The case for Cross-Faction Guilds

Community General Discussion
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Hi! My name is Mistmoore and I’ve been playing WoW since April of 2005 maining Alliance straight through until Legion when after Nighthold I went to join a friend of mine in his Horde guild. I hopped onto my alt-DK Mistmoorex from my main-DK Mistmoore and started mythic raiding with The Remnant - Firetree and eventually got multiple CE’s, Rival’s, KSM’s and more than just the achievements and gear I made a lot of friends. The Remnant is my WoW family and I love playing with them and seeing them on and being able to easily group up. But I also want to be Alliance. I am Alliance. I have the lion tattooed onto my arm. I know what my home faction is and have never felt right with the Horde. I want to play my Worgen Death Knight instead of my Blood Elf Death Knight but I want to play with my friends.

Cross-faction instances allows this, for the most part. I can message one of my b.net friends in the guild to get into the raid or key group but I can’t see guild chat. The communities feature may be able to remedy this but it doesn’t work as well as guilds do and it requires everyone to opt into some additional thing and possibly manage two separate chat channels. I also wouldn’t have access to the guild bank or guild repairs or any of the other things I contribute to as a member of the guild. I thought that with the start of Season 4 I could safely switch to my Worgen and be able to enjoy the new Fated content and updated dungeon roster. This has been partially true where I can join my friends group but when we’re out at the summoning stone they can’t tell that I’m a friend because my name is orange. There’s a whole lot more negatives to the current situation than just this. I think I miss seeing who of my guild is online the most. I support the roll out of cross-faction play slowly but I strongly urge you to implement cross-faction guilds immediately.

Cross-faction play came out in 9.2.5 and immediately saw an overwhelming amount of popularity. Players have been able to find groups more easily, play with their friends and enjoy some long neglected alts. But allowing players to truly experience the game the way they have been for years with their friends, on the characters they most want to play, we must have cross-faction guilds. 9.2.7 is in the works to add some great AH changes and this patch should also include cross-faction guilds. It would be foolish to launch Dragonflight without it and even more foolish to implement some kind of restriction for Mythic raiding where cross-faction play isn’t allowed until the hall of fame is cleared and cross-realm Mythic raiding is available. Please make all of endgame fully cross-faction and do that by making guilds cross-faction. The Horde vs Alliance war has long made little sense in the story with all of our greatest victories being as coalition forces. Deathwing, Garrosh, The Burning Legion, N’Zoth, Sylvanas Windrunner and The Jailer! All defeated by cooperation between the Horde and the Alliance. Please allow us to play the way the story has shown us. And while implementing these player convenience features is most important I implore you to continue showing the peace developing in the World itself. What I’ve seen on the alpha so far has been great and I can’t wait until one day my Worgen can walk the streets of Silvermoon and I can show my Blood Elf friends around Stormwind.

Thank you for listening. I know this change won’t come soon enough to help me with my struggles playing as an Alliance character in a Horde guild in season 4 and I may give that up because of that. But I hope sometime soon I won’t have to choose a character or a race I don’t prefer so I can play with my friends.

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The thing is - as I’ve explained many times - you cannot have cross-faction stuff in the open world without removing factions entirely. That’s why the restrictions on cross-faction grouping are there (no trading, still hostile to each other, etc.).

In order to have functional [*see below] cross-faction guilds, factions would need to be removed from the game entirely. Which would be unacceptable to most players.

*And to clarify, while you certainly COULD create cross-faction guilds where people can’t quest together, can’t make and trade items, can’t go to the same main cities, etc. … I wouldn’t call that a functional guild.

It just can’t be done, for technical reasons. But people don’t want to face that.

This is where people tell me I’m wrong, even though I pegged cross-faction groups right from the beginning. While it was under discussion, I kept saying, sure, you could do it for instances-only, but it won’t work in the open world, you couldn’t trade together, do quests, go to the same, zones, etc.

And people kept saying, no, you’re wrong, they can do all of those things.

And then cross-faction groups came out, and lo-and-behold, Brewa was 100% correct on ALL the limitations that they ended up coming with.

But people just want to keep thinking the big meanies at Blizzard CHOOSE not to have cross-faction guilds, rather than face the truth: They Can’t.

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Yeah I question that. I mean we are basically there. We are Horde and Alliance in name only - really. Apart from some janky restrictions that feel more like technical reasons more so than anything that is “design intent” anymore.

There are probably still improvements that can be made.

You can’t whisper someone from the opposite “faction”? Seems like the kind of thing that can be fixed. Same as inviting them to a group directly. Little things like this go a long way.

Even the guild restriction can likely be overcome. Somehow it worked with communities.

But sure open world and tagging mobs - i can believe that is tougher.

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Only in Shadowlands. Prior to Shadowlands, factions working together happened AT MOST once per expansion.

BfA:
We weren’t working together in Nyalothia.
We did work together in Eternal Palace.
We were trying to kill each other in Dazar’alor.
We weren’t working together in Uldir.

OK, how about Legion?
We weren’t working together in Antorus.
We weren’t working together in Tomb of Sargeras.
We weren’t working together in Nighthold.
We weren’t working together in Emerald Nightmare.

WoD?
We weren’t working together in Hellfire Citadel.
We weren’t working together in Blackrock Foundry.
We weren’t working together in Highmaul.

Mists?
We did work together in Siege of Orgrimmar.
We did work together in Throne of Thunder.
We didn’t work together in the 3 raids of the first tier.

And so on.

People have bad memories.

It wasn’t until Shadowlands that this really happened. And I’d argue that the reason so many people disliked Shadowlands was that it was the first expansion ever to have ZERO Horde/Alliance dynamic.

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Not sure what your point is. This is SL and going forward anyways. We aren’t traveling back in time here. Supposedly the characters said that “things would be different”.

I mean if you really want to pull the lore over gameplay card - the characters themselves told you we should stop thinking about factions.

Didn’t we all have class halls that were working together spanning across factions? Albeit begrudgingly?

Wrath we were working together against LK and you even cited an example where we worked together twice within 1 xpac. I think we teamed up against Deathwing (at least Thrall did).

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God help us all. Hopefully the creative team either realizes their colossal mistake in Shadowlands, or is replaced with people who do.

Was there a Horde lore character in any of the Legion raids helping out Alliance players? Not that I can think of.

Kind of. In ICC we had Horde & Alliance leaders parked at the entrance… but then we fight the other faction in gunship battle. So ICC is a mixed bag. Trial of the Crusader has the same issue.

There weren’t any Horde NPC’s helping the Alliance in Ulduar, so no cross-faction cooperation, there. Even the cinematic trailer showed that cooperation wasn’t going to happen.

Working together is something like Throne of Thunder, where Lor’themar and Jaina are both there, together.

And such cases are quite rare.

People have this mentality of “if we aren’t slaughtering each other, we’re working together” and that’s… well, it’s silly.

The foundation of WoW is a “cold war” setting between the factions. No, we’re not constantly killing each other (which is good, because when they have tried that - twice - it was stupid, both times). But that certainly doesn’t mean we’re working together.

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Just want to reiterate that none of this is really important, and that cross-faction guilds cannot happen for technical reasons (see post #2).

People just don’t want to talk about that, though.

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Everything you said about this one was pretty much on point.

The prime forces weren’t working well in unison, but the factions still worked together - Otherwise Horde and Alliance wouldn’t be allowed in the same city of Dalaran. You see both factions at the forefront in the Tomb of Sargeras when you walk in and both factions were present on the spaceship when confronting Antorus.

Nighthold we weren’t working together exactly peacefully, but to an extent we were both present and working to the same goal so its a bit of a grey area there.

Emerald Nightmare isn’t really referenced much with how the factions handled it so that’s up to speculation and/or opinion.

At the end after defeating Archimonde we see both factions present, which would imply we were. Other two raids though yeahnah, looks like we were recluse.

Mists was a faction at war expansion too, so it’d be a bad take for them to work together.

Given how bad BFA was Blizzard said most people don’t like Horde / Alliance dynamic of faction-aggression as much as many others would like to believe they do – And thus vowed they would never do another faction war expansion.

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Which Horde character was present?

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Good. Faction wars are stupid. I said so before it even came out.

Cold War is the way to go. That’s how WoW was designed.

Too bad that the new people they have on the dev team don’t understand the fundamentals of the game.

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Uh, Durotan?- He was the Horde representative, much like Yrel was the Alliance representative and Khadgar was the neutral one to bridge them together.

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I think you are getting pretty off-topic here. No one really cares if the factions stick around for “lore” or story telling reasons.

What they want is for the remaining annoyances of different factions to go away for game-play ones.

They can make up some excuse as to why we work together, maybe the order halls got the band back together, or mercenary mode like in PvP, or whatever… despite what may be going on faction war style in the lore.

No, but we also weren’t fighting one another in most of the raids, so not sure how this is relevant. That’s like arguing that if you don’t send in troops to my battles, we can’t be friends/allies.

Again though - people care about game play more so than lore, if it prevents them from basically playing the game.

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Sure. But, it’s not going to happen, so… folks should start talking about the many other things that could be done, instead, which are feasible.

Like aggressive realm merges.

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I agree with this. But also…

So there are still areas of improvement. I don’t think you need to just “nuke” the factions entirely.

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You’ve made no argument for why Blizzard can’t do any of that. It seems like your actual argument is that Blizzard doesn’t want to invest the dev time to make it happen?

I’m not in favor of removing factions, but reducing their impact on the game would be nice.

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I did, actually, in the post you quoted.

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No, you just keep saying it can’t be done. You haven’t said why, just that it can’t happen.

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Way too long to read but let me just say this. Why have cross-faction guilds when we can’t even do instanced content together or exiles reach? We can’t whisper each other in Orbios, we can’t understand each other, we can’t party up together if we aren’t on their btag. So, I guess if we did have cross faction guilds I guess I’d have to add every alliance player to my btag just to talk to them.

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I actually care for those reasons, it pisses me off when they just ignore it and blurt out whatever BS they want to push their current narrative - that’s how we got Shadowlands.

But like you said–

Is essentially the case.

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I’m mostly asking for guilds as far as progression raiding is concerned. I don’t expect them to ever allow horde to do alliance quests and vice versa unless they did some kind of mercenary system where they would let you go put on a halloween mask and you’re a Horde race but able to do all of the Alliance content. They definitely could let us all go into each others cities and use each others vendors and hold hands. They can even make it so we can get each others reputations if they wanted, or keep it so we can’t. They could split up all the mirrored armor and mounts and all that and let us collect it twice, or just have the item still collect both but we have both armors available. They can do whatever the heck they want since they make the game. But that’s not what I’m asking for here. It has nothing to do with it. We can already trade and send tells in groups, just extend that to guild members in any situations. Let me be online as a worgen in my mostly horde guild and see who is on and get to whisper inv to them to get invited instead of them needing to manually do it. It’s okay if they go MVP baby steps the whole way for cross-faction. But Brewa your argument is really flimsy.

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