The only faction issue in Legion was Genn going captain Ahab on Sylvanas. It certainly wasn’t Anduin. And we’ve been fighting the old gods for over a decade now.
The faction “war” was at best background noise during Wrath.
I don’t mind that factions are preserved. Really, there’s only a handful of races that don’t feel entirely right being on a faction anyways.
I do wish that when the question had been answered, they would have addressed the faction imbalance in end-game content.
I don’t want factions merged, and I don’t know many people honestly asking for that. Keep the Alliance and Horde are separate, distinct story entities, but allow the individual players, the supposed heroes of Azeroth, to group and play together. There’s no serious reason not to allow that, especially when we’re often surrounded by NPCs doing that very thing.
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And we could argue that the other faction issue is alliance believing sylvanas just abandoned them
Or that sylvanas should have not destroyed gilneas.
We’ve been fighting everything for over a decade. Including each faction.
I would say it was cata, too many faction war related quests be stonetalon, south barrens or even swampfof sorrows.
This is not me thinking it, this are numbers gathered by using the API. You are simply assuming they are maining Horde, there’s no way for you to know this.
How do you know they only main Alliance and they’re just not interested on end-game content or worse… they spend more time waiting for others to form groups instead of gathering others also interested in end-game content and getting groups going.
I don’t think Shadowmeld it’s a “problem”, I just think that claiming racials are imbalanced and that somehow favors Horde and that’s why there’s imbalance on how much content it’s being done on Alliance it’s the actual problem.
Unless they give Alliance free rewards for it since apparently, that’s the only way they can bother to flag…
They want to keep the Factions as this is what World of Warcraft is. Maybe they should stop making WOW like other games then. Scaling like many other games doesn’t make the game fun…
Yeah, it’s beyond stupid. I am so tired of having to choose playing a Horde race or playing with my guild.
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There aren’t even 2 million players in WoW let alone 2 million Alliance. Unless you include Classic. But let’s just say there are.
This is a good point actually. Anyone interested in end game content should just main horde. And apparently that thought isn’t a problem to you? The fact that a new player who wants to raid mythic but doesn’t understand that a majority of mythic raiders are horde makes a wrong choice and can’t play their desired content because of it?
I agree with this, racials aren’t the reason for any of this. The reason for all of the imbalance is simply due the self fulfilling prophecy that the horde are better, therefore the better players migrate to the horde, therefore the horde get better, therefore more players continue. This has been happening since MoP, specifically Throne of Thunder, where the troll racial beastslaying(or whatever it’s called) was integral to killing bosses. Players didn’t switch back after it was nerfed.
They have to give the Alliance more rewards because playing Alliance in warmode is the equivalent to playing content on a higher difficulty level. You will be vastly outnumbered whenever new content comes out and by the time things die down the reward from against overwhelming odds is useless.
I don’t understand why the BfA finale took the route that it did; the dissolution of the factions is never gonna happen.
There’s no need to dissolve factions. Just let us choose a faction at character creation.
Personally, if I could faction swap my Horde characters while keeping their race I would do it immediately and that would be money in Blizzard’s pocket plus a nice little show of good faith on their fault.
There are certain Horde races I’ve always thought looked cool, and I’ve played them since Vanilla, but at this point I’m not giving up my Alliance guild.
The level squish is proof it’s not all about the money.
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Well, at least we know BFA was completely pointless except to destroy two perfectly good faction hubs. Didn’t need an entire expansion to accomplish that either.
Well done Blizzard, well done.
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I think we are reacting to a comment without really taking a deep dive.
The answer of “no change in faction” was really cookie cutter. You know what else was really cookie cutter for its time? Every time Blizzard said “no [x]” Remember? No worgen. No Demon hunters. “No” only means no until Blizzard decides it is yes.
So I think it is safe to postulate that there won’t be a change in the faction dynamic until Blizzard is architecturally at a point where it can happen, and ramp up to such a monumental change. In essence, no changes to factions until changes to factions are architecturally possible and Blizzard can make it an iconic element of an expansion.
Because you can’t just hand-wave away the faction divide. Blizzard didn’t fix the issues between the factions, they left us with a nearly insurmountable divide - a cliffhanger ending. You have the Horde on the precipice, having effectively lost the Fourth War and being abandoned by their warchief at a very vulnerable point. You have the Alliance not actually allied, with swathes of humans, Night Elves and Worgen really, really cheesed off.
The world is a mess, and the rabble of over-powered murder hobos that are usually called in to essentially wreck and pillage everyone into submission are off wrecking and pillaging the afterlife.
So my prediction is that when the time comes, and Blizzard has all the mechanics in place, we will have World of Warcraft: Diplomacy - where the expansion hook is the player character will actively build the new alliances that will redefine Azeroth’s geopolitical map.
And before there is a panic, this can be done in support of both those seeking a real end to the conflict, and those who want to continue to rapaciously murder the other faction with wild abandon.
In this scenario, you would have ten factions you would be working with. Why 10? Because this is the expansion where Blizzard does penance for constantly underestimating the importance of racial identity. So players have their leveling experience reforging the alliances between their home faction’s races. This is intended to define how the faction is going to be functioning in the future - a blueprint so players don’t keep calling out “my faction wouldn’t do this!” And the model is that with every faction you are building an embassy, connecting your base racial faction) to that other faction. For each connection, you gain preeminence with your main faction.
When you hit max level, and you have achieved “exhausted” with the 2.0 versions of all your main faction’s racial factions (allied races not included). The end game is that you are sent as an emissary to start building a treaty with the other side, and you build an embassy in the other faction’s main city. However, your faction has a group who do not believe in peace, so you can choose one of two paths: you can either work towards building an embassy and strive for peace, or you work to build out an intricate spy network with your cover being the emissary. You earn separate rewards for each path, with the “spy” path opening up warmode-specific quests and pvp hooks.
When you hit honored with the other side’s main faction, that opens up the ability to start working on each race’s faction. Here’s the twist, each racial pairing starts at different levels of dislike to outright hated. So Night Elves and Forsaken are at Hated. But maybe Tauren and Draenei are neutral.
The reward for hitting exalted with the other side’s factions is being able to roll THAT race for YOUR faction. The reward for doing so as an emissary would be possibly unlocking some perks - maybe you can walk through each opposing faction as neutral or friendly. Maybe if you do the “spy” or the “hawk” mode, you don’t get to walk openly, but there is an underground network you can traverse that allows you to infiltrate the opposing side’s cities.
For alts, I would say that if the alt chooses the same path, they have earned the same unlocks, but if you want the alt to do the alternate path, at least one has to go through the other campaign.
A model like this would make addressing the faction divide a major event for the player. We make it happen, and we are the ones who build the narrative hooks to allow future conflicts to happen. Rolling an Alliance Orc or even, dare I say, a Horde Night Elf is something we earned, not something Blizzard just unlocked because, reasons. And in forging these relationships, it removes the annoying “[x] race would never…” argument. Yeah, they would never, but now, because of your efforts, they will - even if it is simply a veneer of cooperation from some.
Ultimately, I do think it’s time we start making the faction divide go away, but I would rather do it through play-through narratives than Blizzard just saying “Yeah, ok. Here ya go.”
Hey, sorry we burnt an entire city to the ground full of civilians and gassed a bunch of other people. You still want to grab some tea? From a majority stand point and when talking to the NPCs, most people aren’t happy with the truce.
The way I’ve always seen the factions is akin to how the Sith and Jedi are opposed. They might work together occasionally but at their core they’re not compatible folks. Thrall and Jaina are a good example of breaking the mold, but that’s because Thrall has always been against the hordes primal instincts. Just looking for peace and a safe haven for his people. And a lot of the horde considered him weak for doing so. Saying he’s not a real orc because of it.
There are small great examples of where people overcome faction divide scattered in lore, but for the majority there is a huge distrust and this whole war didn’t help.
The best result from this war is that alliance as a whole would look at it and go, “Yeah, we’ll see how that works out” with the council instead of a warchief. Especially following right off the cusp of this war and then expecting everyone would holds hands going forward is crazy. And these wars and atrocities happen so frequently there’s not even a generational gap to overcome it like some real world examples.
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The reason that these wars and atrocities keep happening so frequently is because the rigid faction structure of the game requires that they do. These conflicts need to keep happening in order to maintain the reason for the factions and their rigid divide to keep existing as they do. The faction dynamic cannot change and so the story cannot do anything that might create change.
There are possibilities, pathways, directions that the story can’t go down simply because the faction dynamic as it exists in the game must be maintained. This forces the story into directions that lead to further conflicts and atrocities.
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ESO also sucks.
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The mental image of Anduin skipping through Orgrimmar followed by smiling Orc children dancing in a Conga Line of Kumbaya™ and singing “It’s a small world after all…” while he sings a counterpoint “Why can’t we be friends, why can’t we be friends?” is borderline sickening.
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as actual alliance mains leave the game, they are being replaced by AI - fake alliance players operated by artificial intelligence. eventually horde players will be playing against alliance npcs, made to act like real players but are just npcs. this is what happens when you cant think outside the faction box.
Of course they won’t allow friends to group up between factions. It is the reason why World of Warcraft is what it is. And more importantly, it would eat away at all the money they make from the faction change services.
Oh Hyper…
Maybe an alt named Hyperbole should be next for your alt army?