World of Monsterwars and Fairycraft

Community WoW Community Council
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I recently watched a video which claimed there has been confirmation via an interview with a World of Warcraft Developer stating that the goal is to make it so that all races are capable of being any class. I’d imagine this might be excluding Demon Hunter and Evokers for example.

I wonder what your thoughts are and if they’re the same as mine. My opinion is not one many people will share I’d imagine, so let me know what you think and why you think it!

My opinion for what it’s worth is: Every step taken to free up, or make available comes at a heavy cost to the core reasons as to why many people play this game. Whether you’ve played the game for a long time, are interested in competitive play or casual play all of us are forced to pick a race, class and faction. By making every class available to every race and making cross faction as we have done, it’s made that choice meaningless.

You could argue that in this mmorpg the fantasy isn’t important and that it has no influence for most people I do actually agree, yet I still believe there’s a good 20-40% of the playerbase and possibly 60% of returning players who look at the current design of the game and go “What the hell is this, World of Monsterwars and Fairycraft?” Making sense? No? Okay, you enter a raid and it’s a team of Tauren Rogues, Flying Elves (demon hunters), soon Dragons (Evokers) who by the way can’t be Tanks (a role everyone relies on which should be put forth to as many classes as possible in my opinion) and finally a furry fox (vulpera) who looks like something out of Sonic the Hedgehog. Perhaps the returning player enjoys PvP only and checks out some Rated Battleground footage instead, what do they see? A battle between two teams of monsters of mixed identity fighting for a base (warsong hold) they would normally seek to burn down and in order to capture the flag one of the players has turned into a fox and blinked as a mage would without being a druid or in anyway related to magic as it was a prot warrior (I am well aware guardian is the only viable FC throughout SL this is an example).

Please excuse my exhaggeration I want to make my point clear: It is in my opinion a massive mistake to make all class-race combinations available and Cross Faction in combination with this will make for a very unappealing game in the eyes of a returning player who knows the foundations of the game’s lore and has a desire to make a choice that matters!

The only benefit of Cross Faction and Unlocking all Race-Class Combos is accessibility and the idea that the reason why everyone stopped playing was due to that is utter madness, systems design and a lack of community care in my opinion have been the major contributors to the game’s fading population. All of that’s in the past, what do you think? Should we be totally unconcerned with enabling all class-race combinations and happy with Cross Faction because it’s been applied? I certainly am not, I’d like to hear what you think don’t hold back I can take a hit.

Thanks!

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Yeah I agree with you I think it really loses the essence of WoW if they made Orc Paladins even though it would be really really cool. I think that the biggest bother for me is that each race and class basically loses its identify everytime they open things up for no reason besides it would be cool.

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That’s pleasing to hear, I just did a Raid with new people that I’d met for the first time and on ner’zhul we ended up having 3 players on the team quote Warcraft 3 lines “zug zug, work work” haha showed for sure that people are out there with similar early warcraft experiences.

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I respect your opinion but fyi, there is no way 20 let alone 40 or 60 percent of the player base cares about this. Not sure what led you to come up with these numbers. In 2022 the vast majority of people just want to login and do what they want and have fun with their friends.

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No thanks. We need cross faction guilds asap. I want to play with friends without being obstructed by an artificial barrier. There’s no reason an Orc and Human can’t be friends and play together, especially not how the factions have worked together over the past expansions.

If you don’t want to play with Humans as Orc, you get to pick your own story here, don’t enforce your ideas about friendships between races on the rest of us. Remember, there’s still the RPG part in World of Warcraft. The more freedom to choose our own story, the better.

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Here is why I have the opinions I have, because I have been on this game since it began and as a young boy I was lucky enough to play WC2 and 3 which installed my love of the game. This VOD >> https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1648655553 << is of me playing with people that I’d met that week and having a great time, there are many more experiences (OF COURSE THERE ARE) that’s why I’m making this post! Please understand I’m not forcing my opinion upon anyone I’m looking for a show of hands! My opinion is strong on this, as I’ve had many experiences where I’ve gone “oh yea that’s because you played warcraft 3 right?” and the answer was yes. Additionally I believe many players do NOT want to see Orgrimmar filled with gnomes or Stormwind filled with Orcs, NONE OF US have a correct figure on this these are my experiences and you are welcome to disagree.
Forcing my opinion, that sounds like something a Jedi would do and I’m only a padowan “may the force be with you” hahahah
I believe I am entitled to have an opinion, and that it’s possible to state it without experiencing such hostility.

Sorry if you’re mad, I hope it makes sense now!
Please continue to reply with your thoughts and opinions on the matter thanks!

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There’s something to be said for keeping race/class fantasy, but you also have to keep in mind that that fantasy evolves without you necessarily going with it.

In Dragonflight the factions are closer than ever before and it wouldn’t be out of place for partial/full x-faction to appear at some point during the expansion. I do think it should be somewhat limited in the way that e.g. horde players will remain unfriendly with alliance factions (and as such have no business hanging out in their capitals, but not to the point where they get attacked on sight either).

The same goes for classes, while Orcs might not have been close to the paladin fantasy in the past, they’ve had a few in-universe decades to fight alongside other paladins so it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that some of them would also like to become paladins.

As an (in)famous orc once said, “Times change”.

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I’m of the opinion that the game has evolved beyond the need for a faction barrier, for PvE at least.

You say you want this based on your experience with WC3, but even on WC3 there were campaigns where the Horde and Alliance worked together to rid the world of a bigger bad. Medivh literally made the humans, night elves and orcs band together to defeat Archimonde in Hyjal.

Beyond WC3, how many expansions now have the Horde and Alliance worked together to rid the world of a threat bigger than both of them? Even Battle for Azeroth, which started as an all-out faction war, ended up with the factions once again on an uneasy alliance to defeat Azshara and eventually N’zoth.

How many times can the Horde and the Alliance put their differences aside to fight a bigger bad before they decide “you know what, we’ve done this plenty of times now, let’s just keep this thing going”?

On a gameplay standpoint, all the faction divide has done of the years is ensure a slow death of the Alliance (because of cultural Horde-centric things promoted by both the community and Blizzard, but that’s a subject for another thread) and forcing Alliance players to go Horde if they ever wanted to do more high-end group content. I’m surprised that you don’t see how that is a bad thing for gameplay as an Alliance player.

I’m speaking as someone who previously felt forced to go Horde to play with most of her friends before faction changing, and as someone who has personally seen an Alliance high-end guild be forced to go Horde or risk dying because the recruitment pool was that short because players simply didn’t want to go Alliance for the chance to be recruited. Honestly, who could blame them? They would waste money for essentially a gamble.

I’m a strong advocate for people being able to play with the aesthetic they want, and Horde and Alliance have very different aesthetics. I’ve never enjoyed the Horde aesthetics (yes, even Blood Elves - far too flamboyant for my tastes). Why should I be forced to Horder to be able to do dungeons and raids?

For PvP? Sure, go wild, have as much faction divide as you want. But for PvE, the barrier had to be shattered.

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There are plenty of logical reasons for All Races to be All Classes within the lore. It’s massive, impossibly massive. As far as the Cross faction goes when the story is concerned there’s always been factions having members willing to work together.

You can fit any concept into WoW and it works already. Never mind the fact that there are always new justifications that can be made and restricting the player’s choices by adhering to some sort of misguided idea of what the game actually is. We’re the heroes of Warcraft and it’s far past time to allow us to actually pick who we want to be.

Cross-Faction is also needed from a technical sense. We know that the player base for Alliance/Horde differs in the competitive PVP and PVE scenes. We know the #s, and Blizzard does too. That’s why there’s been such a push to allow people to finally get to play together.

How? What is so un-paladin-like about orcs? They can already now be priests and wield the light, they historically wear large armor and use large weapons, going one step further to be a Paladin in combining the two is no stretch at all. Orcs/Tauren are close friends, and are both spiritual races, do you think no Orc would be interested in the teachings of An’She.

I think the exact opposite, by pigeonholing stereotypes and forcing the players to adhere to some sort of limited idea of what each race’s culture is, has harmed the game and its lore. Never mind the massive amount of characters who absolutely do not follow any sort of standard cultural idea, class restrictions, etc. If characters in the story can do it, why can’t we? Also, outliers exist in society, so maybe a Goblin Paladin would be uncommon, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t exist.

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Doubling the amount of people you can play with increases your chances of finding new communities, finding new members to welcome into your community and creates an overall better experience for the player. How is having more people to play with a bad thing? I’ll await an answer.

Gaming has changed a lot since 2004. A faction war/faction divide worked back then. It was a foundation of the game, but clearly it no longer works. When I was playing in 2004, I played with friends from middle school/high school. We all grew up together, lived near each other, and this was our community. I feel like this is something a lot of people experienced. However, as I grew older and went to college, I met more people who played this game who were not part of my original friend circle. Some of them were on different realms and some of them were even on different factions. It was fun at first to make fun of my alliance friends in real life (I always played Horde). But then as time went on, we realized we all loved and played this game, and after many lunches, hang outs etc of sitting around in real life talking about the game… we could never play together without some of us sacrificing our own characters/guilds/communities and faction changing. No one wanted to do that.

As I grew even older and left college, found a job, moved states etc… I met even more people who played WoW. Of course by now cross realm was a thing, so I could still play with my new horde friends but I knew many in real life who played alliance too. In fact, one of my best friends and co-workers at my job still plays alliance. The change in 9.2.5 that let us all play together was the best thing that has happened to our little friends group.

I have a feeling that my story is not alone and there are a lot of people who share a similar sentiment.

The great thing about allowing cross faction is that there are options to opt-out. If someone still wants to live in 2004 and swear death to the opposing faction, they can. If someone wants to live in the modern day of the modern MMO and be able to play with whoever they want, they can!

It’s a win win.

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Thanks for your reply

I stand by what I said in the original post, and I think perhaps some of you may be under the impression that my intention is to make it so that you cannot play with your friends. Firstly, I didn’t do that the people who designed the game did and they designed many things around that ideal (FACT). My point is simple, by tearing that away people who could relate to the previous versions of the game could find this game monstrous and like it or not, that’s also a fact.

If you are not one of those people, fair enough express your points as to why you are not. What it breaks down to, is that you want to be able to play with your friends. My counter argument is, if WoW has been unsucessful or will be because you can’t, then how on earth has it done so well historically? My preference would be, that when I enter a battleground and I’m fighting For The Alliance, it’s actually with a team of Alliance not some mish mash of trolls, tauren and gnomes. Yes I’m well aware of the lore, I think this is a step too far and if you disagree fair enough!

I had similar difficulties when I posted about Racial Abilities and a chap basically said “Racial Abilities do not come into the decision process when people make their characters unless those people are looking to be in the top 0.5%” and again my playing experiences tell me that’s simply NOT true and I made a post.

The discussion here is “Is it problematic Xfaction, Class-Race Availability?” and while I appreciate all of your view points on why you personally think it’s not an issue, I think it is and I’d like to developers of the game to hear my side of it and I know there are others who share the opinions I have.

Keep the replies coming, I’ll let Worldpvp reply to the Orc Paladin question above aswell but my response to that is “it doesn’t sit well enough” :smiley: Orcs are cast as tribal and paladins go to church. Perhaps that helps you see why I’ve made this post, perhaps not.

Accesibility and playability vs remolding the fundamental ideas of the game, a fine discussion. Another reason I’d say keeping things closer to the roots of the 2004 ideas of the game is so that we maximize the chances of Classic WoW players returning to give retail another try. I doubt they’re keen to give Dragonflight a go having seen the introduction of Tauren Rogues, and I’d imagine many serious PvPers with a passion for the game will be hesitant when taking into the account those racial abilities (and many other combinations of course) have on gameplay (balance) in combination with the new dragon class (second flying class). Should we keep heading in this direction? No, is my opinion and also Evokers should have been able to tank/melee.

Thanks again everyone for their replies!

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I’m surprised to hear they are planning to make every class available to every race. It’s kind of funny how Shadowlands was the “meaningful choice” expansion and that backfired so badly that now they’re swinging to the entire opposite extreme of, “Heck with it. Just let anybody be anything.”

From a personal standpoint, I don’t have any issue with cross faction play. The factions end up working together through the story of every expansion to defeat the main bad guy. Allowing cross faction grouping makes that aspect of the story a reality for in game players and it will help revitalize the in game Alliance population, as well. Win-win.

I don’t particularly care for the idea that all classes should be accessible to all races. The class limitations help establish core identities of each race. The Orcs, for example, can learn to wield the Holy Light to become Priests, but are considered a more brutish, primal race, so they’re not in tune enough with it to become Paladins. Humans can learn to manipulate Arcane and Fel magics, but aren’t in tune with the elements to become Shamans, nor do they share an affinity with nature and the Wild Gods to become Druids. If these restrictions are removed, all of the races on each faction would simply become carbon copies of each other with only their physical appearance being the difference.

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Agreed on this. I do think some races having limited access to classes makes sense. It also feeds into racial skills. Class fantasy and race fantasy are closely related. I just don’t think some of them make sense, on the face of it.

Why people played in 2004 is not the same as why most play in 2022. People change, they age, they grow, audiences change, tastes change. Games change too. Most people coming to WoW now have no familiarity with the old WC games in any way.

What even is this? Making up stats to support your opinion is not ok. Not sure what the “monsterwars and fairycraft” is about, but if it is meant to be insulting of those who like modern WoW, that is not cool. You have no data at all to back up this assertion.

Exaggeration is not a great way to make a point.

Yes, I am happy with cross faction. Separate warring factions worked in Vanilla, and some further expansions, but within several years resulted in large population imbalances. Some of the biggest complaints about WoW are the faction population imbalances, getting groups, etc. It makes sense to me to address YEARS of those complaints by moving towards cross faction play, esp with DF.

We all love WoW for our various reasons and bringing us together is not a bad thing at all. It would be healthy for the game overall in the current 18 year old form.

If what you want is to live the Warcraft RTS fantasy, do that! You can control who you interact with, who is in your guild, who you invite to groups, etc.

I think imposing that on players, who have been asking for less faction imbalance for years, is not a great idea though.

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Thanks for your reply, I think it’s important too to keep the choices we make matter whether it’s the race; class or faction. Cross Faction remains in my opinion the worst thing they’ve done for me as a player. There’s nothing they could have done worse than this for me really, I am a one character one faction kind of player you see. I picked a long time ago that I preferred playing as Alliance and we’ve been sent on many quests where our rivals or enemy are The Horde. I also have fond memories of World PvP as Alliance, where again the Horde were the enemy. Now when I enter a M+, Raid, Arena or RBG i’m fighting beside an Orc and Warcraft hasn’t been the same since. Laugh if you will, :smiley: but that’s why I made this post I too think they’re taking steps in the wrong direction, perhaps a few more than you but yea we all value different aspects of the game!

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Hiya yea, so my goal was never to offend anyone and I apologize if I’ve offended you with my title the goal was to make an impact and it seems I have judging by your reply :smiley: I think there’s two things you’re taking for granted here, my percentages are not statistics based on factual data they’re based on my experiences as a player if that’s totally invaluable in your eyes fair enough, it’s how my opinions have been shaped; through my experiences.

When I applied to this council I claimed to have a large wealth of experience playing PvP and meeting people of all ability levels. This is true and it means that I meet a wide variety of players on a weekly basis who all have different values. The middle ground you have with me is that you do not want limitless race-class availability, you simply do like X faction from what I can gather.

You and many others have posted saying “No Tom this is NOT why people play this game, it’s not 2004 aaaaaaaaaaah” that’s your opinion, based on your experiences. Fair enough, mine is different and I’ve given one small example above as to why that is but as you can imagine I have many examples I can recall.

“Exaggeration is not a great way to make a point” I see no harm in what I’ve written and the only way I can reply to that is with something nasty so I refuse to do it.

As far as this idea of “bringing us together” is concerned, one of the main points of my original post is that I DO NOT believe the success of WoW in the past required Xfaction and therefore I do not believe it requires it now. Simple logic, based on the idea that if it’s not broke don’t fix it. You could say factions were broke (80% of players on the Horde, an empty wall of fame for The Alliance Raid Teams), yeah, heck yea, because of Racial Abilities which I also made a post about: [Retail] Ideas for Tweaking Racial Abilities!
take a look :slight_smile:

Again, this is my opinion none of this is fact I have nothing other than my experiences to back this up. If all we’re to discuss on this forums is issues we have facts for, we won’t be discussing anything important that the developers of the game cannot solve by themselves. That’s why we were brought here, so thanks for your kind reply once more and hope to see more replies!

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But you’ve been sent on more where the two factions are at least loosely allied.

  • All of Burning Crusade outside of the beginning of Hellfire Peninsula.
  • All of Wrath of the Lich King (except the Gunship fight)
  • All the Cataclysm zones except Twilight Highlands (and Gilneas).
  • All of the Mists raids and the entirety of Siege of Ogrimmar’s patch.
  • All of Warlords.
  • All of Legion.
  • Uldir and Ny’alotha in BFA.
  • All of Shadowlands

And that’s not even getting into the faction cooperation in Warcraft 3, which includes a final mission where you quite literally play as all the races throughout the length of the mission.

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I think same enemy and best friends are way different. Im okay with having the same goals but pretending like every person in azeroth is okay with horde and alliance being together is silly and destroys the fantasy of each character having their own opinions and motivations. One of my favorite things was how the PvP vendor in BFA would talk about horde and alliance working together “never!” Thats what I want. If they want to mix horde and alliance i hope they keep it out of warmode.

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I’m struggling to understand how allowing cross-faction and making certain classes available to different races makes you think these choices are now meaningless.

You currently still have to play the same faction as your friends to join their guild. Picking a faction still have a huge impact on questing. The main thing that changed with cross-faction grouping is that now, thankfully, you can pick the ‘‘wrong faction’’ and still play with your friends. I can’t imagine the amount of people that launched the game for the first time, made their first WoW character, only for their friend to tell them that they can’t play the pretty blood elves because they play Alliance.

As for races, people generally just pick what they think look cool. It’s not essentially an impactful choice in the first place. It actually just mattered because races are tied to factions, which previously led to the problem I just mentioned above. Now, it’s no longer the case, thanks to cross-faction.

And for classes, I don’t see how having tauren rogues made your choice to play a rogue earlier caused any difference. Picking a class is always going to be important.

I highly doubt that. I’ve seen many people come back to the game because they could finally play the race they’ve always wanted to play but couldn’t in the past because of the faction restrictions. I’m sure that many Alliance players are now happy that they can more easily find groups to play with. Allowing cross-faction made way more people happy than disappointed, and is far from being a ‘‘major contributor to the game’s fading population’’. Even yourself implied that your opinion is pretty controversial.

Now that doesn’t mean that your opinion is entirely invalid. There are certain things that I too, would find a bit illogical in the long runs.

On the PvP side of things: Yeah, it’d be weird to have orcs in your Alliance group fighting other orcs in Warsong Gulch, or having gnomes fighting to capture Stormshield in Ashran. It’s because battlegrounds and PvP in general has always been mainly faction-themed rather than just being ‘‘two different teams competing’’, regardless of factions.

What if we had more expansion-themed battlegrounds instead? What if we had a Necrolord vs. Kyrian BG for instance, where your race or faction doesn’t matter, and you’re just fighting for the covenant you were assigned to instead?

As for new class/race combos, I think it could be implemented in the game more easily for certain classes than others. Even as goofy as they look, taurens could very well be trained to use daggers/sword and master stealth. Rogues are pretty low fantasy however. When it comes to things like demon hunters, it becomes harder to naturally add it to other races, but it could be done in time. It may never happen too.

I’m also pretty against seeing gnomes running around Orgrimmar, but it’s not like we didn’t have main capitals shared between the factions. We’ve had Shattrath and Dalaran (twice!). I don’t think more cross-faction changes will eventually lead up to that, but new neutral cities isn’t a bad thing.

That is the opinion I’m sharing. PvP is a grey spot for cross-faction, but grouping up with Alliance or Horde to defeat big bad guys has been a recurrent theme in literally every expansion.

Final note: this is your opinion, and I respect it, but I think you’re making a big deal out of nothing. These changes are driving far more players in than out. They work great from a technical standpoint (accessibility, playing with friends, etc.), and really doesn’t go that much against the lore or ‘‘core essence’’ of the game as much as you may think it does.

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It’s a weak counter argument to say “No you shouldn’t mind if the faction choice is irrelevant because you’ve been playing with the other faction via quest log texts for all these years”

It’s the very core of the game, even when you play Warcraft, you pick a faction and a side of the story to see. You choose, that’s the whole point. All this scientific and factual nonesense is irrelevant. Now, when you choose a faction it has no meaningful difference to how you experience the game at all. World of Monsterwars and Fairycraft is the title for more reasons than one.

I see your point, I appreciate your perspective however I stand by what I said that we’re taking from the game in a bad way (we are making more and more unrelatable and distant to those who’ve played previous expansions) all to fix a problem which was created by issues entirely outside of the faction system design.

Do you not think there is a colossal portion of people who play without even reading a single quest and without an inch of lore, who enjoyed picking to play as an Orc and crush humans, or enjoyed to play as Humans and crush Orcs? Why? Well they’ve watched LOTR, any other kind of media you get my drift hopefully.

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Yes, precisely I think it’s natural that a large portion of the replies will be people who do not care for maintaining faction identity as all they’re interested in doing is pet battles, dungeons and raids. In the game they literally added emotes for /forthealliance and /forthehorde I’d imagine half of the people replying, discover this today and there is NOTHING wrong with difference, valuing things less than others because you have contrasting experiences, here however is someone with similar experiences to myself clearly!
Thanks for your reply

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