That is what I’m saying. But let’s be brutally honest with ourselves.
Dragonflight is them trying to do that, as a cooldown from the bleak mess that was BFA/SL arc. Trying to have more fleshed out characters and meaningful story where the focus isn’t trying to stop a super god from blowing up the world. (Yes the irony of saying this with Fyrakk does not escape me.)
And look how a bunch of people are crying about needing more war in warcraft.
Yes I’d want more nuance and the like but I’d like the characters to be characters in order to do that. That would mean instead of following “X Faction” or “X Race” doing a thing, we’d have “This character is attempting to do a thing” with all the character development that entails.
That particular problem is simply because Blizzard refuses to do anything horizontal progression-wise. Everything needs to be bigger, stronger, and faster than before.
Now imagine all of that, compounded by faction presence due to PvP performance.
With the current raid tier going the way it is going, we’re about to hit a super God–existential threat-- within the next expansion. Its a gut feeling, and I can be wrong on it. But its on the horizon.
Yeah, PvP is dying, if its not considered dead at this point. But that in itself isn’t caused from the story, that is more so from the complexity of game mechanics and having 17 different types of CC that are nuanced and good for specific circumstances. Its over designing the game, where most people want a meaningful story. But at the same time don’t want to go into a stupid war because “hey undead are actually evil, gotcha.” — (Sylvannas).
I mean, over complexity of the combat design contributes to it, as well as balancing. Death Knights are my favorite Class in the lore. That lore went out the window. So did the balance around the three specializations. I haven’t touched a DK since the start of SL, which after an hour of experiencing DK, i haven’t gone back since.
Yes, WoW’s mechanical problems aren’t doing it any favors, but neither would forcing PvP pressure on the playerbase on top of them.
If the factions were optional, and races weren’t hard-locked to them at creation, then fine, let the factions be a lot more bloodthirsty and high-strung. I just don’t want to be a part of Teldrassil 2.0.
As someone who played Chromehounds back in the day, can confirm that this is what happened after Morskoj won the first war. IIRC they won like 80% of the wars until the servers were shut down, which was a little absurd for a three-faction game.
I feel like the way I’m trying to word this thing isn’t PvP oriented but more PvE oriented with a bit of PvP sprinkled in. The faction’s PvE performance is what’s supposed to determine who “wins” the expac (it’s meta-PvP), and it’s supposed to be balanced such that population differences don’t skew results (so if people bail and join the currently winning faction, they’re going to water down the contributions of their faction (i.e., everyone’s contributions scale lower if their faction is more popular, whereas the less popular faction scales higher to balance out population differences)).
Also I’d still play Horde whether Horde won or lost cuz foxes. Also winning or losing doesn’t matter to me. I just think it’d be interesting to have the player’s efforts guide the story.
I think we both agree on a lot of points. I do think concerns over player population density is a concern too. Considering i’m on Alliance and the cities are usually dead, if not sparsely populated.
But I think if the aformentioned points were addressed, and it was a meaningful conflict that was additive rather than superficial introduction to an overblown deity, it may add more value, and perhaps volume to the player base.
Yeah Teldrassil and the narrative in BFA was atrocious. I loved the PvP and the design of the areas, but I absolutely did not enjoy the idea of killing a Deity (N’zoth). That was pretty bland.
Then you have people crying foul that their faction’s being nerfed just because they happen to be more popular. ‘If we have more people, we should be doing better, obviously!’ And they’d have a point. Your gains are being punished for reasons beyond your control.
EDIT: Then you get situations where one side’s more popular, but those players aren’t actively contributing. So you’re doing your part, but there’s an entire group over there that’s totally uninterested in whatever this is. Would these adjustments be made by active players? Unique accounts? What about alt armies?
I am curious as to how they could get to step two after such implementations and adjustments were made for evaluation.
Step two would require years of evaluation, and by the time said group “won,” they would need to adjust the story accordingly. That is a lot of in game dialogue to change, and more. I think it would be pretty difficult, maybe impossible at worst.
Hyper-competitiveness is definitely a big problem (not just in WoW). No clue how it can be solved other than avoiding competition completely, but it’s sad to have to avoid something that can be interesting and fun when done right. It’s why I feel like some sort of meta-competition could be interesting (something where there’s competitiveness, but, to succeed you need to collaborate with your faction, and you need to do it in such a way that isn’t toxic or hyper-competitive (it needs to be fun even when you’re losing)). I think there’s a way to do it but it’s a very fine balance to make it work (I’m not exactly sure how to make something like that work though).
That should’ve been the case after BfA. The truce was made beacuse neither side could continue to fight but the tensions should be super high in the air.
Not to have hug parties and talks about feelings all the time.
Then the problem only grows further exacerbated. Now people will stack ‘sunk cost fallacy’ atop the Snowball Effect and suddenly those population imbalances become permanent.
Honestly it’s not even hyper-competitiveness, it’s spite. People want to see the Other Team™ fail. They want to rub it in. They want to ruin their gameplay solely because they’re afforded the opportunity to.
It doesn’t have to be a war, but it should be tense. Any time the Horde and Alliance share space, the threat of conflict should always loom like a specture.
Any slight, real or imagined could shatter the tenuous peace and plunge Azeroth into a new age of strife.
The levels of friendship we got in DF is several orders of magnitude too far. Not so soon, not after so much bad blood for so long.
Hyper-competitiveness will always exist, but game design shouldn’t be based on it. If they simplified the quantities of CC’s and other mechanics in the game, it would make balancing much easier and bring classes closer together in terms of damage,healing or otherwise. But there is only a couple balancing devs on that front.
Designing a game on hyper-competitiveness means more complexity. More complexity means less players are going to be included, and a higher demand on performance is required. When you start adding in time-crunches into keys, dps metrics, hps metrics, it’ll encourage the toxic behavior. Especially with 30 minute-1hr commitments in say M+ keys or even in raid. The higher the bar is raised, the worse the casual player becomes. In truth there are more “Bad” players in wow than good, I am one of them too. Eventually the bar becomes so high that almost no one can participate or you deal with others who are the same way. Game design incentivizes toxicity out of fear of being punished for burning a key or wasting time in a raid.
and that is why the game isnt succeeding you get the new age wow loving players who like the peace. than you got those who love the old wow and have been with the franchise since before worldofwarcraft i been playing the warcraft since warcraft 2. played wow on my sisters account til i got my own when i got older and got a job.
Also winning or losing doesn’t matter to me. 
I just think it’d be interesting to have the player’s efforts guide the story.