The Faction Divide

Community General Discussion
1

At this point it does more harm than good.

When I started this game in late 2006, the factions were great. They served their purpose and good times were had by all, especially in the PvP objectives in Outland, like Halla or the PvP spots in Hellfire.

But since then several things happened.

Racials for end game content favored horde, so high end guilds flocked to horde.

The story kept pulling away from Horde vs Alliance. BFA tried to bring it back, and it failed. In every expansion story though, even the ones more HvA, we’ve always ended up seeing mutual cooperation with Horde and Alliance anyways (to some degree at least.). It’s always some universal threat that both factions end up banding together to fight. BfD is like the only HvA raid in the entire game (and gunship in ICC but that’s just one encounter).

PvP servers were removed and War mode was introduced. This further removed the Horde/Alliance identity. Now loads of people stuck in a PvP server could just turn off PvP and start ignoring the conflict even further.

Point is, there isn’t much left keeping the faction conflict going and it’s causing more harm than good at this point.

Even if the racials are fixed, the faction transfers were already done long ago. Now some people have trouble getting groups as Alliance, while people have easier times as Horde. There are communities and friends who’d like to to group together and guild together but they can’t because some are horde, some are alliance. There are guilds that could have an easier time recruiting if they could ignore the faction divide and recruit both populations of horde and alliance.

And on top of it all, faction tagging is just really, really, really annoying.

The narrative doesn’t support the faction divide
The gameplay doesn’t support the faction divide

Just bring the faction war to an end.

(I already ship Baina anyways.)

Allow us to group and guild cross faction.

BGs can have two modes, HvA or mercenary, HvA would be the old way, the mercenary way would just be two teams, regardless of faction. Warmode can still be HvA. It doesn’t have to change PvP (much anyways) and it would only improve the game.

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2

Absolutely. Blizzard just doesn’t seem to grasp stacking frustrations at every turn just drives players away. The time played metric is their alter while player retention seems to be ignored.

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3

Faction tagging is bad and needs to go. However, if they remove faction divide then it’s probably an indication that the game has declined so much that it needs to be put down like Ole’ Yeller.

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4

YES this x1000

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5

I agree! Faction tagging is a stinker, especially in Korthia right now.

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6

The Horde suck and need to reroll Alliance, its the only way :sunglasses:

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7

From what Ion was saying on Twitter, it sounds like they realise that the barriers have to come down, but it’s not as simple as toggling it on and off. The divide is probably written into everything and may take a lot of work to remove without breaking a lot of stuff.

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8

Stuff like faction tagging could just be copy pasta of how rare/elite does not have it.

It be the easy start.

Stuff like dungeon…looking at DoS I personally would not care if on my horde I got the alliance opening line about no hard feelings. Or if on alliance I got lines horde get.

BUt that’s me. In DoS i have bigger things to worry about. Like how many people will burn their CD’s on the last boss at fight start. When its, you know, completely pointless to do this lol.

you can in theory not attack him at all really for first part. YOu can press buttons. Its not doing much till the 2 side aspect bits are banged out though.

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I’m really just imagining they adopt the ESO system. Every race for every faction, factions only apply to pvp and you can pick who you fight for.

Then they give us two main quest chains, the PVE story and the “war campaign.” Anduin Jaina Zappyboi and Baine take us through a PVE save the universe yet again adventure while in the war campaign Genn and Queen Talanji work hard to ruin peace for everyone with unauthorized attacks, pvp quests and provide the cover to let BGs still exist.

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10

the faction imbalance wont be fixed until they remove racials that effect combat. Orc 20% reduced stun is huge. I dont even like the way orcs look but if you pvp its needed if you can take it. I would like to see a full revamp on racials where its like a talent you can choose no matter what race you are so we can simply play what we want. Do that at the same time as a free one time faction change… oh ya forgot blizzard so 50% off faction change good enough

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11

The only way the faction imbalance ends is just letting people to play together. Is too late to care about racials tbh. Unless they put like a nasty huge racial to an alliance race , we will not see any change.

And this will only create a faction imbalance for the Alliance so whats the point ?.

Theres no solution at this point to help a faction without destroying the other. Just let people play together and pick the race they wanna play.

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12

TBh the narrative hardly supports anything at this point as broken as it is, so it’s a moot point.

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13

There’s a reason why this is how pretty much every modern MMO handles PvP. It’s because race-based faction divides are toxic game design at every level.

Race-based factions not only undermine the writing - of which there are too many examples in WoW to even begin posting them all - but they make it difficult for friends who like certain races to play together and encourage players to ‘other’ the opposing team rather than view them as cordial competitors (yes I know people are jerks in PvP in every game but that doesn’t mean you encourage it. The goal is still cordial competition).

Besides, pretty much every class save maybe the warriors and hunters operate for their order, not their faction. Death Knights, Demon Hunters and Rogues especially are billed as free agents and outcasts for whom loyalty to a nation over their order would immediately get them kicked out or killed.

There is literally no good reason to keep the race-based faction barrier so just get rid of it already.

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Bainduin is the correct ship

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15

i disagree. faction divides aren’t toxic at all.

the game was at its peak when factions were at their most restrictive amongst each other lol

there’s way more nuance to it than that.

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We don’t do “nuanced” here. We just call everything we don’t like “toxic” and move on to the next topic. :tada:

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17

I hate this idea, no offense. This is world of Warcraft not world of hold-hands-craft. The faction identity is what makes this game exciting. You take that away and we are all on the same side in some carebear sandbox. You might as well just delete all forms of PVP at that point. The “band together” every xpac is disgusting. It’s obviously to deflect from the accusations of faction favoritism from Blizzard. Ironically, it’s blizzards failure not because they did anything to make the faction preference swing one way, but rather didn’t do enough to stop it.

Stop petitioning to make this a PVE only game. On PVE only servers you can argue this motive Op and even then it would feel shallow af. On PVP realms, let the bloodshed continue and let the distaste and animosity brew once again for the other side.

Too bad sanctioned servers done even matter. We are all allowed to toggle off our factions identity.

Kill off Anduin and let’s go back to our roots. As much as the horde hated modern Sylvanis, the alliance hate the carebear boy king.

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18

Still don’t know what’s the point of faction. War story? You can write a good war story without faction.

19

The problem is worsened by those who swap to Horde. You should be angry at them, not ppl that have been playing Horde for like 10+ years. I swapped to Horde while the Alliance was still popular. I just wanted a change of scenery. I really, really wanted to play the new goblin race that had just become playable in Cataclysm.

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20

no.

Blizzard hands the Horde a free pass on everything. “The Forsaken betray everyone at the Wrathgate and the Alliance has to go in and help retake Lordaeron? Meh…” “Oh, Garrosh went nuts and obliterated half a dozen zones? No problem.” “Sylvanas wrecks Gilneas? Who cares?” “Alliance has to help retake Orgrimmar after Garrosh goes totally insane? Oh well.” And most recently, “Sylvanas torches Teldrassil, genociding the Night Elves? Boo Hoo.”

It’s always “World of WARCRAFT” when the Horde commits murderous atrocity against the alliance, and then walks off laughing about it while the Alliance has to wear the egg on their face. But then it always turns into “Can’t you take a joke bro? It’s Peace time!”

So… NAH. It’s World of WARCRAFT, remember? Don’t have enough people to PVP against? Those queue timers a bit long? Not getting your bonus honor?

Suck it up buttercap.

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