Not the players. That much was obvious in Mists remix.
It’s clear that there is meaningful resistance - whether Hazzikostas is one of them or merely their spokesman, the fact is that someone at Bliz still seems to cling to the idea that they can one day sell another faction war without losing another million subs within the month.
Midnight needs full cross faction PVE: dungeon finder, raid finder, healing and support skills in the overworld, and so on.
The fact that you can’t even heal cross faction party members would by all rights be considered a damning bug in any other game.
Only speaking for myself, but I would enjoy this. For me, there really hasn’t been this two faction war in War of Warcraft for a while now the Developers just need to pull the plug and open everything up.
It’s one of the “foundational” design concepts for WoW, and it’d be tough to implement retroactively when several old zones have their own parallel plotlines that intentionally conflict. Kind of contrived, but I can at least understand them not wanting to go back and “fix” multiple expansions’ worth of zones.
Such a change would have to accompany an “old world revamp” with all new questlines, and confine many expansions (MoP, WoD, parts of Legion and BfA) to “time bubble” status where the conflict still exists.
I don’t think they’d have to do this for any reason other than wanting to make the world flow better and they’ve shown that they don’t really care about that with making it so new players are just funneled into the previous expansion as the leveling area, excluding Shadowlands to Dragon Flight. The old expansions are still very much in the time bubble now.
They have made major strides with this though and I’m on team dissolve faction lines. There may be some lingering technical difficulties to it all that prevents total dissolvement for the time being.
Unless they fixed it recently and I missed that line in patch notes, not in the overworld - I was even warned a few times in cross faction parties on my prevoker that if I intended to heal it wouldn’t work.
Not in the world you can’t lol. Gotta wait until you are inside a dungeon, raid, delve, w/e before they can be targeted with buffs, heals, etc.
But I personally don’t care and don’t want cross faction fully implemented. What we currently have is serviceable. Changing how it functions in the world would seriously bork war mode anyhow.
In all the comments I’ve seen from Ion regarding cross-faction, he basically says it’s all coming - they’re just taking it slow. It’s a change they cannot undo later, and they want to make sure it’s really the best decision.
I’m not going to fault them for being cautious with a big change.
I get that they don’t want both factions queueing for LFG content. But it’s absolutely insane that cross faction players within the same group cannot use each others portals or 2 seater mounts or even trade with each other in open world.
I mean if you Google it there is a exact wow replica rip off that not only does cross faction but also does completely unlocked race class combos with dual classes and expanded class types. I have a gnome who is half Paladin and half druid. The only roadblock in this game is the devs.
I know it’s hard to believe but they were about 1500 complaint threads by marksman hunters before the final change was put in place where the pet was originally gonna be completely removed and simply replaced with the AI hawk. After all the moaning groaning whining, complaining and pleading, Blizz stepped back and said OK fine you can keep your pet but it’s gonna cost you a talent tree point. The forum has also been responsible for certain Allied races. Don’t kill yourself. Sometimes the best and the worst stuff we get is because of us.
While I agree that the devs were somewhat stubborn to get rid of it for the most part initially, if there’s anything that’s still very much faction-locked gameplay-wise it’s almost certainly because there’s 20+ year old spaghetti code that they genuinely cannot alter without breaking the game.
I don’t think it’s a matter of them not wanting to. I think it’s a matter of there being far too much code to sift through to ensure it doesn’t come out a broken mess.
You’re never gonna hear devs openly say “hey, this game’s code is a trainwreck, we can’t do this in the near future.”
Can’t be any worse to work with than mercenary mode, where not only does it queue up with the opposite faction but changes your race, and if I remember correctly not just visually but also get the racial abilities. If not, I know that happens in BFA raid Battle for Dazar’alor