Faction conflict in WoW is basically Horde attacks alliance, Alliance tries to retaliate with some small measure of success, but then greater threat emerges forcing the factions to work together, corrupt warchief is corrupt and needs to be taken down by Alliance and rebel Horde, peace agreement. Rince, Repeat, Reload, etc, etc, Ad Nauseam.
Would be fun to see Alliance be the aggressors for a change, give them the chance to sucker punch the Horde and Horde get pissed, Alliance having some kind of internal strife dealing with corrupt so and so who instigated it all. Just basically above, but in reverse.
That’s to say if they ever do faction conflict again, and if they don’t, it wouldn’t break my heart.
So yes… I’ve made threads myself about this. I hate the ham-fisted faction conflict too. It’s stupid. But there’s things now that prevent it. Ask any hardcore night elf player if they’re for the dissolution of the faction barrier at this point. Hell, we have one poster here that can’t stop making new threads that say the same thing over and over again about the night elves not getting proper revenge.
It boils down to this. You and Bob just fought together in a war. You’d had differences in the past, but you overcame them because the war was a big deal. Huge even. Then that war ended. You and Bob are on better terms than you’ve ever been.
Then Bob came over to your house, nailed your wife, shot your dog, and burned everything around you down. Would you wanna be bob’s friend after that?
Nah man, you’d want revenge. Maybe in the form of a badass cinematic and a lot of badass build up. But then all you get is to punch bob in the leg. It even hurts him… a little. You wanna go burn his house down, but the writers tell you no… that charlie horse you gave him was your revenge, you’re not part of the story anymore.
When I think about it that way, I kinda get it. I’d be pretty PO’d at Bob, and not want to be friends with him at all.
We do agree with that. Which is why I’ve wished Saurfang would have come back to help the Night Elves get their lands back first to start the atonement process.
I hate this repeated story, the writers really screwed up and essentially just wrote the same story again with just different actors.
It could have been a far better story with the Alliance as the aggressors and finally being able to flex our muscles While the Horde getting to come together as the underdogs and be the better faction for once.
However at this point I simply want it to end, they have basically ruined the game as the current writers are obviously clueless on how to write a interesting war narrative that makes sense with believable characters.
Personally I like faction war stories, the only particular thing I think Blizzard did wrong was they added BfA too soon. MoP was like two expansion ago, Blizzard should have wait at least two or three more expansion before letting another world war blow up.
Ultimately, I’m still waiting for how this all ends. Maybe Blizzard will prove us all wrong, maybe they wont. At the very least, even with all our theorizing of where the story will go none us of still know how 8.2.5 will end the war.
I’m tired of Blizzard marketing a faction conflict only to have it be the third-party bad guy all along. Like stop it. If you want to faction conflict then focus purely on the factions. No Old Gods, no Legion, no Void Lords, just the factions.
I bought into BfA expecting a pure faction conflict with relatable motives on both sides. Nowhere in BfA’s cinematic showed me I’ll be tagging along Sylvanas’s 5D chess.
Ultimately though even if they do have an interesting twist for the end of the expac that make its different from MOP its a bit too late. They have basically had the majority of this expansion giving us a rubbish narrative and I can promise you that there is no solution that isn’t gonna leave a large portion of the player base upset with the outcome.
Anything that ultimately dealt with Sylvanas’ fate was also going to leave a chunk of the player base unhappy. That doesnt mean it wasn’t a story that should have happened, sooner or later.
It really should have been a story dealt with internally within the Horde Narrative rather than having the Alliance tagged on the story. I mean The Alliance doesn’t even seem like a player in the Narrative. Again it feels like this Narrative is all about sylvanas and Honor horde fighting each other with Alliance tagging along.
We should have got our own story and internal struggles to give our faction a bit of Flavor.
The Alliance hasn’t even seen or Interacted with Sylvanas at all this expac.
Mists of Pandaria actually did the Faction War Better with everyone have their time to shine in the Story. I don’t know I think BFA’s Story is kind of messy and boring and there really isn’t much of anything for the Alliance of their races having their time to shine at all other than Humans of 3 kinds, and Night Elves. Yes there’s Dwarves, Draeneis, and Gnomes. But some of them barely got some screentime.
I think Blizzard needs to do better with the Story of actually having ether a Better Faction Story or just a Big Threat like the Scourge and Legion again.
I think most of us (those who care about/follow the lore) are tired of the faction conflict. Unfortunately, due to the rule of cool and money it generates, we likely haven’t seen the last of it in Battle for Azeroth.
That said I don’t think BfA’s problem has been the faction conflict itself, but rather it’s execution.
And outside of the faction war, the story this expansion (within each zone, and concerning Jaina) has been some of the best we’ve ever seen in-game… so hopefully there’s more of that to come and less of the faction war stuff heading forward.