance. They made a big mistake and now the playerbase is suffering for it.
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Cross-faction is the only thing that DOES makes sense.
The faction war has made negative sense since WotLK. The factions literally teamed up and worked together in the first half. Even after the Forsaken guy went terrorist on the Alliance, the Horde let Alliance go into the Undercity to take care of that and the Alliance left as promised.
Then, for absolutely no reason, instead of taking both airships to the top of ICC and carpet bombing the existential threat to the planet, we have a dogfight to decide whose infantry gets to storm the castle full of literally undying enemies to fight the Lich King on foot.
The factions have teamed up every single expansion since then to deal with a big bad.
It’s always the Horde, and it’s usually Sylvanas or her cronies, keeping things going by committing some war crime because of pointless intransigence not supported by any logical interpretation of the lore.
It’s time to get together, kill Sylvanas to death, and stop having two separate factions.
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This needed to be done back in MoP and it wasn’t. Removing racials now will not help the situation, because there’s no incentive to swap.
Factions don’t even make sense lore wise right now, the whole of BfA ended with the focus of breaking the cycle of hate. We’ve come together to aid each other for 15 years, so even lore wise it’s dumb and restrictive.
For gameplay wise, many play both sides. You might not, but the faction identity is fairly dissolved between both sides now. As the game ages and the population dwindles, it won’t be able to sustain two factions separated by archaic means across 60+ servers. They need to start addressing that rather than expecting the game to suddenly leap back up to a healthy population.
Expecting the whole Mythic group to potentially go Alliance and go back benefits no one but Blizzard. They get a lot of money out of the transfers. And why should the Horde have to spend multiple times the money that Alliance do just to be able to play together?
Blizzard’s ides to fix the faction imbalance in PvE was a hall of fame, not expecting that a vast majority of people do not care about that prestige. Now the imbalance is getting larger and we’re into the content drought. People aren’t enjoying this expansion and likely won’t want to continue because of other systems. Either open cross realm raiding 2-3 months into a raid’s life or just remove the faction walls that are pointless this day and age.
Expecting players to pay Blizzard extra to play the game is a little ridiculous.
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Not for players, I understand this. But all these proposals don’t take into consideration Blizzard’s stance on the importance of factions to this game / universe. And how much they would have to let go the identity of this game and it’s one recurrent theme over the past 20+ years, to now put factions aside.
Longevity of the game, blah blah whatever. There’s no way to say right now that taking small steps over subsequent expansions couldn’t right the ship. It’s been slowly deteriorated faction-balance wise over so many years. It would take so many more years to correct things. I’m sure as developers/creators of the game, Blizzard doesn’t want to knee-jerk reaction this kind of change, and irrevocably alter the landscape of this IP, if other solutions over time can bring things back.
I fully understand it doesn’t help Alliance players now (and I get the frustration) but Blizzard does tend to play the long game on many things, and I’m certain faction identity or dismissal is one of the principles they would definitely want to play out over the long game.