From the Q&A:
Q: Would you consider loosening faction restrictions for grouping with friends?
A: They understand why you want to, but the Alliance and Horde separation is what makes Warcraft what it is and there is some value to mechanical reinforcement of that division. Grouping together is not an option at this time.
So Shadowlands is going to be another expansion of two forcibly divided communities doing exactly the same content, and this apparently has “some value”.
I’m going to take a wild guess at that value is - Blizzard making easy money from faction transfers and server transfers, as alliance continue to migrate to horde for the bigger player pool (snowball effect), and smaller servers continue to die.
Sorry Blizzard, not buying the excuse that giving players more options to play together in an MMO will somehow take away faction identity or remove “what makes it Warcraft”.
So much for breaking the cycle. RIP Saurfang, you died for nothing.
edit: Guys a faction merge isn’t necessary. The factions and their identities can remain, just let people play cross-faction if they want to. If Jaina and Thrall can be best buddies (since WC3) while still identifying with their respective factions, then players should have that option too.
230 Likes
“We want to preserve faction identity” or, in other words, “We want to keep making money out of faction transfers”.
109 Likes
Ion has been very consistent in saying factions are too integral to the game so I was not surprised by this. I think the faction war is stupid, the back and forth makes no sense, and this will mean another idiotic meaningless faction “war” at some point and the cycle will continue, unfortunately.
54 Likes
“We also want to keep using the nonsensical faction war card whenever we run out of ideas for expansions”
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In other words the story of BFA means nothing haha.
97 Likes
Truly bfa means nothing. Sylvanas was right all along.
56 Likes
Yeah, screw that answer. It’s Blizzard being stubborn and refusing to allow any alterations to a 15 year old system that’s increasingly hurting the game for players interested in doing higher-end content.
I didn’t expect any change from the BfA story conclusion, but I was hoping they’d allow cross-faction play as a non-canon thing outside of warmode. Alliance in particular has significantly less participation in basically all forms of content that can’t be queued for (as well as PvP). Cross-play would alleviate that disadvantage.
They can keep the story divided while allowing PLAYERS to not be arbitrarily divided.
34 Likes
You people read way too much into that. We weren’t going to go form an active war to drinking buddies the next day. We have done this dance after Garrosh started the last war and look what happened. It will take much more before the faction trust one another enough for what many of you assumed was just going to automatically happen.
17 Likes
Anyone who thinks they’d ever merge the factions is delusional. If you don’t like paying for repeated faction changes, level up two characters.
However, I don’t see why they couldn’t allow cross-faction grouping for instances. Several instances already change your character to a different faction when you enter them. They could just make the characters change to whichever is the majority faction in the group.
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So why do you all buy faction transfers?
You do this to yourselves. You create imbalances because so many of you want to be on whatever side has enough players to make you feel more powerful, lol. You go running off to switch sides. Nobody makes you do it!
I have switched factions a grand total of one time in 14 years . . .and I always felt like it was kind of a waste of money.
9 Likes
That would be a major change to the game… I don’t want to play with Orcs , trolls or goblins … 
6 Likes
I’ve realized another thing, with this nonsense of War Mode in the Shadowlands (despite the fact we aren’t at war anymore to have a “war” mode), we will have players from the same Covenant killing each other because they are from different factions. With no repercussions at all.
Blizzard, you’ve always were knew for your quality, what is this BS?
23 Likes
You people think everything is a conspiracy. Breaking the cycle simply refers to not having pointless open war ongoing all the time. Signing a cease fire (basically) doesn’t mean you’re skipping through a field of daisies arm in arm whistling the Sesame Street theme song.
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Good.
It was a stupid idea to beign whit.
People really shoudl stop thinking youtubers got everything right.
Considering the leveling revamp beign 50% faster you can easily level your horde/ally char whitout them making any money from it.
Ya same thing since ever.
Because they never did let the character be anything but a member of their own faction first and foremost.
Ikr
TOO much of a drastic change to the very core of the game.
3 Likes
There have been plenty of ceasefires in the past. This time alliance players literally walked into Orgrimmar with multiple Horde leaders by their side. But apparently we still can’t chat or group with other Horde players. It makes absolutely no sense for the enforced playerbase divide to continue.
29 Likes
I think its short sighted, The faction imbalance will just get worse as time goes on. How many weeks have alliance had less than the max buff for warmode? and how much of a time gap was the clearing of mythic ashara for horde and alliance?
They claim its integral to WoW but I feel its been the weakest part of the game for year. How much of the conflict these days actually feel organic? It’s all force and contrived and more than a bit stupid. I’m wondering what idiotic reason we will be at war after shadowlands.
And its not like we can’t have both. Hell make it sylvanus supporters vs tryande supports and be done with it. Players can group and you still have your conflict.
32 Likes
Ok will there be any leveling and itemizing advantages for making an alt to play with the other faction to make the grind easier? Probably not. People will get mad and say that there should only be mains. So which is it? Mains for one faction that can cross play or force two separate mains, one for each faction?
1 Like
So the big question is “which horde leader will go insane next?”.
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Tyrand didn’t. Actually she wants all horde to die.
And many other minor ranks still hate the horde and vice versa.
Cease fires never made hating each other countires end, i mean, this is too obvious just look at most wars background.
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We’re you folks really thinking the faction merge would happen?
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