State of cross-faction guilds and future plans for cross-realm?

It’s been a minute since I’ve been involved with the RP community in any meaningful way. I’m very curious about two things: how cross-faction guilds are going and how viable cross-realm guilds will be once they’re implemented.

So, are there some successful cross-faction guilds out there? Do both factions in these guilds get mostly equal interaction or do most people stick to one main side and the other faction just makes occasional appearances during events and meetings?

And do you think cross-realm guilds are going to be viable? Any guilds already planning or even considering going that route? Do you think people would be more open to interacting with off-realmers who are in a cross-realm guild than a guildless off-realm character using an anchor?

I’d love to know about your experiences with cross-faction rp or your expectations of cross-realms rp.

Personally, I’m hoping that the latter becomes popular since I have a slew of characters on a small server that I’d love to roleplay again without having to move them all. If nothing else, they’ll be added to a personal guild and brought over for some public events. I’d love to hear your plans!

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The Blackwater Company was cross-faction as soon as it came out. This was an easy choice for us because we already ran two guilds and used communities to chat between, so we combined. Before the cross faction communities stuff, we still interacted with both sides as a factionless guild. Currently, there are less horde than alliance, which aligns with the statistical numbers on each side.

Every event WE host has always been cross-faction friendly, and we run a cross-faction community that has a tavern, newspaper, and monthly events. It is continually growing, but slowly and methodically. It is not a numbers game to us but we want it to make sense for the RP and world we live in. When people are casual with their time, they do migrate to their own faction areas, but we have cross-faction gatherings as well.

The challenge, not really a challenge, is that Blizzard has done infinitely better at keeping a steady stream of content/activities every 8 weeks over like every other expansion. This has led to a lot of ‘if there is not an event, I am doing content’ mentality. Which is perfectly fine in our book. It isn’t like Shadowlands when the story was so bad that standing around to RP was all there was. But Discord chat is still happening a lot and we see it a bit in guild chat.

Today, we have one WRA member. They just have a proxy in the guild proper, and leadership has that person on BNET to pull them over for our events, so I guess you can say we are already cross-server. So we absolutely will be doing this when the time comes. We suspect that we will see a boost in our horde numbers with this move, and we are very excited.

Will this work for everyone? Nope, not even close. But it works for us because we have already played this way since forever, the game is just finally catching up.

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I’ve had fun in Blackwater as the non-prominent faction side. It’s been a warm and welcoming community for someone like me who is very social but also anxious.

It doesn’t seem like faction matters much in the guild, at least from what I’ve seen. So, server likely won’t matter either, given our 1 WrA member.

I hope this helps.

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Another member of Blackwater here, being with the guild a while even before the offical movement to cross faction guilds, as a prominent Horde member who as a former officer who did the helping of the running of the horde side before blizzards awesome move here, i can we’ve always made faction not a factor.
Its never mattered to us and honestly thats why i feel so at home here.
Being a former GM of my own guild since MoP (guikd is now dead of course) but have done my shate of bouncing around, finding BWC is by far the best thing ive ever done.

I found them through their crossfaction Tavern event, and i have never looked back lol.
Also as stated by Sefi, weve technically speaking been cross realm for a little while, that member being a fellow horde as well. I do know people from other realms come to a lot of the server events ive gone to, many servers tend to come together to events on a fairly regular basis in my time in the RP community; which is a long time, though its much better now than it was when i first atarted.

In my own opinion, i think cross realm will be a good thing for many reasons, especially for Blackwater given the reasons i mentioned before.
I think it’ll help boost our horde numbers in the guild which, for me will be awesome, being one of the more active horde in the guild. Though, its never truly mattered since ive always felt welcomed, and my character(s) are thriving in the guild as a whole.

Ive always played as more factionless, so its been awesome to be a part of a guild that not only alligns with my playsty le in the RP sense, but also my shares my views on faction as well.

Only thing that would make all this better for me, in my opinion, is for blizzard to make factionless an option in game. That would truly make my life, but until then; or if ever really, cuz honestly i have lost some faith in them, but they’ve been surprised me a lot lately, so not all hope is lost.

Tl;dr, my point is, this wont be anything entirety new for some, including us, and im sure there’s other guikds out there too.
Them making it official makes the use of proxies no longer needed, which lets be honest is a hastle at best.

I think itll be a good thing. Itll bring more RP to our doors and open avenues to more of it that we; or a lot of us, such as myself, have wanted for a while now.

Also sorry for any weird typos, i am on my phone…lol

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The more I read about Blackwater the more intrigued I am with it. I hope to see y’all around when I jump back into RP!

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Blackwater has had a wonderful experience it seems! I can give some input on my guild as well, we’re a “neutral” guild, Cross-Faction and possibly Cross-Realm. As a Guild Master actively recruiting and wanting Horse races and non-Humans in, it’s been difficult!

Part of it is having a niche guild, Cult of the Damned/Scourge was a rp flavor years ago. Now? It’s much more scarce. That being said, we have had a few Horde characters interested in joining! Some just didn’t fit the guild theme, a few actively stated that were done with Moon Guard Horde because of how the culture is/how they felt like city role-play is. Now, I’ve never been on Moon Guard Horde so I can’t say if it is true or not.

That being said, I have high hopes for Cross-Real RP Guilds. I think it will do a LOT of good. I personally think Shadow of Lordaeron may grow into it more, allowing us to work on building better stories with the general role-play community and not just the Moon Guard community. I think we’ll see some challenges overall for the first few months. Each server has a lot of Fanon stuff, but I think it will go well.

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In the end, it is a good thing to embrace the change or you risk fading away. The game is changing, and with more options and features, it only serves the interest of guilds to explore the new offerings.

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Howdy Folks old player thinking about coming back to retail after playing some season of discovery, im wondering if you could answer some question i have about cross faction as the information i have seen is conflicting. The situation i have is a mate of mine just started again on a new character and is playing alliance personally i would prefer to play a horde character what exactly can we do together and not do together ie: can we do normal/heroic/mythic dungeons and raids together. Battlegrounds or any pvp how does it work if we are able to group like if we are grouped and exploring the world can someone attack them while they are grouped with me can i heal them can they receive buffs. Im sure there are alot of other things im not thinking of please add to responses if there are as i want to know all the details about how it works.

You can do all content together as long as it’s a premade group and aren’t using Dungeon or Raid Finder (which is a dumb hurdle, but whatever). Because of this, most likely you won’t be able to do normal/hero dungeons or LFR, beyond that you realistically can do all the stuff you would typically be doing at endgame (m+, normal/hero/myth raid).

You can’t do world content like questing together, but you can do certain world quests or help each other with world quests. I just don’t think progress will be universally tracked across the group as it normally would be in a reg group.

PvP is also cross faction, but of course it needs to be premade and one of you will have to use the ‘mercenaries’ option iirc.

In a group you cannot heal members of the opposite faction within your group unless you’re in an instance.

The game still treats you like you’re members of the opposing faction outside of instances. You cannot do quests together and you will still be attacked if you’re in the opposite faction’s territory.

You cannot receive buffs from someone of the opposite faction unless you’re in an instance.

You speak different in-game languages from each other unless you’re in a group.

In a group you are able to trade with each other when in an instance.

You may have the same guild, and are able to speak with each other in guild chat without any issues.

With the addition of war mode you may not attack each other unless you both ‘opt-in’ to this option. War Mode is the world PvP option a lot like how world PvP worked on a PvE server in classic (you have to actively set yourself as being targetable in PvP). If one of you has war mode on and the other doesn’t you cannot see each other as you’re put into two different phases. You may only activate war mode when in Stormwind or Orgrimmar.

Hopefully one day all these hurdles will be removed, but for the moment these are the stipulations we all have to live by when it comes to cross-faction.

With all this in-mind, if you want to level together or do casual content you will most likely want to be on the same faction, as leveling is impossible to do cross-faction. If you’re planning on running M+ or raids above LFR as your main way of playing, then the factions don’t matter. Just remember you can’t use any Random Dungeon Finder or LFR, which means you won’t be able to do holiday-bosses or any regular dungeons together.

To give my own experience with it, being cross-faction simply isn’t fun. With all the meaningless hurdles Blizz has placed, cross-faction play is butchered and made needlessly difficult. Initially, I played a Horde character on my friend’s largely Alliance guild, the logistical nightmare that would come from me being a different faction eventually amounted to me faction changing. I wouldn’t recommend cross-faction if you want to play together, it’s unfortunate that it’s this way, but it is what it is.

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The Scarlet Reclamation is cross faction and cross server now. We have multiple Scarlet Reclamations on the other RP servers now and we are cross faction because we let in Blood Elves/Quel’dorei since they can have blue eyes now. =) It is very possible you can join a raid and talk to each other and emote without needing a Tongues Elixir. We have everyone in a central Scarlet Reclamation community where we can all be connected too and I AM LOVING IT!