Or perhaps we could find win-win solutions to our conflicts of interest that would allow us all to continue enjoying the game rather than trying to drive each other away?
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I love HvA, game needs more of it. Horde are a blight on Azeroth that must be cleansed by the Light and might of the alliance.
Also, it kinda went out the door when Thrall shows up to help Anduin recover. There was a time he would have rammed a sword through him.
What happened was that there was real consequences (thanks to the story they wrote) and no one likes it. WoW was sold as an adventure game were we are supposed to be adventurers not generals, not soldiers, and that was apparently forgotten.
They didnât make a star wars were millions if not billions of sentient beings die and no one seemingly cares, entire planets are blown up and itâs basically another tuesday. So yeah they wrote themselves into a corner and the only way out was to either wipe out an entire faction or have the other faction do the same and they didnât want it cause in the end what would be left? The faction conflict taken to its most probable finale would be the end of wow unless they mumbo jumbo in cloning and brush away all they had done
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The catch is that WoW is an MMO. There are players on each side of the faction divide.
Neither side can make any progress because that alienates the other half of the player base. No-one can win, just an infinite stalemate.
And it gets boring.
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I mean technically itâs the same thing when it comes to the bads that we face at the end of every expansion.
There can really be no progress made in the long run without ending the story. Which wouldnât just alienate half of us but all of us. We canât kill all of the bads. The bads canât kill us.
So itâs an endless stalemate against cosmic forces that we canât actually beat without ending the game.
How is that somehow less boring? Itâs all about suspending disbelief and enjoying the story in the moment as opposed to forecasting âthe endâ in either case.
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Iâd prefer it is there WAS only one faction, the H vs. A is so last decade and needs to die, itâs asinine in the context of all of the âend of the worldâ story lines are concerned.
If you want faction conflict do PvP, it has no relevance in PVE any more.
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Whatâs important is changing the scenery.
Sure, weâre going to have a new baddie turn up each expansion. But the players still get the win, the old baddie is gone and everyone gets to celebrate and the illusion of progress is maintained. Itâs an infinite line instead of a circle. Treading the same ground over and over with the faction conflict makes the loop obvious and breaks the illusion.
Maybe there is a writer good enough keep the illusion of progress while maintaining the faction conflict status quo. But they donât work at Blizzard.
I donât see any causality there. People donât change factions because of the story, but because of racials and boni. Imbalance already existed on servers before.
Ion the wise stated that there will be no further focus on the faction war, but he does not want to close any doors. Thatâs far less absolute than youâre expressing it.
There wonât be another focus on the legion either, but this doesnât mean we will never face demons again.
Thatâs not the full picture.
Alliance and Horde were unable to work together, so neutral factions were formed or joined. Gilneas and the Forsaken continued to fight each other. With BFA, the class orders either remained neutral or disbanded for rational reasons.
The masses of the factions didnât joined the class orders; they remained behind. This is also a common fallacy in the âwe have always worked togetherâ argument. No: Only a few faction representatives have collaborated in a specific region. The remaining 99% continued to fight or bury corpses. If someone tells the guy from Brennadan, whose house was burned down and half his family was killed in a Horde raid, that a couple of Alliance and Horde guys stopped Aszhara together in Nazjatar, he wonât give a f.
Regarding the forced part:
In fact, the time for a the war to erupt was ideal. A common enemy is only effective for the duration of its existence. When it falls away, old conflicts resurface. They had only been suppressed and not resolved. This is human and authentic.
And there were numerous reasons for conflict. Sylvanas mentions them in âa good warâ with Saurfang. For these reasons, it would have made more sense for the Alliance to initiate the conflict btw.
This setting has allowed for good war stories, deep emotions, epic scenes reminiscent of Lord of the Rings, and political skirmishes akin to Game of Thrones. Peace does not provide anything like that. Peace is boring. Even romantic movies need conflict. Of course, it failed because the writer of the war campaign lacked skill and squandered all of his potential. But this does not alter the fundamental premise.
If there is no war because it does not make sense in the story (as in TWW), that is one thing; however, allowing the characters to act as if they were close friends after killing each otherâs friends for a decade is super wierd. The faction conflict (not war) is more plausible than this hanky-panky with the former enemy.
I believe people are capable of distinguishing between fiction and reality. I play shooters, but I would never touch a real gun.
Youâre bothered by action in an action movie, mate.
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I used to be pretty big about factions and the faction divide but at this point in time stuff like world content, world quests, dungeon queues, raid queues, etc. I would prefer to be able to play with my bestie thatâs a Dark Iron Dwarf because legit if we are grouped who cares. 
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I am gunna have to respectfully disagree with you there, mate.
I absolutely think that players should be able to group (guild, and even visit cities) cross faction. Thereâs no reason to keep us separated for gameplay. But for the storyline however, there definitely still needs to be a division between Horde and Alliance.
I love a good faction war. BFA was not that bad, sure the ending was ripped out of LOTRO, and NyaâLotha and Nazjatar shouldâve been their own respective expansions, but it was great. I wish the faction war had had more time. After Dazaâalor, imagine a raid in stormwind or someplace! Sure, Sylvanas was irritable, but she was the perfect villain!
Shame they copped her out so she can be our mascot 5 years from now.
Letâs face it, player characters in World of Warcraft PVE have long been âneutralâ. We work with who we need to in order to get the job done, Horde or Alliance. Our characters have always had to look at the greater good. We did it in Silithus. We did it at Blackrock Mountain and Hyjal. We did it in Ulduar and Icecrown. The list goes on. Horde vs Alliance worked fine for Warcraft, but a game built around grouping and social interaction is actually hindered by such things. I canât tell you the number of times Iâve met people who played, or even had friends that started playing, only to find we couldnât play together because of the faction divide. It sucked to be faced with someone needing to give up their investment in a character and that characterâs affiliation. So glad itâs gone.
And story wise⌠leading up to Shadowlands, the narrative of âweâre all heroesâ and âthe Horde arenât villainsâ was really stretched beyond belief. The faction followed the atrocities of Garrosh, then followed the atrocities of Sylvanas. Lore-wise, Baine of all characters should have balked a lot sooner at Sylvanas than he did considering Garrosh left Tauren and Darkspear soldiers to be bombed at Theramore. On another note, man did it suck in Legion for Alliance players to invest so heavily in both the Highmountain and Nightborn stories only to be told that no, those races arenât for you. It doubly sucked in BFA to find myself forced to fight my own factionâs heroes, and to find myself forcibly re-rolled to a different race - I took the time to customize a character because THATâs what I wanted to play, and that agency, that choice was taken away for the faction narrative. The current narrative is much more palatable and strips less player agency, though it is easy to argue that it is more Alliance slanted - the Horde doesnât have as strong a lore connection to âthe lightâ as the Alliance, and Light vs Void/Shadow is a big emphasis of the story. I suspect with the next patch and the coming interactions with the Harronir, weâll see some more involvement from Horde aligned characters.
I think you could realistically have PvP only stories and questlines without forcing those of us who do PVE to suffer for it, but thatâs a bigger storytelling commitment than weâve seen Blizzard make.
No. Sorry.
All this means is that we are boiled down to a SINGLE homogenized story with no end that doesnât alienate (remove, end game for) all of us.
You had the option to change scenery before by playing both factions. Now nobody has the option to change scenery. Thank you for your contribution.
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And that gets an ignore
Eugenics never really went away.
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None of my friends listen to the story. No one in my guild cares about the story. There is a ton of stuff to do in this game that isnât story. We choose to enjoy that side of the game. It is nice to be able to group, raid, and guild with friends who changed factions years ago.
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lol if you think you were getting much change in scenery from two faction stories.
The only expansion where core hubs remained fully separate was BFA and all it did was push dumb âskewed perspectiveâ narratives on both side.
Then again I guess I should be used to the bad takes, pity for the hidden profile.
Donât worry yâall, I am keeping up the good fight slaying Alliance flight masters
Of course some of these dudes got a buff. I nearly got destroyed by one guard in Goldshire
I told Jim to stop attacking me. But he persisted. So I had to open up a can of Apocalypse
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These perspectives advanced the faction divide narratives.
The entire point was to have different perspectives. Calling them âskewedâ means that you think one was objectively accurate or should have been written that way.
Different != skewed.
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All they did was advance the toxicity levels and confirm why the wow playerbase has the worst reputation across all mmos
When the devs decide to do something stupid like Mists 3.0/BFA 2, Iâll be waiting with a shovel to bury the game for good. Itâs what the faction brainers will have wanted.
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