There is a way around it in the open world, but they wouldn’t want to do it. Completely remove factions. No more pvp flags out of warmode on players or npcs, all npcs neutral/friendly to everyone.
Edit! I just noticed my whole mog is missing except my helm? is the human heritage set borked in the forums?
Periodt.
10c
nice progress but for 99% of realms that do not solve anything.
xrealm guilds and or xrealm xfaction guilds will be the glory moment of yay. this solves absolutely nothing for anyone on a 1 faction dominate dead realm that got a ton of alts when an xfer is out of the equation due to the amount of alts and costs.
True, they could delete the Alliance from the game and re-flag everyone’s characters as Horde, with no faction transfers to go back. But I doubt that’s on the table.
That would be fine with me, flag everyone as Horde, problem solved!
A number of my friends came back to WoW in the past month, and cross-faction gameplay was one of the big things that enticed them to try the game again. Trying to explain to them the intricacies of what is, and isn’t, allowed in the current system has left us both scratching our heads. It’s really confusing to people who have been gone to WoW for a while, and has limited the amount I’ve been able to play with them since they returned.
While cross-faction guilds are a step in the right direction, I strongly believe that a lot of these remaining restrictions need to be lifted. At a minimum, we should be able to queue for dungeons and LFR together, and we should be able to see cross-faction postings in the custom premade group tab. I hope Blizzard will keep iterating on this.
This is not good enough, ladies and gentlemen! Not even by a mile.
This is a glorified feature for organized content only. This is not what we know of a guild, but a lobby for players connected in Battle.net communities, and operating outside of the rest of the content except for Mythic+ or Raiding.
With this idea, it seems there is still not going to be World Content cooperation, nor queued content together, or even general guild or social cooperation.
We will not be able to make recruitment based on characters, but instead have to pull in Battle.net information, this making this a larger problem for everyone except for the ones running organized content.
This is NOT cross-faction guild, this is a glorified cross-faction community.
some of the horde players here are just… let’s say they represent “trolls” as a race.
This. This is what needs to happen soon for many of us on dead realms if we’re to retain any semblance of MMO-style play.
I’ve been playing since release on Feathermoon. I remember when it was full and we had free transfers over to Rexxar. Years ago we joined with Scarlet Crusade, but now our conjoined realms are struggling.
Most of the folks I know who still play have transferred realms. There are only a few small raid guilds left, and those communities are shrinking.
The answer for how to sustain a healthy in-game community for the long-term is to remove all realm barriers.
They’re getting closer (cross-realm AH, cross-faction guilding, sharding, and so on). I am convinced it will happen as soon as they overcome the technical hurdles, but the sooner the better.
There are answers to how to handle the naming and playstyle logistics, as well.
Naming conflicts? Continue using realm suffixes as they do now, no problem. (Or better yet, remember surnames? It’s never too late.) What about RPers? No problem. Use a flagging system just like with PvP. Timezones? No problem. Flag for timezone preference.
Realms have become archaic barriers to playing with who you want and how you want. It’s past time for them to go away.
I still don’t know if I am on board with cross faction. I like the divide. I think its an important part of the lore of WoW that is being gutted.
Horde probably would’ve ceased to exist by Wotlk, if they weren’t given a major Alliance race (Elves). You could probably add all the Horde races together and there’d be less players than Blood Elves.
Need lots of clarification on qued content etc. Also, if you decide to faction swap on a 1 faction dominant server (which most populated ones are now), you’re basically gonna have a bad time because it’ll be impossible to find crafting & such.
I’m just glad that this will prevent my alts from being spammed by horde guilds on my alliance characters by that annoying addon.
Sure but none of what I said has anything to do with open world gameplay.
And those of us who understand how the game is built have been telling everyone all along that this is what “cross-faction guilds” would be.
And people kept telling us we were wrong. (We weren’t wrong.)
The two factions are hard-wired into the game at multiple levels. They’ve managed some workarounds (we’ve known that cross-faction play is possible in instanced content since WoD) but that’s probably as far as stretching the game’s framework can go.
Aggressive server mergers would be a better solution. And are long overdue.
A nice step forward! I hope we continue to see more expansion to cross-faction gameplay to include properly setup grouping in non-instanced circumstances. I can understand there being a limitation to players who are flagged, but if I’m in a group with the opposite faction, doing the WB for example, I should be able to heal and be healed by those in my group regardless of faction.
The Warmode Button/Classic is there for all your racist faction needs! 
there is… but idk what that would do to they system.
flag a character temporarily as both factions with a if then resolution for “if hostile to Alliance, show Horde faction true. else set Alliance.” and vice versa
I would like to see a Mega Server.