Even if it hasn’t already been reached, at some point population will dip to a point where mathematically the numbers are just not there anymore. Why have half of your players unable to play with the other if the alternative is waiting longer to do practically anything?
When the game was huge this didn’t matter so much, though if you think about it queues would have always been half as long if we could access the total pool of players. I won’t lie faction has been a stumbling block for me ever since I first decided I liked trolls but my only friend in the game was a gnome. Most of the years I’ve played I’ve had an average of 1-2 people I know that I theoretically could play with, but different faction, so no.
And classic made this problem even worse. Now you can be one of two factions, on either of two independent forms of the game. The last RL person I was playing with quit retail to play classic, then quit altogether a few months later after maxing a character, largely because I was not interested in classic so we were never actually playing together. Subbed to the same game, only not really.
The faction war ended in Warcraft 3. Any attempts to bring it back since then have been contrived nonsense. It never should’ve been a major focus for wow in the first place, or at least not in a way that inseparably tied player characters to it.
The only time you Rodentia are anywhere near Stormwind will be as togas for the Dwarves.
That’s not the fault of the factions, but the fault of the writers and their inability to conclude ANYTHING.
There’s a lot of personal and potential story that could involve both factions. The catch is that developers actually have to invest in it and not use it as a vehicle to the ‘next big bad’.
It’s part of the game’s identity. You can’t just get rid of it. Otherwise, it’ll start a trend of removing other things you and OP would find inconvenient, like letting every race be every class, or as OP puts it, make races a ‘cosmetic’. WoW will just end up being your run-of-the-mill MMO. No lore, no story, no allure.
It will have plenty of story, lore and allure. Going back to Warcraft 3. The factions came together at the end of the game. And in most expansions, the factions were unified.
It makes way more sense lore wise, to remove the barrier than it does to keep them intact. They can keep two factions, but removing all grouping, guild, and communication issues, and you are there. In the current game, in the current expansion, both factions are at peace, working together, and existing in the same capital city.
And as for all races/all classes? Im not really concerned about it, but If that happened, my Tauren Demon Hunter would be made ASAP.
People need to stop demanding the faction IP dissolve factions. Go play another franchise.
I’ve had no problem finding wPvP. Lack of Horde on my Alliance heavy server? I just group up with a friend on a heavy Horde shard.
Random battlegrounds are finally fine as is.
Arenas have always been cross-faction in story so why even mention it?
Seriously.
XIV is right there for people who hate war IPs.
We got cross faction because it was a legitimate gameplay issue, not a story one. If anything, we can finally get some proper faction and pre-BFA vibe conflict stories going again because people can actually play the faction they want now without it impacting gameplay outside random BGs and wPvP.
I just want Horde stories. Stories about Horde characters and races, quests where you do quests for Horde characters, and things from a Horde perspective.
Whenever the game is “both factions working together”, the entire game is Alliance-themed. Legion being the perfect example, where all the NPC’s were Alliance, we were working from an Alliance-themed base, and the Horde was basically written out of the game for 2 years.
That’s why I’m opposed to cross-faction. We don’t even get Horde stories now. We’re never going to get Horde stories again if factions are eliminated.
I want Blizzard to rebuild the faction barrier. Build it higher than ever, in fact. It’s the only way we’ll ever get Horde-themed content, ever again. I actually think Blizzard should have two different story & writing teams. They already have an Alliance story team, they need to hire people to create a Horde story team as well.
I think, from a story perspective, that the static WoW factions keep us locked into stale plot lines. Historically factions, alliances, rivals and so on tend to be very dynamic over time. Populations, resources and ideologies tend to break some and create new, sort of like plate tectonics shapes the surface of our planet.
For example, elves should be a singular but rather fractious faction. I can also see night elves coming from their natural based technology and seeing the stone and concrete of Stormwind and never wanting those nature hating barbarians anywhere near them. The tauren would probably be allied with the nelves and have an unsteady working relationship with the orcs.
The forsaken would be their own faction as no one would fully trust them and probably for good reason. Though in reality, the forsaken would be attracted to human kingdoms due to historical reasons but also angry that they were abandoned.
Gnomes and dwarves make sense as a faction with goblins being quasi neutral to not miss any opportunities.
Due to human and orc populations rapidly growing with endless needs for resources both of them would constantly be clashing with each other and the nelves who live in areas that are resource rich. Belves and Velves would be largely independent but probably friendly with goblins as Machiavellian bedfellows.
Existential threats would naturally reshape these groupings and that’s where the dynamics of each expansion would come from. The downside is that it would make playing previous expansions difficult if one is friendly in the current expansion but hostile in previous ones. Old zones would have to reshape themselves with each new expansion rather than resting upon static political dynamics.
Still this could be a lot of fun, especially, if individual characters could choose alliances. History is filled with examples of individuals making choices against their group’s official policy as in, foreign fighters on both side of the current war in Ukraine shows. Perhaps a process of rep acquisition to make this more than just toggling a switch.
There can still be two factions, and not be in a war. this could be done in a Cold War scenario. The factions are cooperative to a degree, however, they will have sphere’s of influence, and will have proxy wars with one another, but never face each other directly due to the M.A.D principle.
The issue is the two faction system has been mismanaged into irrelevance.
If you want to do high end content for either PvP or PvE, you gotta be Horde. Blame it on Racials that were very overpowered for far too long in WoW’s history, blame it on prominent streamers, blame it on the World First Race, blame it on “Horde Bias” or whatever… the reality is a max exodus happened at the top end, where only 1/8 players pursuing Mythic Raiding and the highest tiers of organized PvP are Horde, and only about 28% of PvPers in general are Alliance (which makes them almost constantly have the ‘more recruits needed’ incentive for even casual PvP - can’t remember seeing a time in recent years it wasn’t up).
You cannot have a 2 faction system when 1 side is just clearly inferior and I’m glad Blizzard is finally recognizing that. Granted, I wish they’d fixed the problem so factions felt like they did back in the day before it was too late… but at least the problem is finally getting addressed with Cross-Faction Guilds in 10.1.
This is how the game was designed in vanilla/BC/wrath, and what Blizzard needs to go back to.
But we can’t, because Alliance players who don’t even raid kept complaining that there were more Horde raiding guilds, and that the Alliance couldn’t possibly get anything done unless they were allowed to be carried by Horde players. (Mind you, this isn’t true, but it’s the narrative they spun the last few years.)
And so here we are, with the Horde (the more popular faction) essentially being deleted. It’s the same as when they removed the more-popular 10-man raiding because 25-man raiders complained.
I’ll never get why OP and others like them want the game to change everything that makes it what it is to something it isn’t. Might as well ask for another MMO.
Agreed… we need a 3rd playable faction… that is at war with both The Alliance and The Horde… a faction with no remorse, no peaceful intentions, no compassion…
