It’s because alliance don’t have a population to play with.
Or they can leverage the playerbase they already have and allow them to play together. Wasting time on a chance to gather more players, and to a specific faction, would be counter productive, especially in light of being unable to attract new players lately, period.
What I want is to remain on Alliance, on my RP server (arguably 1 of 2 viable). It’s okay our wants are not the same. I don’t think you’re lazy or selfish for not being able to see more than one viewpoint.
And yet allowing cross-faction end-game content would solve it.
Agreed. The Faction division should remain. Just like there are those who live in a country/state/community and do not agree with the overall politics, there will be those who are all in. Blizzard should allow the option of cross-faction end game content w/out removing Faction barriers such as language, cities, and pvp. My thoughts are to extend the b-tag system into WoW and allow cross-faction end-game content to evolve organically. It would also allow Blizzard to cap it, if they felt there was too much mixing to reflect the brand identity.
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So. I suppose thanks for responding to my personal take and opinion on the stuff I mentioned and provided to the OP.
Thorough.
That said. Server merging might sound like a good idea but condsidering neither of us work at Blizzard I would speculate that it isnt that simple and there are caveats that make it not the simple switch flip that some seem to believe it to be. Instead of server mergers…I advocated for better content which would bring back more players in theory and, in theory, solve a large portion of the factual population issues and the perceived ones. I say this because the only real source of credible information on server populations would be Blizzard not 3rd party websites that maybe people use to try and discern the information. Im acknowledging a lot of this in the original post without spending a lot of time proving I understand such concepts.
Ive been playing since vanilla through Wrath and then off and on since Cata. I am very familiar with the faction conflict concept. Or maybe thanks for the kudos in acknowledging my acknowledgment of the significance the factions have to the game?
I would hardly call players who dont want to redo all the shadowlands stuff specifically and excluding other content on a new character lazy or selfish. Its an incredibly valid point made regarding the flakiness of some players and spending countless hours grinding a toon out to play with someone who might not even be around in 3 months. Its also a player issue. Leveling is easy but its ease is subjective with the most significant portion of that point being in available time to invest. Thats entirely a “player problem” despite that term seeming inadequate for the point. People have real lives too. Again player issues in the end.
Your feedback on my Preach comment. The paragraphs point was to…point that out. a portion of the population issues are player driven. Player problem… I also acknowledge the risk to the core faction divide and changing that. Im on a phone so I THINK I mentioned that in this post but if not apologies though I am keenly aware of the significance of such changes. Thanks for explaining.
My praragraph regarding whats reasonable and whats not. Im not sure I follow your response… the core of my point was play what you want. I dont see that paragraph as indicating that I am for or in against the cross faction concept. I understand the systems available for players.
Character creation.
Faction changes.
And no I dont advocate for an upheaval of the entire faction system. I dont recall indicating that but it seems that your reply is geared toward heading off the concept or implication that that IS what I am communicating? We appear to be on the same page here despite what I see as interpretation issues on both side.
NO DOUBT narrative isnt the issue holding back cross faction or faction removal or modification. I wasnt confused about that.
Yes…I am aware that some servers have a much lower base population than others. Been there and I understand but thank you for the clarification.
Sub numbers low between patches. Sure call it a design philosophy. We can debate when we as players we ahould have received content but we cant know why that didnt happen. Blizzard does. 2021 haz been a rough year for the company and as tou can guess its impacted production. Im guessing entirely or course. Maybe they just didn’t feel like doing anything? Im not a dev nor do I have an education in game development. What I can say is that there is only so much content a company can make in a given window of time and failure to ignore that concept and always expect more just doesnt seem reasonable to me. Not satisfied with whats in the latest content delivery is fine. But expecting there to always be enough new or fun stuff to keep an individual player with so much variability in available time and/or income engaged patch to patch…not sure what the expectation is as the expectation doesnt sound grounded in realistic expectations…in my opinion. I THINK i know what you are driving at but…not sure maybe.
There are plenty of non mmo games coming out all the time that also might have appeal that pulls people away.
Summary.
Its somewhat subjective or player interpretation dependant but…for #1 anyway. Some people say they are really enjoying Shadowlands.
#1 Game quality or core game experience
#2 Player driven issues.
Again thats my opinion on it. Entirely opinion. They are tied to each other. So I propose #1 clearly more significant than number 2. It also has player interpretation to contend with. Whats fun for one isnt fun for another…
Im sure you are already aware of the things I responded with here even if you, like me, didnt take the time to flesh it all out due to time constraints or assumptions of understanding.
No sarcasm or insult is intended if you end up reading this. Confusion.
Or maybe your responses are meant more as praise? I assume mostly so though praise might not be the best word for it.
Alright I think my legs are numb from this company toilet so I should get back to work.
Take care!
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BS… it is about pugging. period.
hmm, a troll making a troll post.
what is so difficult to understand. cross faction play = more people and more people means faster groups for LFD, LFR and Mythics.
Having Factions was cool in the beginning, then they started adding more races. They shoehorned several into one side or another that makes zero sense. Honestly, they should either let you faction pick regardless of race or even go three factions, but it is kind of lame how it is set up now. Nothing like the original.
Keeping the factions separate makes perfect sense from an RP perspective, and there are a lot of hard core RPers who feel very strongly about it. I get where they’re coming from. A lot of them have twenty or more years invested into the lore, going all the way back to the boomer games.
I’m not super invested in the game lore and RP really isn’t my thing, so from my perspective the races are just character skins that come with an extra button depending on your skin of choice, and it’s weird that the player base is divided based on skin.
Speaking for myself, two reasons:
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The story suffers heavily from the faction divide. Literally every expansion has put it aside for the “greater good”. It’s a tired mechanic from days gone.
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I like Horde races and I like Alliance races, I’m fine with either but I prefer some classes as Alliance races with the problem being all my friends play Horde. So I play Horde. Couple this with my first point and you can see how it’s an overall frustrating design.
Extra: Blizz already has a mechanic in place for people that want to keep the “faction” aspect in World PvP with War Mode. I have yet to see a compelling argument to keep the factions.
It has been a trend since server transfers started. Even in Vanilla there were some servers with Either Horde or Alliance dominant. People want to play with the most possible group members and guild members. So they naturally migrate. Then when faction change became available, it exacerbated the issue. People kept migrating to where there were the most players in their faction.
Over time, servers have become Alliance or Horde servers. The populations have dispersed that way. And now, we see that most PvE players have migrated to where the majority of those players are. Horde servers.
This was happening long before BfA. And it was an issue long before BfA. But the Hall of Fame definitely shone a bright glaring spotlight on the issue and the faction disparity.
The faction barrier has to go. It is really the only way forward.
I would love cross Faction grouping for tons of reasons that people have gone in to already in depth:
The dwindling population being split isn’t good. It would open the pool of available players to do stuff with. If you meet someone who plays wow, and become friends irl, you can play together. It would solve tons of problems.
My personal reason is because I get sick of looking for groups in two different pools. I log on to my highest ilvl Horde Character, and look for groups for my Horde Characters. Then, I have to log on to the Allance and see what is going on there. It would be nice if I just had one listing.
As a casual pugger who plays both Factions, it would make things more fun and convenient.
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- it actually makes more sense in game then it doesn’t?
- allows people who want to play alliance races but play horde due to faction restrictions; you might say well just play alliance then? bringing me to #3.
- allows people who want to push harder content on alliance that current struggle due to lack of groups or better skilled players to actually do content they want to do ( this has been talked a lot already involving mythic raiders and high M+ keys. majority of which probably swapped to horde over the years while some still remain on alliance ).
people always tell me form my own group of play X server instead. it’s not that simple. i live in Hawaii im already 2-3 hours behind PST servers and if you take into my work days/schedule and my days off and other stuff i need to do irl on my days off there is little room to be waiting hours on end to pug groups WHICH is what i have been doing over the year specifically for raiding. i literally waste more time waiting for groups to fill then i do playing the game when it comes to pugging a raid and that is on a populated horde server.
east coast i think is 5-6 hours ahead, Oceanic gives me high latency. east coast it gets high as well but i think tolerable.
major issue for me though is i actually came from alliance LONG… ago. played with friends, tried filling our guild and raid time on launch day it was rough af to find competent players so bad to the point we couldn’t even down the first boss on normal. then i got to deal with friends who refused to play horde so then i basically went my own way after majority of them quit. 1 plays but he is off and on constantly and still only wants to play alliance which is up to him. he is a good player though.
i swapped to horde back then mostly for a different feel of the game and races but stayed because i became attached after maining horde now longer then i did alliance and that i have to rely so much on pugging. finding a guild for my schedule is pretty rough. it may get better in the future but currently im looking at the present
You are not describing cross faction play. You have no way of communicating with or grouping with those members of the other faction. And for PvP joining either side, isnt really cross faction, it just makes you the opposite faction for the duration of the match.
Here is my take on it. In the game, at this point, story wise, there is no reason why the two factions cant group and work together. We do it constantly.
The player populations have become hyper concentrated. PvE is horde. And by and large, at least on US servers, Its mostly horde players. An entire faction of race/class combos are not used. Not because people want to. But because if they do choose alliance, then they isolate themselves from the bulk of the players.
I just dont see any reason why keeping a largely arbitrary faction divide in the game, improves the game at all. There are plenty of alliance races I want to play. But I would have to transfer to Stormrage, or the other high pop alliance server. Then I would be separated from, pretty much all the people I regularly play with. So I am locked into Horde.
Long story shore, freeing up the faction barrier, only opens the game up more, and improves the player experience.
On the greedy Bobby K, Activision side, It will only generate more revenue. There are a lot of Horde players that would buy race changes to alliance, and some alliance to horde, if that meant they could still be in the guild with their friends and group and raid with them.
Horde players want Stormwind on the horde lol
Cross faction queues would mean nothing to the game’s integrity. It would literally be queuing into instanced content, playing it out, then everyone returns to being able to murder each other out in the world.
Games population is declining, and as a mostly PVP player if there’s some guy/girl sitting on the Alliance around my CR when I’m trying to queue I’d sure like to be able to accommodate them.
Why should a Human mage have a harder time finding a group than an Orc Mage?
Why should a Gnome Warrior spend 2 hours finding a raid when they could spend <30mins as a Troll?
Why should one faction have longer/shorter queues just because they like the way X race looks or Y story plot?
This is why cross-faction play is important.
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I think there is room to allow it to happen & I imagine we’ll see it rolled out some day soon ™.
One interesting way they could do it would be to tack it on at the end of the current roll out system at the start of each tier - Normal & Heroic full raid faction exclusive, mythic & LFR (week by week), then once LFR is completely open have that trigger cross faction availability in LFR > Heroic… finally have cross faction available on mythic once the hall of fame is full.
- Queue’s are bad, on both factions, whether people claim there’s 10x more horde players or not. Mine are generally 20 min regardless if not tank or heals.
- The story constantly forces the “heroes” together to cooperate and they’re “friends” while at the same time the factions are at war so let’s just shed the nonsense and let us choose to do content together.
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Don’t see why it is not possible in non warmode . They could make it as an option one checks off like when you mark are you either tank , dps or heals and the are you willing to lead mark .
Have it for the LfD/LfR finger and the LfG .
I mean they are computer programmers if any one can make it possible with out completely removing the factions they should be able to.
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Server mergers are actually far easier to accomplish than trying to alter the base game code to allow for cross faction. So, there we shall have to agree to disagree.
I really wish more people were this civil here. There wouldn’t be so much toxic behavior if others would actually take the time to just be polite rather than obtuse. The latter just ends up gaining the same thing in return and i’ve experienced that far too often from way too many people on this forum. Thank you for that civility.
That said, i can’t shake my view that some of the people screaming the loudest for cross faction are only doing it cause of lazy behavior considering how easy things have become to level toons as opposed to how things were from Vanilla all the way through wrath in regards to that leveling process. If people really want to just play with friends, it isn’t a difficult thing to go through barring time constraints. Not everyone has the same amount of time obviously for leisure activities but this is an old game that’s gone through so many changes that have dumbed it’s leveling process down so low, it really is an absurd joke at this point considering it’s an mmoRPG. Those last 3 letters about the game are slowly being destroyed by the company.
As i said above, altering base game code is not an easy process nor does it guarantee success. It was why Ion even stated there were other issues besides the narrative structure of the game preventing that from happening.
As far as talking with friends through the chat system? That’d work, it still doesn’t resolve the problem of rewriting the base game code. With that now repeated a third time i also have to point out that they’d have to alter the game code of every expansion too, any of which also hold the potential of breaking and causing other problems. That isn’t something just immediately done over night, least of all within any reasonable amount of time. It could take years and that’s a big IF they could even do it in the first place.