I dig these ideas across the board. I especially like the well thought out battleground factioning if that is to be a thing . I’m also curious if this will bring a new type of skirmishing warfare such as zone pvp events or new small scale sabotage / influence type pvp . Story wise this post makes a lot of sense and I look forward to Blizzcon.
I wonder if BG's will become an extended version of the 'queuing for the other side' option. Sorry I've forgotten the ingame name of it.So everyone (both A&H) would be in the same queue, and it just dumps you on the loyalists, or erm...'peace-fulls' at random. After all it doesn't really matter who you're playing against...right.....riiiiight? :pLet's see what happens!
I don't know if people have noticed yet but those possible 4 factions kind of align with the Warcraft 3 setting: 1- Humans and allies (Anduin's Kingdom); 2- Orcs and allies (Horde Council); 3- Undead/Forsaken (Sylvanas' Loyalists); 4- Night Elves (Tyrande's followers).
I just want more footie pj's and some backpacks.
I personally believe the cross faction thing will be a little more extreme than what is stated here. But, time will tell very shortly.I can say for sure is that the "Shadowlands" expansion holds very, very little interest to me. I'm really hoping that the WoW expansion will be something exciting. Otherwise, I will sit it out like I did Cata.
Here's my thoughts. From a mechanical perspective there is just a huge faction imbalance overall. Short of completely gutting racials on one faction to "encourage" a faction change, the imbalance is going to persist. x-realm helps, but you still only have so much of a pool to draw from. I'd say its a matter of mechanics>lore. If it is indeed the intent then they're trying to make the lore justify it.Also the imbalance will just keep feeding itself. Especially if a player returns and finds there friends have switched. They either have to pony up for a faction change or reroll. Either way it just feeds back in on itself.As far as PvP goes the faction split can justify the "rogue" elements. We already have mercenary mode.Either way WoW works best when we're facing off against some BBEG, then fighting each other. The narrative just feels forced in those instances. Look at the complaints about how SoO ended and how the current war went. Horde vs. Alliance while at the core of the game has proven to be its most damning feature.
What if we represented our order halls from here on out ? That would justify fighting for either side in a way .
When BFA started i was really hyped. They created ads and commercials like "choose your side" with boy who lost interest in a girl because of another faction.But then this expansion ....changed everything. Horde is totally destroyed and stripped of soul for sake of unity. Alliance forced make peace with agressors. Where is fun in peace?
I really do wish for the capability to have the mixed raids/dungeons.
I think that the factions should stay. But if they want pve instances to allow cross-faction play, that would be an acceptable allowance. Anything else would just be arbitrarily re-drawing existing lines. Open world, story content, questlines, pvp(especially) need factions. Changing faction mechanics because there is an imbalance doesn't work. Right now the imbalance exists, at least on a competitive scene, because of racial abilities and passives. Should they remove racials? No, but I wouldn't be bothered if they disabled them in dungeons, raids, battlegrounds. If racials weren't an issue, something else would cause an imbalance, the next immediate cause I think would be the races themselves. What percentage of the Horde are Blood Elves(and what percentage are those characters female)? How many of them want to be a sexy Horde Elf? If factions were dissolved, how many would then go to be the second most attractive race? Which is only second because the majority of players were Horde, thus inflating the number of Blood Elves, because they'd rather be Humans/Night Elves/etc.
Cross Faction makes alot less sense since the ending of the warcampThe alliance allowed the Horde to right their wrongs internally If xFaction would have been an option that the alliance would just have ocupied the horde territory till they agreed to be a part of it and resolve the factions in the long runbut the fact is the alliance has still his high king and the horde has now a councle so if they split up the factions the high king has to step back or get himself killed and he wont step back there is no need for that from alliance point of view he led the alliance to victory and due to spoilers we know he will not die in 8.3 so the only possibility is he dies in 8.3.5 or 9.0 and that would be like varian but since anduins story is not yet told this makes no sense eitherat least lorewise there is no evidence of resolving the factions not until sylvanas is dead if she tyrande and genn dies then okay there would be ground for that but until then there is no lorewise way in resolving the factions or how would you explain that genn and tyrande would agree that horde members would fight and live at their side? in peace i mean?
How I see this:1. Next expansion Alpha starting later this year. Hopefully, 10/10 MC and 1/1 Onyxia will count equally to 8/8 mythic, when it comes to alpha invites :D2. Seems like there will be no in-home blizzcon demo this year. A pity, I'd gladly check out the next expansion demo.3. Patch 9.0 will bring level squish as well as World of Warcraft: Free-to-Play. It will also revamp the levelling process - all lower-level content will be scaleable to you, regardless of your level. Old dungeons, such as Deadmines, at maximum level will award loot slightly below the current-tier "Normal" mode. Old raids will be converted into timewalking raids that will be always available, but the corresponding quest will be available only during Timewalking event. After completing all quests in a particular zone once, it will be unlocked account-wide for repeating and resetting, which will be done via Hero's call board.4. Your faction will no longer be dictated by your race. You will be able to be an Alliance-sided orc, for instance. The "faction change" service will no longer require a race change, and the "race change" service will now allow to select all races, not just current faction. Alternatively, the "faction change" paid service will be turned into an in-game quest with long (monthly?) cooldown.5. Current-tier content, that is, latest patch dungeons and raids, as well as all mythic+, will require an active subscription. However, all character levels, and previous patch soloable and queueable content will be available for free accounts, as well as the in-game store.So, basically, levelling in retail will be extremely casual and free-to-play, and endgame will remain hardcore and require subscription
Warcraft will and Allways has been about war but that Doesent mean Neccearly horde vs alliance even though it is where it started there will allways be threats that will emerge threats that the horde and alliance now too weakened even in a combined fashion cant risk being Separate this expansion has clearly shown how the enemies of Azeroth are exploiting that fact for there benefit against us.
To all who want WAR, the name isn't only for faction war, but any war. The game started in WC between the 2 factions, then WoW came to fill the gaps, and we know, also thru the books, that that 'war' began when the Legion spotted the Draenei in Draenor and turned the Orcs into raging beasts. Then their world began tearing apart, and they felt the need to flee to other areas, but all their 'world' was breaking up, so they built the Dark Portal, trying to flee to new, 'fresh' World. They found Azeroth, a rather peacefull land, with plenty lands. But some within the 'Horde', even after the Legion failure to wipe out the Draenei, still wanted war, some few among them, still served the Legion. Legion came at last, we defeated them, but they wounded even more Azeroth. All in between Azeroth already had it's corruption in the shape of Old Gods and their creations/corruptions. That was the next real Threat, after Legion. Azeroth still had plenty of 'room' for everyone. The 'War' in Warcraft, can be War agains the voids, other scattered existing Legion members, etc. To keep this 'nonsense' of a faction war, just for the sake of it... "Make love, not Warcraft ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)"
You want to say that the Horde will receive the skeleton of humans? Then the Alliance should get an orc skeleton, right? In any case, it sounds disgusting. The man who invented this is disgusting.
It's worth remembering that all this started from some greyed out icons and some movements at the faction embassies. Since then anything that could be interpreted as supporting the idea has been eagerly mind controlled and made to serve. It could all just be a classic example of how rumor develops. The evidence is still extremely thin that anything is going to happen. Still, factions have been around in their current form an awfully long time. Blizzard will want to do something about imbalance, especially with greater scrutiny of raiding as the esport dollar develops. But people seem to be conflating two things here. Being able to choose any faction for any race is not the same as an end to factions, or an end to faction conflict. Just because you can roll a Horde human or an Alliance orc does not mean that there will be no fighting between Horde and Alliance. PVP has continued regardless of the current state of war between the factions. Even in Legion when Horde and Alliance were in full cooperation mode, PVPers were still buttkicking each other.So while I think it's possible faction restrictions on race might be lifted in order to address faction imbalance, I think they'll find ways to keep the Horde and the Alliance distinct and occasionally antagonistic.For me I hope it stays as is. I don't see any benefit to ending faction restrictions other than for mythic raid leaderboards, a tiny percentage of the player base. And I certainly don't want to see Alliance players mooning about in Orgrimmar, or Horde leaning up against walls in Stormwind.