Raiding is down by 50%, sure.
But there’s only 1000 alliance over 1800 in the 3v3 bracket in all of North America.
Create new factions. Let people choose their faction. Make each faction stand for something different.
I wish we could do heroes versus villains.
I know thousands of people who love PVP and never touch arena.
Why am I against ending the faction divide? Because this is an RPG. While I the player don’t hate the Alliance, some of my Horde characters absolutely do.
By the way, this:
Takes place over the course of about 10 years in game, give or take. The events of BfA, in game, are known as the “Fourth War.” From our characters’ perspective, it literally just ended a few months ago. The burning of Teldrassil was, like, a year ago. Sylvanas gave the order, but the Horde were still complicit. I wouldn’t blame the Alliance for still actively hating the Horde. From a character perspective, the faction divide makes 100% sense. I mean, it’s called the World of Warcraft, for Pete’s sake.
“But X game does it this way!” Great - go play that game.
It’s a barometer for total participation since arena correlates with other PvP.
Almost no one in North America is PvPing outside of a small community on the horde side.
Depends on the character.
Night Elves and Worgen hating Forsaken? Given. But what reason would a Night Elf druid and a Tauren druid have for fighting each other? Why would Night Elves and Nightborne be trying to kill each other? There’s a halfway decent chance they’re distantly related.
Void elves literally just left the Horde because they went too far in trying to protect Silvermoon. Would they be trying to murder Blood Elves that were probably their neighbors a year ago just because they’re on the blue team now?
And that’s the problem. Our characters are locked into this stupid faction system. It takes away choices for roleplaying. There’s dozens of organizations that we’ve worked with directly that draw from races in both factions: Argent Dawn, Cenarion Circle, basically every joint task force we’ve ever had to grind rep with. Why are our guilds and characters locked in this position where we’re forced to be beholden to barriers against cooperation just because of the race we picked?
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Not just worked for. It makes absolutely zero sense that I, the Champion of Azeroth, the Archdruid, the Maw Walker, who has fought and killed and defended the very world itself, who has worked up reputation for various neutral individuals across the planet, who is aiming to keep the world safe from all manner of threat, would only want to protect a small portion of it.
The factions flew out the window the moment they gave us the chosen one narrative, and you can’t take that back after all of this time. Not to mention helping the very leadership that is keeping us in the war to begin with, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to team up with various races to deal with issues when I’m already working with Jaina, Tyrande, and (eventually, perhaps) Anduin.
They make no sense narratively, especially now, and they’re far too restrictive. Any positive they provided has been lost because the races were heavily homogenized to fit human vs. orc. We aren’t a conglomeration of different races and ideals fighting other race and ideals; we’re human and orc. Factions have done irreparable harm to the night elf lore in particular, and they as a race are a prime example of why the factions are bad.
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I sorta agree with this. Even though I would like the option to group/raid with those of the other faction, there is an in-game reason for the lore.
However, this completely discounts factions such as the cenarion circle existing.
Basically this is why in my earlier post I said that there should be consequences for choosing the “mercenary” route. It would leave the faction divide intact for anyone that wants to play that way, and add a bucket load of consequences for people that would like to group/raid with folks from the other faction.
Originally, the faction divide was meant to have ended at the conclusion of WC3.
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I believe that the Horde and Alliance have much identity and uniqueness to them. And while cross faction gameplay should be implemented, dissolving the factions does indeed dissolve identity. I would not wish to see Alliance in Orgrimmar any more than I would wish to see Horde partaking in Night Elf questing.
It’s a relic from the RTS games that doesn’t carry over to an MMO very well and it needs to go away.
It doesn’t make for an interesting story because there are only so many petty conflicts you can have before it becomes tiresome, and the conflict is never ending because you can’t have an absolute victor in a two-faction game like this without alienating the players on the losing side. Eternal stalemates after finding another arbitrary reason to fight is boring storytelling, especially when the military might between factions isn’t even comparable. You can’t really justify the war having gone on so long when one of the factions literally has a spaceship equipped with an Ultra Mega Deathray and the other faction has barely graduated from living in huts.
It doesn’t make for good or interesting gameplay either since you could always opt out of the conflict by playing on PvE servers or now just turning off War Mode. And ever since TBC both factions have had access to all classes so there aren’t really any strategic choices either. Racials have ping ponged back and forth for years, but have almost always been minor in the grand scheme of things.
At the end of the day all the factions continue to do is limit storytelling potential and needlessly keep the playerbase divided and wildly unbalanced, all for the sake of maintaining a story beat from a completely different genre that’s continually undermined anyway.
At this point the only real difference between factions should be aesthetics.
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On the contrary, the faction divide is a mirror of real life history. It’s patterned after the Cold War. Which largely remains in place 75 years later despite the military might between factions “not being comparable” either.
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Oh FFS not this bs again.
I must have missed the part of the Cold War where Russia and America teamed up to fight off the demon invasion.
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Occasional cooperation during the Cold War did happen, such as the Suez Crisis.
(And since I’m going to assume most people don’t know what that was, it was when the USA & USSR teamed up against the UK, France, and Israel after those 3 countries invaded Egypt.)
Blizzard definitely over-does it, though, which is why we need a lot less faction cooperation in the game. A LOT less. Not more.
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Just stop. The only way the Cold War is remotely similar to anything in Azeroth is that there’s a conflict with two sides… There’s a million and a half ways that your analogy doesn’t make any more sense than that.
I don’t care what the factions do. Players should have the choice to go along with them or not, regardless of the race they pick at character creation.
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Except we’re never going back to “simple.” Simple is dead and we haven’t fought for simple reasons like resources for ages. It’s always some old god or a dragon aspect or some world-ending malevolent entity. Blizzard brought the game’s lore to a place where the faction divide stops making sense.
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Sure, lets meat half way though. so like. let players form a neutral party with the opposite faction for Dungeons and raids. have a “Neutral Looking For Group” section. i dont see what would be so hard about doing this. mercenary mode exists for pvp.
for Lore, its not that uncommon for small parties of cross faction characters to form for short term goals.
Thanks for my new young adult novel idea!
Honestly Marvel probably already did it at some point.
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The main reason is that Blizzard has done an x pack that focuses on the faction war…it has always been poorly written. Because in a War there has to be a winner and a loser and neither faction’s playerbase wants to be the loser.
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