As with many of the anecdotes above, I want to reiterate how much CrossRP has added to the game for me and how much more real and immersive it makes the world when you can interact with the other faction’s players & characters:
My own character is, to my imagination, a pretty neutral person. She’s a taunka, so she hasn’t got the same historical baggage as other tauren to like or hate most races. In fact, it’s hard for me to think of a lot of people she’d hate at a personal level amid all this faction conflict…
Until she fought a gnome at the ToA this year. During a team dueling event, things went pretty sideways with her and her team expecting sportsmanlike fair play and blunted weapons. Instead a group of pirates tried to cut them up. When she confronted the seeming leader later, a gnome, he played dumb about the whole thing and acted like she was some reprobate harassing him.
Thanks to that exchange my character now has a bad personal experience with gnomes and it lends just that tiny feeling of authenticity to the idea of her punting a few of them if the opportunity arose. In other words, it helped me buy into on the story Blizzard is trying to tell. A story that, while I’m still not buying wholesale, I’d be leaving on the shelf if not for little encounters like that which give my character and me as a player a feeling of personal investment and agency that can’t be expected in the game’s questing.
In the very same event, with Teldrassil’s burning fresh on everyone’s mind, she was sympathetic to the Night Elves she met because hey, Icemist is a ruin last time we checked, so she knows what it’s like to lose a home. Similar feelings were shared among Highmountain who once called Riverbend their home.
These are the things I keep forking out money every month for. Not raids and dungeons, but engaging personal interactions with my fellow players via the characters we’ve all concocted for ourselves. And with Blizzard refusing to relax the language barriers it’s addons like CrossRP which bridge that gap and allow these kinds of interactions to happen.
Please reverse this change, Blizz. Please give RPers our cross-faction stories back.