This is true, but I’m interested in hearing from those who do pay attention to the story, and are active roleplayers.
And yes, we do check the forums.
I do wish this were true. I think back to the MoP era when the Battlefield Barrens patch dropped, and we faced (what I’d consider) one of the darkest periods for RP within the Horde. While it was neat at first to be in the “us” or “them” groups, players were eager to take things way too far. The treatment that players, not characters, received for choosing the A or B side of that Horde civil war story plot was just downright awful.
Definitely one of my least favorite memories of this game. That said, I have more fond feelings towards that story and those experience than I do towards BFA.
The Kor’kron incident was bad, but BFA and the War of the Thorns/Sylvanas rebellion plot has been the worst case scenario that I didn’t think possible - even for Blizzard. So much so that I stopped playing the content right near the start of this expansion, and just haven’t gone back.
I’ve seen more toxicity and hostility in game, during roleplay and OOC too, than ever before, and that’s been really disheartening.
Specific to the questions I posed - I’ve stayed as far away from the war as I possibly can on my characters (post War of the Thorns) to try and give myself some space from the misery of it all, but I’ve still been fairly active doing other RP. I try not to have characters think much or acknowledge the war, but I won’t outright claim it never happened. That can be hard though, especially when it feels like the Alliance and Horde have both betrayed the base principles that I was initially drawn to.
I think it’s largely unfair to wrap up the story with “SUDDENLY PEACE!” once again (absolute bull, to put it bluntly. Blizz, you screwed this up big time). This is a huge slap in the face to all the players, both Horde and Alliance, who feel that there has been no resolution, no progression, no genuinely sound movement towards a reasonable peace that makes sense.
Two main characters believe that their factions have made mistakes. That, however, doesn’t erase generations of genocidal war mongering from the Horde races, nor the wars for vengeance and justice by the Alliance races. It doesn’t resolve all the issues brought up during this expansion alone. So many things are still unanswered for. It’s as if Blizz opened up five dozen cans of Play-Dough, and then hasn’t gotten around to playing with each one, so they’re all dried out and terrible. And then they go: “We gave you so much Play-Dough. Why are you upset?”
It’s been an absolute slap in the face to the Kaldorei and the Forsaken players too, both of whom have had their entire core shattered, but with absolutely no efforts to build them back up.
The whole “wait for Shadowlands for the build up” response, by the way, is garbage. This is a plot element that is tied to the BFA story, and absolutely should have been given more focus towards a meaningful resolution. I paid for the BFA expansion; I should be given the resolution to the BFA story, and all its elements. This is like if during WoTLK, they had saved the Arthas kill for Cataclysm.
Blizzard is taking the “Done with one big thing, onto the next. No blending or smoothing between these two major things,” approach - and that’s just awful. There’s no meaningful closure for what we’ve been dragged through.
As such, not a single one of my characters on the Alliance is going to be halting their aggressions should they see Horde characters - and not a single one of the Horde characters is going to return to the Horde.
Neither faction fulfills for me that draw they once had. The Alliance is rolling over yet again, and the Horde is having to acknowledge it’s inherently flawed, and far too eager to commit and support genocide. That’s a depressing and miserable ending, flat out.
Neither of those two things encourage support or investment, and are hard passes for me.
So, pretty much neither set of characters will be with their factions - and are just lurking on the periphery. Miserable, yes. That, however, is the only logical sequencing I can scrounge up based on how things played out. If I’m going to take my characters’ stories seriously (which I do), I have to take the game’s story just the same.