The way it is going, there is not really going to be a horde or alliance anymore. We are all one big happy family. Apparently.
Like it already isn’t. I really do not see why everyone wants to go to half baked Disney World. And yet, they do…
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Half-baked Disney world has the portals, trading post, etc…
And if Horde players have the choice between Orange, or half-baked Disney world, I imagine more than a few will choose half-baked Disney World.
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Sadly, I cannot even argue.
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Psht. Flying around Stormwind with maximum zoom is a frustrating effort. Flying around Orangemar’s canyons though? Glorious.
You can keep your Disney city, I shall stick with my mud huts for easier navigation!!
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The thought of tearing out all of the spaghetti code to un-Faction the game and abandoning the fanatical player buy-in to said Factions remains hilarious to me.
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There’s like a handful of people left who are obsessed with the faction conflict though
Which does explain why blizz has been slowly but steadily, moving the story AWAY from that style of story.
(It’s an exaggeration, but my point is I doubt there’s that many people who care about faction conflict or faction pride)
I feel like BFA did a serious number on faction pride from all sides of the equation. Then, during SL, a lot of people went a played games like FFXIV where that is not really a thing, and those who came back had new expectations for crossplayability that blizzard is slowly but increasingly responding to.
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Sure, you can still ally with them?
But that doesn’t automatically mean:
- “Oh we can ONLY ally with you if we completely and unconditionally share our city and share its rule with your leadership that has despised & critisized our own culture and leadership, for so long.”
Additionally, them needing allies doesn’t really negate the ordeal of the void elves very nature and practices from being a danger to the Sunwell and its light energies that perpetuate the kingdom of Quel’Thalas …
I’m actually curious at to how they’ll justify them being in Quel’Thalas altogether, or if the void elves + Alleria are given a questline / trinket / blessing to protect the kingdom from their energies, or what the go is.
The Silver Covenant & Vereesa along with the Void Elves and Alleria are 100% going to be a part of the Midnight expansion. There’s no denying that much.
However I don’t believe they should hold equal leadership of Silvermoon & Quel’Thalas, and most of all — Certainly, not hold majority of the lore significance & exploits / scenes of heroism in the story of the kingdom or expansion.
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Not a lot of point in going down that rabbit hole because there’s no way of knowing how many, but I very much disagree. You can encounter this sentiment in the wild in pretty much any environment that pertains to Warcraft (be it forums, social media, or resource websites like wowhead/mmochampion).
Even if I set that aside as a concession, abolishing the Factions would solve none of the game’s issues, particularly in the writing department. They could just write off the Horde completely and not bother having depressed sad sacks tag along to sit on steps or marginally exist in the background, I guess? That won’t make any of the retcons or abysmal character writing any stronger.
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Private servers, run by amateur, unpaid coders, manage to do it just fine.
I don’t think its a matter of difficulty for Blizzard to do the same, but a matter of fear. That sort of change CANNOT be backtracked.
It remains to be seen how much a part they are. The Silver Covenant always had some potential for narrative purposes, but has only really been used as a counterpart to the Sunreavers or the Horde’s Blood Elves. I could see them dying off, becoming a neutral faction, or just standing in the background like they usually do.
It’s the Void Elves I’m worried about. Blizzard added this race with no seeding, no development of any kind, etc… They’re the least fleshed out playable race and desperately need development. That development SHOULD have been before they were added to the game, or at least during the expansion they were added, but it never was.
In short, it would not surprise me if Midnight was 99% about the Void Elves at this point. It’d disgust me, yes, but not surprise me.
I’m just worried Blizzard is going to interpret all the people who used to defend Void Elves just to argue against adding High Elves as actual interest in the race, and use that to justify the expansion being all about them.
“But you guys kept saying they were way more interesting than High Elves, and cooler, and had way more potential. You were so into them, we figured you’d love to have an expansion all about them.”
It’s Blizzard logic at its finest.
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I doubt a private server’s “just fine” measures up to WoW’s standard. But coding for games I’m not playing or privy to is so far out of the wheelhouse I don’t particularly care to get into a discussion about it.
Suffice to say, I think it would be a monumental blunder to get rid of a defining feature of WoW because one drunken sex pest who was allowed to fall upwards into creative lead did a really bad job of writing a faction conflict once.
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Yeah, while I don’t see them totally removing factions (too many technical obstacles, especially with pvp and old quests), I really do not expect much in the way of faction-based stories coming around.
The factions will exist, but more in name only. We’ll be working together against the threat of the expansion from launch to final patch, with maybe some token thing of “go back to Org or SW to tell the leaders, who will have a leader-meeting cinematic, but then come right back to Neutral Town.”
BfA burned away many people’s interests in factional storytelling like it was an elf tree. Shadowlands killed a lot too, but those jokes are too easy. Revisiting the Horde and Alliance in meaningful ways would require effectively rebuilding both from scratch, when it’s just much easier to throw us at the cosmic farces and see how that works out.
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The only legitimate reason to bring down the faction barriers is the game’s health.
WoW is an aging MMO. It’s numbers are going down over time. Eventually, it will not have a player base large enough to support two factions. We’ve already seen that once imbalance sets into faction populations, it’s all but impossible to reverse.
I don’t think we’re necessarily at the point where they need to break the glass case and drop the faction barrier, but we’ve been seeing it on the horizon for a while now. In Shadowlands the Alliance couldn’t get above a dozen or so mythic completions for raids, while the Horde had it within the first month of it being possible. Usually they didn’t allow cross realm (I think) raid queuing until both factions had hit 100 completions, or something to that effect. They had to decouple that requirement, because there just weren’t enough Alliance players raiding. Populations had been skewed. Blizzard had to actually allow cross-faction grouping at that point.
It’s a sign that, eventually, the faction-divide as a game mechanic will need to end for the game’s health.
Like I said, we’re not there yet, but its been on the horizon for a while.
Some people think Blizzard is going to steal part of a Horde zone, and a Horde race, to set up what is basically a High Elf zone. They are not going to so any of that.
Blizzard has shown you what they will do when both factions adventure in the zone of one fact. They will do what they did in Balameth.
Veressa may show up, but she will be part of the “Purge? What Purge” amnesia (so no silver Covenant).
Alleria will be there and the plot will revolve around her. They have already committed to it. Jaina and Anduin will be major characters. Thrall with keep making token cameos.
There might be Horde involvement, but there is a real chance that the home of a Horde race will be used as a backdrop for characters from Alliance lore saving the world. Again.
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Given the current writing the pass few expansions, I’d just like to hope the Horde can get some significant shine and awe-appeal scenes — without the Alliance factions & leaders budging them out the way like the fat kid at a buffet to grab fistfuls of the cake to stuff their face with.
I certainly hope that they don’t resort to virtue signaling & shaming the Blood elves – making THEM apologise to the Silver Covenant and Void Elves, because I’ll deadset feel like throwing my computer out the bloody window if that happens 
Should 100% be the other way around – Especially after the Purge of Dalaran.
… Also hope that HuMaN pOtEnTiAl doesn’t take up any significant story points in the Elven kingdom, for obvious reasons. lol
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Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment.
From the moment the words, “Void invasion of Quel’Thalas,” were spoken to describe Midnight, we knew the Blood Elves were going to end up eating, not so much a fat steaming slice of humble pie, but a whole god-damned factory’s worth of humble pies, boxed fresh and in bulk.
They’re obviously going to struggle fighting against the Void. There will be those elves who throw their hands into the air, and cry out, “Why were we never taking steps to protect ourselves against this?!” Or they’ll shout, “Doesn’t anyone in the Magistry know anything about the Void, so we can stop this?!”
There’s like… an 85% chance the Void Elves swoop in and become the heroes, and chide the Blood Elves for being so utterly, incompetently stupid in their views about the Alliance. How dare they think the Alliance hated them? Where could they ever get an idea like that? The Purge? Aethas knew about the theft of the Divine Bell and said nothing, because Garrosh would’ve retaliated against Quel’Thalas. Obviously the Horde is evil and the Blood Elves are simple for staying with it for so long. The Horde clearly cannot be trusted, just as the Void Elves knew all along. The purge wouldn’t have happened if the Sunreavers had just rolled over and let themselves be arrested, like they should have since, if they were innocent, they had nothing to hide.
You’ll vomit. I’ll vomit. The playerbase will vomit. Aethas will apologize to Jaina, again. Lor’themar will apologize to Vereesa. Umbric and Rommath will confess their mutual attraction and start making out over the backdrop of a void explosion, and we’ll all hold hands as the sun rises and Alleria stands on a mountain of blood elf corpses and shouts, “Quel’Thalas is Free!”
(Edit): Oh, and Talanji or Thrall will be tucked away in some corner and shed a tear of happiness for the elves, or something. Can’t forget our token Kalimdor-Horde representation. They’re such an afterthought I forgot about it.
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Just to be clear, allowing cross-faction interactions is not the same as abolishing the factions. If we’re getting to that point, I think Blizz would be better served reflecting on how good a job they’re doing at telling a story, innovating design, and serving the customer. There’s still a massive audience there for the taking. Not 12m+ massive, but even on the decline we always see a huge influx of players for each expansion launch.
Faction breakdowns themselves are an issue of parity, not overall scale. When that parity shifts to disparity, there are always reasons justifying those shifts that seldom seem to get addressed head on. Thus, we get band-aids that make a death spiral more palatable instead of digging to root causes that could avoid the death spiral.
Put another way, if we get to a point where a Blizzcon isn’t erupting with “FOR THE HORDE!” or “FOR THE ALLIANCE!” we are probably already moved on and playing different games.
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I don’t know about all that — From another perspective, it kind of resounds a whopping:
- “I told you so” from the Blood Elves
at the same time, due towards the sinister forces of void wanting to influence the Sunwell and those powers having the potential to result into terrible consequences for Quel’Thalas. 
At best?
It’d be extremely interesting to see a Blood Elf who wasn’t transformed into a Void Elf surprisingly know more about void than the void elves do — and a Void Elf (who was obviously transformed into such) know more about the LIGHT than much of the Blood Elves → with these two individuals combining their knowledge and forging a pact, later coming forth to their peoples in order to plead with one another towards working together against Xal’atath who threatens their kingdom.
- You could have the Blood Elf detail significant knowledge on dealing with the void threats and how to protect against it.
- And have the Void Elf detail significant knowledge on restoring the light and banishing the darkness of the void.
Heck, with the latter – You could potentially even feed their lore into further justifying void-elf paladins in the future …
For each individuals vast knowledge reasonings:
- THE BLOOD ELF – Had secretly & extensively researched the void as they believe their people should be free to explore all venues of magic just like they always have; especially in correlation for either bettering or protecting their people.
- THE VOID ELF – Had extensive knowledge of the light, due to researching the void merely for the benefit of the light; to which chasing such research lead to the unfortunate & unwilling transformation of themselves into what they are today.
Ultimately – That’d be a story compromise I’d probably be okay with.
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I sort of think they might try to pretend there never was an exile of the Void Elves and everyone is happy to see each other, honestly. Blizzard tends to run from things like this than put in the hard work of writing a story that accommodates animosity and meaningfully utilizes it.
Blizzard likes making messes in as dramatic a fashion as possible, not cleaning them up.
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More like stole back. 