Based on rumors and speculations, it sounds like the line between Horde and Alliance will become blurred in the next expansion. There will always be Alliance and Horde. But relationships can improve with races from the opposite faction.
I believe a rep building system would work as follows.
Reputation with each race and their capital city is hated. Same as now. However, each capital city now has an ambassador from each opposing capital city. Speak with one of the ambassadors to begin a series of quest chains that will move you to unfriendly.
When you reach unfriendly, you can now enter opposing faction territory and will not be attacked on site by NPC’s. You can go to outposts and villages, but cannot freely enter the capital cities unchallenged. NPCs will attack. If your HP falls to 1 and you are unfriendly. Instead of dying, you are dazed and black out. Then reappear outside the capital city with 1 HP and some lost rep. Throughout the opposing outposts and villages, you will find NPC’s that offer quest chains to advance you to neutral.
Once you are neutral, you can enter capital cities with which you are neutral. Then you can find a variety of quests and grinding to increase your rep to eventually reach exalted. Each capital city will have its own rep. You can be exalted with Orgimmar but hated with Silvermoon.
If you still seek war and PVP, maintain a hated reputation with the opposing faction and you’ll have nothing to worry about. However, even if you are exalted with all opposing faction capital cities, War Mode, will still mark you as PVP.
It’s a cool idea, but I don’t want the factions to be that diluted. Orcs in Stormwind and Humans in Orgrimmar just doesn’t sit right with me.
What I want to see is players being able to group and make guilds with the other faction while all other faction limits remain the same. You can’t meet up with the Alliance in Orgimmar, so you would have to choose a neutral meet-up point like Mount Hyjal. PVP would remain the same.
The cinematic of Jaina, Thrall, Baine, and Saurfang overlooking Thunder Bluff hint that something will happen in the relations between the two. Loose alliance to defeat a common foe then back to regular aggression. It has happen too often and Thrall even points that out. Legion invasion in Warcraft 3 when they fought together on Mt. Hyjal. Then there was the Lich King, Deathwing, and the Legion again.
No, there will likely never be a time when an orc will be able to walk into stormwind without being attacked.
We’ve had cinematics like this before, it doesn’t hint at anything. Horde and Alliance are like water and oil, they will never go together. This game is built around the faction war. Just because we fight together from time to time doesn’t suddenly make us forget all the crimes/transgressions that the other faction has committed. Nor does it suddenly make us pals/friends/buddies.
Just get rid of the factions…
It holds SO much back in game play and lore. We should not have to dance around it anymore and say ‘what if that or what if this’.
At the very least if people want there red vs blue drop the race restrictions. Make some new lore the explains it, problem solved. As long as we have the faction war going into future expansions WoW’s lore will boil down to the same complexity of TF2…
