Why Are Other Games Better with Faction Representation?

Community General Discussion
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NOTE: THIS IS NOT A THREAD ABOUT FACTION CONFLICT, BUT FACTION REPRESENTATION AND CONTENT IN GENERAL
I’ve seen a lot of people reference SWTOR and ESO lately when talking about faction-based MMOs.

If you dont know, these are both relatively popular MMORPGs (some of the last successful MMORPGs if I’m being honest). SWTOR has 2 factions. ESO has 3. Both of these games keep their factions relevant, and even when the factions arent the focus they are still present and express their political/ideological differences with one another.

But in the WoW community, there seems to be a growing narrative that faction based MMOs are inherently a bad idea, and that it’s impossible to make one without one faction feeling left out or overly-villainized.

But I’ve played all of these MMOs and, when it comes to factions, WoW clearly stands out in a bad way.

Sure, none of these other games are perfect, but I think anyone who’s played them can see that:

  1. Its still possible to make a faction based mmo
  2. People still want to play faction-based mmos
  3. You can make a faction based mmo without one side needing to “win” over the others.

So why is this so hard for Blizzard? How did we get to the point where, not only is the faction CONFLICT gone (I actually prefer it when we’re in a “cold” war but we dont even have that), but Blizzard seems ashamed of any kind of faction pride or representation.

To make matters worse (and to get all the Alliance stans to attack me in the comments), when they’re trying to tell a faction “neutral” story it still involves mostly Alliance characters in Alliance-coded zones dealing with races who have strong cultural or mythological ties to the Alliance (the Earthen and the Arathi).

It seems that, even when they’re trying to diminish the factions, there’s really only one set of races and themes they feel comfortable working with anymore.

So, as far as faction-based MMOs go, WoW has become the worst of the bunch when it comes to the factions.

Why? How did we get here? Why are two of the most popular MMOs able to beat Blizzard at their own game? How did we get to the point where a vocal minority of the playerbase, and the entirety of the writing team, genuinely wants to change this faction-based MMO into something else?

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I miss the faction wars. It certainly created a community and you felt more part of something.

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Because there are no “political/ideological differences” between the Horde and Alliance. Neither faction believes in anything and are shallow as a puddle. The only difference really is their names.

Because Blizzard can’t write to save their lives.

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Agreed, but I dont even need a full on war.

Hell, I’m even fan with MECHANICALLY merging the factions more.

I just want the factions to feel like they matter in-universe. I want…a faction based MMO.

I thought that’s what I signed up for.

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ESO; The three factions are pretty much done with their conflicts with each other after their DLC High Isle released and Cyrodil is just a race for recourses, and getting the Throne is player / faction bragging rights more than glorified power now.

SWtOR; your character is just humoring the factions as a glorified figure head after taking control of the Eternal Fleet as Super Space Cop helping niche and fringed groups with their struggles after slapping the Emperor and all his personalities out of existence.

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Both of these examples (which you’ve intentionally made as reductive as possible to support your flimsy argument) are better than what is currently happening in WoW.

To act like the factions dont matter anymore in ESO, when the center of the map is focused on faction-based pvp, with players literally fighting over the most iconic place in the lore, is laughable to me. Like I said, even when the factions take a back seat in the story you still feel their presence and understand their differences.

Seriously, go to the Summerset Isle or Elsweyr DLC zones and tell me they dont show you EXACTLY what the Aldmeri Dominion is all about.

Compare this to WoW.

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The Alliance and Horde have fought together in WoW more often than they have against each other. We co-operate in every expansion, even in the one where we’re at war, but then Azshara pops up and we band together again. After working together so frequently over the years continued conflict feels silly and manufactured.

If we’re going back to factional wars in the future, it’ll likely be between different sub-factions within existing ones. Like Grimtotem Tauren supremacists trying to conquer Kalimdor, a fanatical Arathi sect waging a holy crusade that attracts Light worshippers from both the Alliance and Horde, or whatever.

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So you would be fine with more tribal designs and lore since that’s what the Horde is at its core and the main thing that separates it from the Alliance?

I ask because there’s already been an uproar that the Horde design for housing is too “Orcsih” and spiky like the Garrison.

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So your ignoring all of Greymoor, Blackwood, High Isle, Necrom and Gold Road for only two chapters that delt with Princes trying to take over and back stab each other, and moody broody Dragons trying to siphon power from themselves that leads to, two of the last Tharns getting killed off.

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A very common but completely false argument.

The faction conflict makes up 98% of the content in which the Alliance and Horde must deal with one another. The few convenience alliances that do exist are transient and fraught with distrust.

If 25 Horde and Alliance members are collaborating on a distant front against a third enemy, why should the other 99.99% of the factions, who have been standing on scorched fields for 30 years, care?

If anything is silly and manufactured, it is the faction leaders’ close friendship.

With the help of neutral factions, you can cater to both tastes perfectly. In wotlk, we saw conflict between the Alliance and the Horde, as well as a lot of cooperation with the Argent Crusade.

Nonetheless, the ‘pro-coop’ party wants to deny the others the butter on their bread.

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There are a lot of possible answers here. Maybe they finally realized they had failed to make good faction conflicts. Maybe they didn’t and instead stopped because they thought WoW fans just don’t like faction conflict. Maybe stepping out of the faction conflict was just a normal step in the story and the characters themselves decided they went overboard that one time.

But I think most people agree that the faction conflict has been handled extremely poorly. I have to go all the way back to BC just to find an expansion that wasn’t obviously overall Alliance being the PvE good guy faction fighting bad guys while Horde are either absent or being bad fighting Alliance or themselves, only stopping when factions are irrelevant.

That’s enough reason for people to say Blizzard shouldn’t do faction conflict anymore: because if they try, then it will be bad.

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And according to you these are the last two, and the last even moderately successful, and there are none since.

See above.

If you can make one at all that’s successful. But I think that’s just more of your first two points.

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Doesn’t mean it’s good. Doesn’t mean it’s bad. We don’t need every MMO to be faction based, WoW doesn’t need to be.

You’re basing this opinion (not fact) on you seeing people play SWTOR and ESO. Well, more people play WoW than both of these games put together, mathematically speaking it’s more accurate to say people don’t want to play faction based MMO. Not to mention FF14 and GW2, also not faction based and also have playerbase comparable or quite frankly way bigger than SWTOR and ESO.

Or you can make a faction based MMO where the point is not to always end up fighting each other, but rather to team up in order to win.

It’s not hard, it’s just not the direction they wanted, and just because you want a different direction doesn’t mean your direction is better. It just means you’re playing a game not made for you, no game is made for everyone, and you already identified 2 games better suited for you. So you don’t have a real problem, and you already found 2 solutions for your absent problem. Why cry?

As the game evolved and players started playing both sides more and more natural selection resulted in players making friends on both sides and wanting to play with everyone or having their opposing faction alts be able to participate in the same raid with all their friends.
Which makes me reall wonder where this comes from:

Objectively incorrect, most people want factions gone. I have no idea in what bubble you exist to fabricate yourself the belief that the majority loves having 98% of the game content be limited by factions, with zero benefit to counter this issue.

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Considering your other examples of factions done better are less commercially successful than wow, I think you’ve constructed an effective argument that faction representation is not important to make a good MMO.

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WoW had factions as a major part of the game for almost its entire history, and had many more players while they were doing it.

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Then go play the ones you mentioned.

The faction war has been dead and wildly unpopuler for a decade.

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I wish they would bring back the faction wars, but add a twist on the current system.

Why can’t we have some reason for fallout between factions that makes them go to the other? Why even limit Orcs, Trolls, Tauren ect to just Horde and Humans, NEs and Dwarfs to just alliance? Get rid of the race based on the faction, and then just let players select whatever race and pick which faction they want to support.

You can still have wars, it opens up to choice for someone who wants to be an Undead heavy metal guitarist but also play on the alliance side with their Dwarf, Human and Elf counterparts to journey and destroy a ring…

Or flip that and with the return of Thrall vs Garrosh the Horde faction has been split, add flavour context around different factions, some of which are mentioned above for like Tuarens, Trolls ect… And let the blood fued begin!

Does it matter at the end of the day, not really. We just grind for shiny objects that get easily replaced :person_shrugging: If you read all this, you must be bored.

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It’s cheaper to design a game this way.

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Have you actually played through the entire campaigns of both games, or did you ask Chatgpt to write this up for you?

Swtor is also on life support, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ESO wasn’t close to that.

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This isnt really relevant to my point. This isnt a post about faction conflict, but faction representation, faction-themed content, and faction pride.

As I mentioned in my OP, I dont even mind that the factions arent at open war with each other. This thread isn’t about that.

So you dont even know what you’re talking about and just making assumptions and insulting me with low effort chatgpt memes.

Blocked forever. Your contributions to this discussion are worthless.

So sad yet so true.

Again, this isn’t a post spefically about faction conflict. I literally said I prefer it when we’re not at open war. Are you semi-illiterate? Are you high on a Wednesday afternoon?

And what a shallow and immature response to hear any criticism or comparison to any other game and say, “Go play that game”.

  1. I do play those games
  2. I like WoW more. Factions arent the only reason I play this game you dolt.

You clearly didnt even read my post and just came here to make snide remarks.

Very true. I think the problem has more to do with Blizzard handling the factions so poorly that a vocal minority of the fanbase is now traumatized and hates anything to do with factions.

But, again, I dont even necesarily want another faction WAR. I just want the factions to feel like they matter within this faction-based MMORPG.

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