I was thinking today what it would be like if we had a couple neutral realms where both factions could interact with each other,
Both horde and alliance could group up to do dungeons and raids even join neutral guilds.
I know it kinda ruins immersion but does that stuff really matter anymore ? It would be cool to see humans and orcs fighting together instead of against each other for a change.
For city’s I’m not sure if we would allow the opposing factions inside them or not but details like that could be hashed out later on.
I know for RP people this might be a cool option to have but what does everyone else think?
I like being horde and fighting against the alliance I just think this would cater to some people who don’t like the whole PvP and warmode thing and would rather just enjoy the game without the conflict.
While that may be true, I believe WoW itself is now nothing but a theme park for friends and families to gather and have fun together. We could leave the strictly-faction-conflict aspect to other games and have various aspects to cater a broad spectrum of players in WoW.
I don’t think offering simple opt outs works for everything. Sometimes in a game you need solid consistent rules. I firmly believe faction separation is one such rule.
I honestly love this idea! I had been hoping that some day we would be able to pick a faction first and then any of the races but this idea accomplishes the same.
The lore is not worth anything but do not destroy the only thing that still gives meaning to the game!
Why would an orc dunce partner with a human with 3 times his intelligence?
Why would a worgen tolerate a forsaken ??
Alex Afrasiabi was quoted a couple of times at Blizzcon this year saying that Blizzard indeed aspires to, someday soon, allow both factions to group, quest, and raid together. (Specifically, he talked about the dilution of the playerbase and the need to bring players together for the long-term health of the game.)
This I would think would be the reason above all else. I don’t know the sub numbers. I don’t know the faction counts. Im not saying the game is dying. But at some point, if it isn’t now, this will be the reality.
You realize faction wars aren’t the only way a “war” can exist in WoW right?
There’s a huge portion of the population that doesn’t even participate in this sort of stuff.
Further, the alliance horde beef only continues because Blizzard keeps shoe honing in horrible leadership into the horde, who all seem hell bent on killing as many people as possible.
The idea that the two factions could not be at war, but other wars are erupting around them and their having to fight to keep their own people safe is not a new concept in WoW. It’s been done before, to pretty good effect.
Yeah, and even if the game weren’t dying (and, let’s face it, even if it only has ~1 million active subscribers, which is the latest conjecture – and Blizzard actively disputes it, FWIW, but they stopped counting at ~5-6 million several years ago, down from the ~14 million high of Wrath of the Lich King – the game can and should benefit from cross-faction play.
IMO, You can maintain racial and faction tension without enforcing strict grouping and communication prohibitions. While EverQuest did a lot of things terribly wrong, their faction and racial-cross-grouping system was one of the things they did right, IMO.
Honestly instead of neutral realms that would be too much effort for blizzard so they would just give up like they do on a lot of topics, instead we have neutral “modes”
So people are granted titles of ambassador or diplomat so they can travel with limited abilities and have a chance to go to other faction capitols for sweet loot but under heavy watch by guards and players.
Then make it like a reputation system where the more activites and quests you do in the name of peace between the factions gives you more access to content for peaceful ideals like resource trading, hunting/gathering parties, and forming personalized neautral zones of your own that you can customize with bars and feast halls or vendors where you can sell items less common on one side to the other.
It seems like a lot and I doubt they would ever do something like this but the world of Azeroth is not black and white but they treat the horde and alliance like they are nothing but black and white choices.
That would be incredibly boring.
But as long as this realm was “walled-off” and none of the new elements present in it are in other realms, I suppose it would be fine.
To my knowledge it worked fine on Dark Age of Camelot. A game that was made and based around the three realm conflict.
There are plenty of big baddies that we are still doing the Warcraft thing within an all PvE server. And if they want to Warmode, share them over to a warmode shard.