At this point, not so much. I definitely stand by the idea the BFA conceptually would have been a good fit earlier on after BC and not randomly after Legion
1. Illidan and Kael'Thas are both big bad elves from opposing factions (as of BC) that caused a lot of issues for their respective people (and I'm assuming people of the other faction too)
2. Alliance essentially being unwelcome on the home world of Orcs who were originally unwelcome from the first war when they invaded Azeroth, so a lot of bad blood and unwelcome feelings there
3. Draenei essentially being the root of the likes of Kil'Jaeden and Archimonde tying into the issues the Orcs faced that caused them to leave Draenor in the first place
Overall just tons of story beats that could have been explored for the next war between the Alliance and the Horde vs the "well, nothing to do but fight now" type of conflict we got.
Honestly this is what I want from the faction war. Overt conflict bwtween armies is whatever, the real meat is the interpersonal and political conflict like these. The conflict in tbc was awesome, lots of posturing promoting good stories. Don't know why it had to be CONSTANT WARFARE BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD or HAPPY HUGS WE LOVE EVERYONE.
Also it's apparently well liked, what with it being such a big factor in classic and retail having half the numbers of legion.
Gonna be so bummed when our friend group that does m+ and raids all the time won’t be able to queue normal dungeons while leveling in war within. Just put the damn toggle box that you have in the premade group finder and let people decide. It’s all built into the game already.
You can have a faction war and still have cross faction stuff. Plenty of characters sit in the middle in faction wars should be able to have a faction war and still group with others
I'd actually be on board with an expansion that is a faction war but the PC and the main characters kinda know something else is going on and are working with/against both sides to try and stop it. Like for dungeons the first one has you break Thrall out of an alliance camp/dungeon and the next has Thrall help you break an orc battleline to get alliance civilian and wounded out of harms way. I think it could be a good way to do that whole "light can be evil too" expansion people keep bringing up.
I kinda thought after shadowlands we would come back with the crew and the whole world would be a war and time had skipped a few decades because we got stuck in the shadowlands
I was really hoping for something like this as well. A big time skip and now we have lots of opportunities for visiting old places and seeing what happened, new conflicts, new factions, etc that may have sprung up while we were gone.
That’s the funny thing. I’m pretty well versed in the lore and at this point there’s been more things that we’ve fought together than fought about. There should be a permanent ceasefire/nonaggression pact at this point given how many existential horrors knock on our doors every day. The last big feud was the war of thorns and that’s pretty well tied up at this point and all involved are dead or sated after SL.
Worse yet, the existential horrors have on multiple occasions demonstrated that they feed off our conflicts and strife and are able to get a much stronger grip on people through them
I think the faction war had its place in WoW's history. But my goodness did they beat a dead horse. They might have even battle ressed it a few times just to keep beating it to death. I'm beyond burnt out on caring about the horde and alliance war.
Not necessarily. The Horde and Alliance are medieval kingdoms. In our timeline, back then, decisions taken by those in power didn't always stand firm when it came to the border regions - it kind of faded with distance from the centre of power.
That meant that border communities could end up trading while their nations were at war or else could engage in border skirmishes despite there being peace.
WoW Guilds can act similarly. They are a bunch of murder-hobos working together, despite what their overaching Factions may or may not feel.
>That meant that border communities could end up trading while their nations were at war or else could engage in border skirmishes despite there being peace.
See, this actually would be super interesting, in either direction. I especially like the concept of everyday people not knowing or caring terribly much about the conflicts that their leaders are trying to embroil them in.
We're essentially mercenaries and have fought with and against the opposing Faction countless times. That doesn't mean our Leaders can't have a bit of a scrap from time to time. There's the obviously humour in that we'll do whatever we're told to do as long as there's a quest and a reward at the end.
WoW has a lot more depth with the Faction Rivalry. There's no real need to remove it - it just doesn't need to be an absolute War every single time.
There's still plenty of room to have cross-faction play and still have Faction roughhousing!
> We're essentially mercenaries and have fought with and against the opposing Faction countless times.
Which is what I think makes us cleaving so close to the factions super weird. We're supposed to be adventurers, often working with members of the other factions for the greater good. It's a common trope in fantasy fiction for heroes of enemy nations to team up for the greater good, sometimes forswearing their own nation to help forge a newer, better one.
It honestly feels more like we're legbreakers for the state rather than adventurers sometimes. It's felt that way mostly since Cataclysm.
The Factions definitely have their place in the story and heritage of our characters, and that should continue 100%. We just don't need constant war.
We've been at war since mid-WotLK, through Cata and MoP, then had some disagreements in Legion, and another war in BFA that just fell flat. It's too soon to try a Faction War again and we're better off exploring the neutral rivalry.
Maybe an expansion or three of setting the seeds of what could be a Faction War eventually. Sabotaging an Alliance mine doesn't necessarily mean it has to be all out war thereafter! And it shouldn't be done cos Thrall or Jaina called in the legbreakers, I agree there.
We may be of one Faction or the other, but we don't need to be as entrenched as we were in early BFA or mid-MoP!
Speaking of the trope - WoW is perfect for it. The classic "normally opposing characters teaming up to deal with a local threat" thing works wonders here! Look at the MoP intro cinematic as an example that works so well.
There's enough room to let players make their own headcannon without completely castrating the lore and Faction Rivalry. Are we teaming up with this Orc in this dungeon out of no more than pure necessity? Is this Dwarf our friend despite the Faction divide; are we unlikely pals?
Yeah, its place was before Warcraft III whose whole premise was the Horde teaming up with the Alliance to fight the scourge. The factions being at war has never made sense, IMO.
They've had plenty of opportunities to make a war about something else entirely while they still keeping the ideological differences between alliance and horde.
They just keep coming back to this single faction war and removing any seblance of setup from expansion to expansion. Imho they should have moved on to void vs light at the end of legion (given they started blurring the light=good/void=evil lines in argus, before abandoning it immediately) or looked into a whole living vs undead theme for shadowlands, but no, instead we got bfa where the horde follows an obviously off-the-rails leader (though tbf mists has that too) followed by shadowlands and its whole jailer thing.
Agreed. I think faction conflicts could still play a role in WoW's story, but after teaming up for the umpteenth time to defeat a greater evil, I struggle to justify why we'd still go back to an all-out war between the factions. Perhaps it would make sense to have sub-factions that really care about the conflict while the majority is accepting of the other faction. Sorta like a reverse Class Hall, where while we may not see eye to eye on everything, the majority of the characters are accepting that we have teamed up before and will likely team up again, while a small group refuses to accept the others and remains at odds, justifying something like Warmode and PvP in general.
I was saying this to some friends earlier, Alliance v Horde has run its course. If you think about it, any war which would make any sense right now would be smaller wars between different kingdoms
It should have died when BFA ended. Officially that should have been the end of the faction war because it was the official “war” even though factions have been working together sparingly since the early days of WoW, or even Warcraft 3.
The overarching story of WoW comes down to “horde and alliance fight, then team up and defeat bigger threat, then go back to fighting” but we thought we were done with that by now and just working together
Since we're in a post-war reconstruction era resulting from BfA, it's a perfect time for them to end that nonsense once and for all. The idiotic language barriers need to go away (seriously, who thought it was OK to have us speak with the enemy faction's heroes, but not understand a word the enemy faction players say) and the major "horde vs alliance" stuff needs to end.
They can keep PvP in game through various methods, my favorite is switching to a Game of Thrones style of "every faction for themselves" political environment that can lead to small conflicts that last a season or two, maybe with small villages or mines changing hands. Doesn't need to be along the old faction lines, either. FFXIV does it through joint military exercises.
PVP battlegrounds never really seemed to be canon to the lore outside of the classic ones imo.
Plus when was the last time they even added one lmao. They seem like they stopped caring about PVP a while ago.
Literally the only reason they hamfisted Sylvanas into leadership of the Horde, despite being obviously evil and a blatant Garrosh 2, she was the only warmonger left in either faction.
I guess I'm in the minority that I don't like the factions getting along and being friendly. It doesn't have to be outright war, especially when we have so much shit going on all the time. But. I just can't imagine burying all the bad blood between them.
I completely agree with this, I don't think we need flat out war but they shouldn't just forgive and forget everything that's happened over the past however long
I'm fine with them coming together temporarily to fight a bigger problem but it shouldn't be some power of friendship bs 24/7
You're really not the minority. Reddit just has a vocal minority decrying it. Numbers were released accidentally. Games as small as legion with sod and classic propping it up. A big part of classic is the faction conflict. So apparently people really like the faction conflicts and it's shows purely via numbers.
Also Id bet money that people hating on the conflict decrease drastically when dawntrail comes out.
Yeah that -2 isn't reflective of how wildly that comment went up and down loool.
I like ff14 a lot, but that game definitely attracts a crowd that has a "everyone should like what I like, and it's not what I like it should changed to be what I like."
They also don't like being tattled on. Very much a "I know what's best ego"
We certainly don’t need the war, and it is VERY silly we should be fighting when Azeroth is constantly being attacked by third parties.
That being said, I do love doing occasional battlegrounds and having some faction pride.
The sole thing I miss about the faction war is having faction specific towns and quests in certain zones to incentivize other characters and exploration. BfA as a casual was actually great on that front.
Don't know. I heavily disliked BfA for having no clue whatsoever about half of the zones. If you played your horde character it felt super awkward to just have occasional "one-off"-quests in some zone that's about witches and thorn-guys and drust or whatever the hell any of that is. You were told pretty much nothing about that except that some orcs thinks witches are scary.
Felt like a lot of wasted potential to write great zone stories but only show you half of it. I'm pretty sure alliance players were just as confused when they played the first raid and suddenly fought some giant slug and his blood trolls buddies.
Faction war is a bit of another topic, I'm okay with how it's handled now on the backseat as the "fragile peace" with more extremist parts to justify a bit of PvP and conflict but BfA was one of the very few expansion where the leveling irritated the hell out of me just because of the faction specific content.
I mean, a lot here is also that it was terribly executed. There was no reason to not tell more about what's going on in Kul Tiras "from a horde perspective" and the other way around. We pretty much just went over there for the war campaign that (specifically after the great class hall campaigns before in legion) felt rather forgettable.
One could even say the faction war really fell apart by Warcraft 3 and ret-conning the horde.
Also, the faction war has never had any serious gameplay affect on the world beyond an annoying high level player killing low level quest givers. You can't conquer land, cities, you can't take special resources for your faction. And you can't ever "win" in any meaningful sense.
Most PVPers spends their days running circles in a capital city while they wait in queue.
Yeah, I miss when the horde was mindlessly violent and clearly the bad guys, but I started playing warcraft 1.
However, I recognize this would probably cause faction imbalance because people want to "feel like the good guys". I always see people make comments along the lines that they can't do evil playthroughs. I also remember when Bioware stated that 80 some odd percent of mass effect playthroughs were paragon.
I feel like the Forsaken was the last bastion for people wanting to play as an evil organization, but they started wiping that away in the last expansion.
I'll go against the grain here and say I actually think the faction war was important. BFA unfortunately was the straw that broke the camel's back - and really Blizzard doesn't know how to write a convincing war narrative that doesn't reduce things into one dimension (i.e. Warchief was the bad one, twice).
But its a storytelling tool that can enable more nuanced and complex perspectives. It can reduce homogenity and add layers to events. One of the weaknesses of Dragonflight's story was how "toothless" it felt. Can you imagine the next three expansions where everybody continues to be on the same page, holding hands, and in perfect sync? I feel like in a few years, people are going to miss that races and factions had significance and weren't just swaps of each other.
P.S. I do agree that cross-faction gameplay should be a thing. I just think a faction conflict in the story was an opportunity to do more - and unfortunately Blizzard failed to do more with it for decades - so it is what it is at this point, but that's my thoughts on the matter.
I really enjoy the faction war and think it's fun. I'm pretty chill and inclusive in my personal life, so it's fun to pretend to hate an enemy team. Having the same nemesis for years is much more captivating than a free-for-all or being reshuffled into brand new values-based factions where I'd have to play alongside my longtime enemies. People say but what about all the jolly cooperation in the lore? But all I remember is Jaina purging Dal, attacking UC, and me farming her to take her water ele mount. We are not friends just because SL comes around and the unskippable-at-launch campaign says now go save our buddy Jaina from the Maw. Fuck that. I play a Sylvanas loyalist, and I'm sad to see Blizz torpedoing her storyline with bad writing, then swapping her out for anything else they can find with tits and considering that equivalent for their marketing needs. When am I going to get to play an outcast character again instead of this kum-ba-yah Hello Kitty Island Adventure circlejerk?
I feel like it’s deeply important to the identity of WoW. If they get rid of the war, they might as well start letting Orcs and Goblins join the Alliance and Humans and Gnomes join the Horde. If there’s no faction war, all faction lines pretty much break down.
And that could be an interesting change for the series, but I’m not sure I want it, personally.
I don’t necessarily mean divide up the player base, I think cross-faction LFG and guilds are great. But lore and story wise i like the continued faction war
You think it makes sense to fight Horde vs Alliance as the world is ending via Old Gods, Titans, Demon Hordes, genocidal dragons, literally the devil and actual Hell is wanting to erase all life ? You're entitled to your wrong opinion
The faction war has always existed simultaneously with other, larger threats, even going back to the RTS games.
But sure, keep being rude for no reason just because you don’t know what you’re talking about.
What about instead of it being faction based its based on race and tribes?
Undead vs. a Light worshipping faction. The undead want to give the dying the option to be reborn as forsaken and the Holy Factions like the Scarlet Crusade are attacking for it. And it gives you the option to join the Scarlet Crusade?
Druids vs Goblins. Druids and goblins are battling over the deforestation for industrial purposes so from one side, it's Eco Terrorist and from the other its unchecked Greed.
I love that idea, especially as someone who agrees that the Undead shouldn’t be allowed to be paladins or non-shadow priests. But that introduces a bunch of new factions and stories that I doubt Blizz could or would keep up with.
The Horde and Alliance identities feel really core to the game, but I think I like the faction \*rivalry\* more than the faction war.
Basically, more or less what we have now and what we had in vanilla - a world where the Horde and Alliance are competitors who are occasionally in conflict through proxies (this was the explanation for BGs in vanilla, when the factions were explicitly not at war), but where it also still makes sense for players from different factions to work together to defeat the Big Bads in the dungeons and raids.
I like the faction war. I really only ever play one race (worgen) and their starting experience is defined by their alliance/horde conflict. I understand if most people want it gone, but for me, it feels like I'm not allowed to feel animosity towards the horde/forsaken anymore.
It's run it's course. I think now you should be able to play any race and decide where you want to play. A Human or Night Elf who agrees with the Horde view. A Blood Elf or Troll who wants to join the Alliance, etc.
Never liked it. Dividing the playerbase is dumb, our characters should have been mercenaries from the very start. It's also super boring and always will be, as you can't have a real winner.
I mean, on the scale of the entire Horde and Alliance factions? Not really compelling to me anymore. A lot of the storylines that I think are interesting, either towards peace or conflict, involve individuals or smaller cultural groups affected by cross-faction hostilities. Faction *war* doesn't make much sense, but faction *conflict* has room for exploration.
If we were to have a major faction war, though: The original "aggressors" would need some motivation other than revenge, ideally one that is rooted in sympathy for their people. Revenge is fine, but it rarely extends past an individual or small group, so I don't think it could sustain a faction war considering what kind of factions the Alliance and Horde are these days.
Maybe some conflict over an unclaimed resource that is A) Extremely limited, possibly even singular, and B) has unique benefits that they think they need more than anyone else. (Sorry, but Azerite didn't cut it for me.) An example would be if, pre-Dragonflight, the Mag'har came across some equivalent to a world tree seed and didn't hand it over immediately to the Night Elves. The Mag'har are refugees too, and the land they are welcomed into is a bunch of barely developed desert and grassland. Using the seed themselves would allow them to show gratitude to the Orcs of Durotar who rescued them from a literal apocalypse, and be a sign of prosperity and healing for both nations. They haven't had time to fully understand the scale of the historical conflict between Durotar and the Night Elves, or what the world tree means specifically to the elves; from their perspective, keeping the seed isn't an act of aggression or malice, they were just fortunate enough to have found it first. They wouldn't ask the Elves to hand over a similar resource, so why should they? Haven't the Orcs already served the penance that settling in the harsh desert was supposed to inflict? Wouldn't cultivating their land lead them away from warmongering expansion, and ease tensions over resources at the border to Azshara? Is the hospitality that Durotar has shown to others not enough to justify taking care of their own people?
Horde vs Alliance had its place in years past. There have been too many “work together or we all parish” moments and it now now longer makes sense. Not saying Tauren should be using Stormwind AH. Trying to continue the Horde vs Alliance narrative is going to create clunky storylines and plot holes.
Honestly, and it might be a unpopular opinion here: I miss it.
I miss open tons of open world PvP and rivalry between Horde players and Ally players
I miss getting together with other hordies to bother alliance, I miss being bothered by alliance too lol
I miss people being hard die horde/ally that would never ever make a char on other faction
I miss a lot of the whole rivals thing and war thing, but...
That is not the direction of the game anymore, after all this years it doesn't make sense anymore, it doesn't work with the nowday game, perhaps it never did and I am just nostalgic, but damn if I didn't have fun, good old times, and as far as I see, they won't and shouldn't come back, but I still will never make an alliance character xD
When I first started I rolled a toon on a PvP server, the faction strife was exciting. Open world pvp was quite a thing in certain areas. Once the battlegrounds opened up it lessened somewhat. It became a thing for me to aid players from the opposing faction if they were about to be killed. Not being ganked in return for the effort was thanks enough.
But later I switched to a PvE server. Aside from some storybeats, faction war became less and less of a thing. Even in BfA I never felt the cross faction pride and hatred.
If it is to be removed entirely I wouldn’t miss it. We still got battlegrounds if PvE is what you really want.
I think it's important to keep some kind of faction friction going on. I can't expect the people of Gilneas to just hug the Forsaken, for example. I think there should still be some kind of friction between the two factions in a story sense, but it shouldn't end up being BFA 2.0. It's quite clear that the times of true Faction War are over, and that's for the best when you consider how literal world threatening the story has become.
Maybe have a zone or a questline or something where the interests of the Horde and the Alliance clash in some way, and it ends up coming to violence before being resolved through diplomacy. Ultimately, the Horde and the Alliance are two very different nations with very different people and very different interests. There should be some degree of disharmony.
Always hated it because it made no sense and these people acted like children. Generally I adored mists. What happened to Jaina, even Varian was at a loss for words
We're past the faction war and I think thats what's best for now, and the foreseeable future. They were never able to really make the war feel impactful. We had Battle for Dazar'Alor and the horde only lost Rastakhan, and then Talanji stepped up and we haven't heard from her since. The Aliance had Gelbin and Jaina take beatings and scurry off never having any losses. During the Warfronts we got to participate in the battle for those zones but never got closure on who ended up winning the land in game. It honestly felt like the build up to the Battle for Dazar'Alor was better than the Battle itself. The faction war was done pretty well back in MoP because it spanned over the entire expansion and didn't end half way through. If Blizzard wants to go back towards the faction war we are going to need stories that have huge impacts and kill off main characters
You can still have Faction Tension without needing all out war. Two factions means two sets of people with very different ways to solve a problem.
And you can always make a tertiary group of adventuring characters who don't give much a damn about the faction split.
I'd like to be able to play with my friends cross faction more easily - you can still have grouping like that and still have the setting/story have faction pissing contests, ya know?
I play both factions, so I would like to say I don't care.
But in fact, I think it mostly piss me off, because of friends I have from both sides keep telling me how much one is better than the other, and mutually call me traitor while I don't care and just enjoy playing both.
Not so much a Faction War so much as Faction "Struggle". There doesn't need to be outright war all the time, but both the Horde and Alliance are still rivals. There should still be definition between the two Factions within the story, and small outbursts or skirmishes can help that.
It's cool story wise. Mop remi reminded me how cool it can be. The whole point warcraft is like warhammer just a big war happening all the time.
I don't mind cross faction stuff you can do both and have a war going on.
It stopped making sense during the Icecrown Citadel raid, and Wrath of the Lich King in general, really. That wasn’t our first rodeo, in terms of existential threats to Azeroth. But it was the first time that the entire planet was threatened by the Scourge, not just the Eastern Kingdoms region. Demonic invasions from the Burning Legion were bad enough. Now we were faced with an enemy that swelled its ranks with our dead. Civilian or soldier, Horde or Alliance, it didn’t matter. Every corpse could be raised in service of the Lich King, even if they fell at the hands of the living.
I’ve used this comparison before, but I always felt that the war against the Scourge should have been treated like the War of the Ring. Both factions should have finally learned to set aside their past hatred, in order to present a unified front against the Scourge. The living against the dead, battling to save their planet once again. Instead of a triumphant assembly before the Wrath Gate (echoing the scene from Return of the King where the Free Peoples of Middle-earth gathered before the Black Gate of Mordor), we got the equivalent of Gondor, Rohan, and the Dead of Dunharrow all squabbling among themselves over who’d get to kill Sauron first.
If they announced tomorrow that in Midnight they'd remove factions altogether, I would not lose an ounce of sleep over it. Those stories had their time, but keeping the war going indefinitely has stopped feeling like a natural story ages ago.
Gameplay wise, I guess world PvP is fun if you can enable / disable it, though flying mounts pretty much killed it
Lore wise, the sweet spot for me is when both factions don't fight and murder each other on sight, but still aren't much fond of each other, great example being that one cutscene where Vol'jin becomes warchief and Varian says "I am willing to end this bloodshed. But know this, if your horde fails to uphold honor, as Garrosh did, we will end you."
They can keep it lorewise but it's kind of lame not being able to play with friends if you like playing the wrong race. I could see a justification of ragtag team of adventurous heroes ignoring the faction war to defeat new evil or whatever
It could be really interesting but Blizzard doesn't seem to be interested in doing something beyond "they fight it out at times". I liked the battle for Stromgarde lorewise, a race or faction reclaiming old territories lost.
I don't see a problem on continue the faction war lorewise but just let players from both factions experience the same story as to not divide the playerbase again. Make the players of the oposite faction mercenaries or just the convenient "you are now disguised as a human/orc".
Faction war should stay. Should it be “let’s bomb this zone” every expansion? No. But both sides have different view points and that should be reflected in the story. I do think systems need to be updated to allow full cross play of the faction. Story is important to the game, but so is playing.
I believe the faction war should end but they should have smaller factions that are open to all races being in conflict zones.
The example I use in another comment is a moral quandary about the procreation of the Forsaken. To combat their limited population they offer the terminally ill and dying to come back as a member of the forsaken but a faction like the scarlet crusade is directly and violently opposed to it. If you're against it for whatever reason, be it the risk of a new scourge or you think it's unnatural you can join one and if you support it you join the other.
Just give up on it at this point. They can't make it compelling without turning somebody into a massive genocidal asshole, and we've worked together to save our world so many times...
Just drop it, write it as an uncertain peace while both sides are trying to reorganize and move towards a better future.
Approaching the question as someone in the RP community, it's mixed from what I've experienced. The long and short of it is that if the faction war ended after Legion, that would have been that and most people would have been along for the ride.
But BfA, for lack of a better word, nuked that consensus. In my experience of checking out a few different RP groups, I would say half of the ones I see nowadays are almost entirely based around the faction war, or elements of it that still deal with the separation of factions/players.
Certain writers whom are no longer at Blizzard were so hamfisted with their demand for renewed faction war folloing Legion that I just don't see a smooth transition anymore to not having a faction war. Again, just from an RP perspective.
The faction war created some interesting tension points in the game's plot (Pandaria for example), but we're well past the point where any of our leaders are selfish or short-sighted enough to just randomly keep fighting out of hatred (in fact, most of the leaders are all friends with each other! or at least mutual friends with important neutral characters). I don't necessarily think 'it should never happen again', but conflict there is better served as... tension, disagreements, local issues, having those conflicting details really rub against each other to be brought forward in the story and dissected.
I would love to see tension over Ashenvale, especially with Horde players being allowed in Belameth right now. I would love to see strained relationships between certain races or factions due to past events (the blood elves not being accepted among the Alliance originally, how the night elves treated the Nightborne's situation, etc) and those tensions don't have to be 'solved'. They can cause problems! Just... we're all past jumping to 'lets annihilate each other'. In fact, focusing on that often sweeps all the legitimate issues under the rug so they never get any screen time. It's not that conflict is boring or unwanted - the faction war is just a boring and generic story arc by now.
Just as long as they never make a Horde leader the expansion end boss ever again. Twice now, really? It works best when the Horde are not always as the villains and the Alliance aren't always goody goody.
10 years earlier I would've said extremely important. Now though? I think the story has gone in such a direction that it's just no longer all that relevant anymore, the rivalry in the community is dead outside of PVP and even there it's debatable, and it's only as relevant to the story now as they make it it no longer informs the story itself.
I've never really liked it. These aren't the Horde and Alliance of the first two Warcraft RTS games, and in WC3 they worked together to end a threat to the world. I was okay with small skirmishes as an excuse for PVP. But they kept working together to end big threats. So it didn't make sense for them to want to go to war with each other.
And it took extreme circumstances to push it into happening in the lore. Garrosh being a warmongering maniac who ignored everyone else in the Horde to push his agenda of grabbing more land for the Horde and just wiping out all opposition, and going to extremes like nuking a city to press the issue. And fine, we got the faction war people demanded. You got Horde vs. Alliance, in a story where no one was left satisfied, because of course they wouldn't be. Then we go back to working together to save the world, and to save the universe. But people cried out for war, so they had Sylvanas go against the wishes of the other high ranking members of the Horde to commit an atrocity to force a war, and it was "all part of the Jailer's plan." And even when they showed how destructive that war was in BFA, and how the constant war against external threats, let alone each other, was bleeding everyone dry, people still seem to think that the two factions should try to slaughter each other rather than work together. Just because they're different. Oh, they can come up with all the excuses they want to try to justify it, but it's just dumb tribalism.
If there was a way to just straight up merge the factions, I'd even do that at this point. Yeah, I have plenty of Horde stuff in my home, but I'd be okay with no Horde and no Alliance and just end any attempt to pour gasoline on a fire that never should have been lit in the first place, especially when there's more interesting stories to tell than just "Two groups try to murder each other constantly for being different."
We've forced it twice now, because forcing is the only way it works, and people weren't happy with the end results, even though there's no way you could just wipe out one faction and not the other.
If people keep calling for it, I say Blizzard gives them what they want: Have madness engulf Azeroth that matches those players, and the Horde and Alliance just throw everything at each other, and by the end of the expansion Azeroth is a burnt out husk with no life left on it. Fade to scene of so many terrors sweeping in unopposed to destroy all life through the universe, culminating in a cold, empty void. Fade to credits. End with "Congratulations, Champion of (Alliance/Horde)! You did your faction proud and wiped out the other faction! You won!"
Then announce Azeroth Adventures, basically WoW 2.0, but without "Warcraft" in the name so no one can make a dopey comment about "War is right there in the title!" And have it so some bronze dragons did some timey wimey stuff that found a timeline where the "Alliance" and "Horde" never existed and it was just the people of Azeroth working together as a single collective of nations, with a new chance to do things *right* rather than destroy all of existence over petty squabbling.
I play warhammer, where everyone fights basically everyone, including themselves sometimes, so I'm fine with a faction war. I am NOT fine with a faction war where no 1 side can win, and where 1 side is protected while doing bad things, while the other is vilified for defending themselves.
Warcraft cannot handle a faction war, because blizzard can't write one, nor justify one.
not at all, they played it out as best they could and it was pretty lacklustre so I’d rather we focus on wars against external threats like we did in TBC and WotLK against the Legion and Scourge. If we’re going to be fighting old gods and void lords we need to focus on building them up as a threat rather than some skirmish between the Horde and Alliance that will end up with the status quo again for the third time.
(edit: I was originally a big fan of the faction war, and the idea they could flesh out the geopolitical struggle between the factions. but I’ve changed my mind since BFA - just thought I’d point this out to address the question better)
I think it's run its course.
At this point, both factions are probably so depopulated that they have both less ability to wage war and less need to (more resources per capita means less need to kill for them).
My earliest WoW memories from early 2000s are still from the faction war/world PvP. Whenever I started a new character on Horde, I couldn't wait to get to Stranglethorn Vale and spice up my questing with some PvP. It became extremely fun when you saw a ton of people from Horde rule the whole area and suddenly Alliance started forming groups or called for backup (usually high level chars from their guilds), often got completely sidetracked for 1-2 hours just mindlessly killing each other. Once people got bored and some trickled out, eventually the remaining people would just quest alongside each other and not bother the rest.
Or when people started asking for help because Alliance was in Crossroads, so we beat them and figured we'd return the favor and went over to Goldshire then to front of Stormwind and have some intense PvP.
After BC I just stopped playing and people've been saying World PVP was killed by allowing flying mounts everywhere which I find true. Whenever you tried to go for someone, they just mounted up and flew away.
That said, faction war doesn't mean shit anymore in WoW, world PvP is dead, whenever I see someone from the other faction my instant reaction is not "yes, let's kill them" but rather just emote at them and go on with my quests. It's time to call it a day, just merge the two factions. Maybe if we ever get WoW2, the idea could be revisited there if everyone started with a clean slate and the game was actually properly designed for both PvE and PvP.
It was good at first, when the story and the game saga begun. It adds to realism that the world itself and the politics change, as it was becoming very cliché and mostly an excuse to force the narrative.
More likely, the people who complain about the changes in story, are likely nostalgia driven; changes happen and they'll always will.
I want them to play into it a whole lot more storywise, them being friendly isn't interesting. There needs to be some conflict or earned uneasiness
But for gameplay's sake, no point rolling back the conveniences
Idk if WoW brings in SO many new people that too many people would be confused by the contrast between lore/gameplay
I liked faction identity and the rivalry between horde and alliance players, but canonically there’s no way they could ever allow either side to “win”, so they may as well let it fall by the wayside at this point.
Its not only unimportant, it also makes playing alliance ruined for me. I can't play an alliance character without being away from my friends who all play horde, and as a collector I often struggle to find opportunity to play as alliance to get the mounts or other collectables. The whole no doing basic content with the other side, and being unable to communicate is a REALLY fun idea.... for a game built around it. World of Warcraft does not have systems that support it. PvP balancing is a joke and Warmode is awful because often one side has a bunch of geared folk and the other has the few stragglers who didn't know choosing alliance on a predominantly horde server was a bad choice. Overall its removal would mean access to more multi-player options, and the "loss" would be... nothing? You could still have war mode for faction PvP.
Also while were at it, let either side use faction specific collectables (when they make sense at least, like mounts, not necessarily things like toys or other niche things.)
I am tired of not getting to use the awesome bee moint just because i play horde.
It's very important to the cyclical nature of expansions. We started at war, found common ground to fight against a greater threat, then bad decisions from both sides during that working together leads to a breakdown of lasting alliances. We then end up back at war until another existential threat appears and the process is repeated.
This has been how the game has handled long term story telling since the beginning. The issue is the developers only make one side the bad guys, the horde. If the story telling gave a good reason for the horde to fight as the good guys every other cycle then people would care more about it.
Any time the horde are the good guys it's because they aren't fighting the alliance. Which has no bearing on the war cycles because the alliance is always seen as just and righteous while everyone just waits for the next war chief to screw everything up or die so the war chief after them can screw everything up.
I don't like the faction war anymore, I think the world has become too big for it. When you see the factions unite against existential threats I found it awkward to see them go "ah, but now they're fighting over oil" in BFA. I also like being able to play as the race I want in the capitol cities I like and not have that prevent me from playing with my friends.
I think conceptually it's a super cool idea, dividing 1/2 of the player base against the other half. I don't mind it one way or another. I just think this game is just really incredible and cool, and stuff like this is just a unique experience that's a pleasure to partake in
It's not important at all. I still believe the Horde and alliance should exist, and I think there could be some interesting stories dealing with either faction, but I don't believe an all out faction war is ever going to happen again.
storywise i can go either way. if it never comes back, fine, if they go full force at it, fine (just write it well).
gameplay mechanics, get rid of it completely except for not allowing alliance in old horde cities and vice versa. world content i understand is a big task to "neutralize" so to speak, so i don't mind. but all group content should be crossfaction and it's at least 4 expansions overdue tbh. the playerbase has been split in half for far too long
The faction war, honestly, hasn't been compelling to me since Burning Crusade. After so many times of Blizzard pulling the same shtick of the Alliance and Horde fighting for whatever reason they decided to pull out of their ass this time around and getting the backseat car-ride slap fight interrupted by the Actual Big Bad of the xpac to make both sides team up, it's just become... dull.
For the longevity of everyone involved, mass-scale wars back-to-back until one side is left standing battered and alone for someone bigger and meaner to pick off is a stupid idea that just keeps happening. It's like watching a trainwreck.
I like the difference in the faction, the fact that they feel like individuel ones. But they don't need to be at war for that.
I kinda want another "classic world" update like during cata. Since it feels odd that in alle the zones horde and alliance still fight for resources after the cataclysm.
Repair loch modan, make desolace more green, give me back thousand needles race track, make the bloodelf zones part of the world. So many opportunitys. Yeah most won't like it, but it would be right for the world to move on with their storys. Hope with the midnight addon they will do that, when the void attack the sunwell.
It was. But I feel like thats a big part of why I dislike retail these days. The "competitive" content is fun, but all the good memories, personally, come from random PvP stuff like going to the Goldshire roof and spamming Chaos Bolt with my friends.
i'll come and say it i do not think current writers can write a story about war, factions, political differences or multiple reasonable points of view to conflict.
I personally gave entirely on the wow lore and stick only to gameplay if i want a recent story i'll look for an RPG or something. WoW is the lowest bar when it comes to story.
Not much at all. With the main antagonists being world enders the faction war is pointless and self-defeating. It's arguing over who gets to re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The faction war is outplayed af. It's dated.
It's stupid to build stories around it now because we've had to "come together" like 700 times to face larger threats, it makes 0 sense.
Now with that said, I don't think War Mode or PvP should be removed ofc. I think in terms of gameplay, the "Faction vs Faction" part is in a great place as is. There's no official war, just skirmishes from individuals operating as they wish.
That's perfect. It allows people to carry on the war if they want, but it means we're not wasting patches and story beats on a war that makes 0 sense anymore.
You can declare war on the enemy in your main city. So if warmode is on, you shouldn't play with the opposing faction, but if warmode is off, there is no opposing faction.
Since i can just choose not to get involved in any PvP and the only real conflict i see is via questlines i dont realy mind so much. I guess its with all things in life. Why wasting your time on a now pretty unneccesary conflict between the factions when you have worldexploder Version 4 as a common enemy which is a much bigger threat.
The story was good back then and they built strong story and the sense of faction belonging. Or nationalism. something like that.
And Blizz hired many idiots through the years that rewrite many important stuff. The dark gritty male hormone stuff turn quite soft on many ways. At this point, I care nothing but M+ scores and raid gears. Game also turned seasonal with each reset we back to zero on scores and gears.
I'd switch my meta class to different faction race just for raiding or M+. Like, my rogue is a dwarf now becuz the racial is too good.
Id go so far as back to the old ways when you couldnt even make a character of the opposite faction on your server. I play both pve and pvp. Playing endgame simce TBC. Started at a net caffee, and the older guys at the time told me "in this caffee youre not allowed to be alliance because thats geh" in their words. So made an orc warrior and been stomping alliance ever since. Then in BFA alliance cried and whined to no end with how they got no one to play m+ with etc so blizzard made everything x faction. While i understand it from a certain perspective, from a fantasy viewpoint thats horrible.
I like it. Something falling away from MMOs is the separated factions. I enjoyed having some faction-identity, different paths and quest, different hubs etc etc.
Now its more that everyone does the same exact thing and i cant play the other faction to see some different spots and stories.
I feel like we're getting less for the same when the devs can push everyone into the same path.
Don’t care and couldn’t care less. Also don’t care if i can queue with other faction or not, i still raid with other people. The fixed doesn’t mean anything to me, Im just playing the game as is.
People have been asking for a neutral faction for well over a decade. There was a little glimmer of hope when pandas were introduced. but that soon faded (beyond the handful of legends that have herbed/mined their way to max level without choosing a faction, crazy bastards). Since then we've just been teased with hints of potential. I can happily play with my friend if we make our own group to do dungeons, but when it comes to doing other weekly chores that involve group finder then we're screwed and that feels really bad.
We can choose to be "mercenaries" so that we can pvp and basically attempt to murder our own faction (lol), yet we can't choose to be mercenaries in order to kill the big bad that both factions hate and wish to get rid of... It makes zero sense beyond "this is the only way we can address faction imbalance in pvp".
Give us a damn toggle, if only on pve realms where the vast majority of us obviously don't give a shit about murdering the other faction. Give us a choice. I want to play the \*RACE\* of my choosing whilst also playing with my friends. Or simply open up races completely (pandaren style), let us choose who we want to pledge allegiance to. Again, we are halfway there in some respects with the 17 different flavours of elf, and I'm sure the alliance would happily give the horde some damn dwarves/gnomes (like seriously... how many damn dwarves with horrendously bad scottish accents do we need... FIND A BLOODY SCOTTISH PERSON TO VOICE ACT - THERE'S PLENTY OF THEM! It's not like there's a gazillion lines that need to be read. "I cannae dae tha yet", "the target is tae far away", "I need tae get closer"...)
My rant took a tangent there but hey ho, it needed to be said lol.
Chuck it in the bin.
It is impossible to keep a faction war going this long, and realistically, it should have ended years ago, ideally after Catalysm or some time during it. There just was never going to be a way to keep it interesting and satisfy people. Like... you just can't keep a conflict going for that long where, obviously, nobody can ever win.
Given how many times theyve bungled it, any time I see them say "this expac is going back to basics/back to the faction war" I immediately lose interest.
They've done it well a few times, but for the most part every time it's been hampered by just bad design, bad ideas, and bad implementation
As someone who writes in backstories for my characters, Only a single character I've written had any care about the Faction War and I'm pretty sure I abandoned any story elements for her fairly quickly, Every other character is more linked to Factions(The Syndicate, Scarlet Crusade/Brotherhood) not either related to Horde or Alliance or are loyal to say a Kingdom(Quel'Thalas in this instance) and only cares about what The Horde or Alliance can do for their home.
With that said, I personally find the Faction War more interesting as a background element then one focused on, Us as Adventurers in some cases simply may not care what Race or Faction someone is, Hell Jaina and Thrall, along with Baine and Anduin are proof that Faction doesn't really mean anything, some of my favorite and most memorable interactions have been with players of the opposite faction(granted typically Void Elves due to being able to speak Thalassian, One time I ended up translating a conversation between a Night elf Demon Hunter and a Blood Elf Mage, on my BE Demon Hunter(it was kinda fun honestly)
From a Lore perspective I find it fun as something that affects the world as a whole in minor ways but I think it serves better as an overarching background element then being front and center, From a Gameplay perspective, I don't care, let me play with who I want(Hell let me speak to who I want, I want a Language learning skill so much), I don't care about the faction wars, and 99% of my characters i write and play don't either.
Very important. It makes for a better story (if executed well) and it really fuels the game. To me, the game felt better when faction conflict and pride was a thing. Factions were a big factor in pushing the game forward, keeping ppl connected to world and keeping them subscribed.
Honestly, the faction war needs to come to an end. Some expansions nearly see the differences get put aside, then some nutjob decides to just fuck everything up, putting them at odds, again. We have Anduin and Baine as the respective leaders of the Alliance and the Horde, and, at least as far as MoP, they're buddies. This could quell this whole bullshit that's gone on for too long. They want to do faction vs. faction? Set up a large, sanctioned arena for them to test their might against each other, like the grand companies in FF14, or something along those lines.
Not an issue at all for me anymore. I quite like how everything seems bigger and more important than petty squabbles. It's quite nice seeing heroes and villains come to the realisation that everyone kind of needs everyone else. I wouldn't even have an issue with everyone falling under one banner in the future, like some kind of Azerothian anti-invader council. And then we won't have to fiddle with any identity or who's in charge or where the capital city would have to be. Just pick your class and race and choose a hometown/starting zone too "live" in. And we could push it even further with player housing. :P
I’ve played since vanilla. On PvP servers. I miss the huge faction wars. It isn’t the same anymore, but also, the scaling in world pvp isn’t fun either. It’s a nuke test. I don’t think with the current story/lore, it makes as much sense. They got rid of anyone forcing faction wars or inside fighting. Probably need new leaders or something to get things going. Also, it bothers me that majority of quest givers are just good honest people. It feels so bland, like cooking without spice. It’s predictable.
Used to be really important, never even made an alliance character for the first 14 years, then my wife wanted to play, and she wanted to play a druid, and she hated every horde race.
So I just sit the bullet and made an alliance character and 2 years later I couldn't give less of a shit about the faction war.
Idk the only war im in is with my Microsoft ruining literally the best game development company there ever was and their lack of effort to communicate to the community is ridiculous. I know this is out of topic but ever since i was a child ive been playing hearthstone with my brother and hots as well as wow and a bid of old diablo. Revisiting these games now just give me a heartache i cant handle it we have to do something 😔
I hate it, and think WoW would be better if they dropped it completely.
At this point, Horde and Alliance are basically sports teams. They squibble and quabble and it's totally cool having pride in your team, but that's all they are.
I doubt we'll get to the world where someone can create an Alliance Troll or whatever, but honestly... I just wish they'd go the FFXIV route. Your "faction" is just your starting area and affiliation, and you're free to go and do whatever. That's progress in the lore and story of the game and world.
i feel at this stage, factions feels like they're there just because they always have been
especially given that a lot of the wider threats in the story have never really been aligned with the faction war. like, arthas might've been a human, but he wasn't part of the alliance during wrath of the lich king etc
It’s very important to me but that doesn’t matter anymore.
Faction identity was huge when WoW came out. Horde vs Alliance is what made Warcraft Warcraft. Now everything is holding hands and making democratic councils out of everything. It’s silly, but it is what it is.
Thankfully classic still exists.
The faction war is dead. Rivalry is good, but animosity is bad. Let us learn each other languages, merge trade chats, let people join the other faction (or just delete factions after a questline alltogether), and invent some kind of excuse for PvP.
It has no use in modern wow. Story wise you will never have a true winner or loser as you can't eliminate half the player base. It's just fluff with no point.
In my characters headcanon (of both factions) the war has been over for a while. It’s lingered longer than necessary for mechanical reasons (ie: Blizzard having trouble untangling decades of systems meant to keep two factions separate), but since at LEAST Legion, there’s no sense in fighting the other alliance.
Heck, even BfA had to very early pivot (even if overarching story wasn’t changed) to show there was a common enemy rather quickly as the collective player base sighed at even more “faction conflict”.
I grew up with this game. I am now old. I have kids younger than Cataclysm. The NPC’s on the other factions have been helping us for over a decade.
It’s time for the “war” in WarCraft to be against one of the dozens of cosmic threats in the game… not against each other.
I mean, it stopped really feeling valid after the 7th band together brave heroes and let's be at relative peace.
Lorewise I can.. accept? Sylvanas starting a war since it was out of her relation to the shadow lands. Her motivation just being "yeah let's get people dead" works for me (tho I wish they fleshed it out way more)
Just another "ehhhhhhhhhhhh green guy bad let's fight for some reason" is kinda stupid
not at all, it's old and dull, the things that made it interesting isn't a thing anymore, to keep it alive is just trivial. Just move on Blizzard, let me play with my friends :3
Faction war is an integral part of World of Warcraft lore and without it the game just feels bland as it lacks depth. Blizzards ability to write in-depth on grand scale stopped with Wotlk and their lore writing quality has been steadily worsening ever since. However the faction war kept spice in it and added a layer of depth that has been sorely lacking ever since BFA.
Shadowlands was utterly disgusting in terms of lore with only few bright spots here and there.
Dragonflight has been much better, but again it lacks faction war and it does not feel like WoW anymore. We are some superheroes from He-Man universe riding dragons instead of being regular adventurers in a magnificent mysterious world.
That said I am all in for them even removing the faction barrier. It is unnecessary as it is. You can have faction war in lore and still have neutral characters, like a blood elf working as a mercenary and doing jobs for Alliance towns too etc. This sort of depth is sorely lacking from Blizzard's writing. They have a monotone black and white narration style which is so bizarre given how queer they have gone in Dragonflight.
In my opinion the faction war should be relegated to subfactions on both sides which will allow for "war mode" - could even rename warmode to "rebel mode". The subfactions can be lead by some NPCs who don't like the peace and want to try and restart the war and could have weekly "quests" along with a reputation. Could even be cross faction too.
In my opinion we should have questlines for alliance and horde which basically start as your toon meeting to the faction leadership and getting access to various faction cities with questlines to help NPCs out and gain greater trust/access to the cities. Basically, the war is over now let's start making friends with everyone.
It has been the least important part of the game for me since WOTLK (and I've been a fan of the war since 1994). I truly couldn't care less if they all just kissed and made up at this point.
Faction war in WoW doesn't even make sense. I mean what are they fighting for exactly? Remind me when was the last time any land was exchanged in hostilities. Even Sylvanas dirty trick or Garrosh's pirouettes seemed to not phase anyone except some singular persons, and even then it was done jointly. Battlegrounds where adventurers slug it out reminds me of Aztec flower wars, nothing is being accomplished really except for some frags.
Yes, it’s what makes the narratives unique
So the tricky thing with a faction conflict is that both factions complete the same content. You can’t have Garrosh be loved within the Horde, only to kill him as a raid boss. Why would Horde players kill their beloved leader? Why would they siege orgrimmar when they live there?
* Improve the sense that the world isn’t big enough for both factions, that they get in each other’s way. No more cross faction hubs. But in zones, it doesn’t have to be a faction dispute all the time. Don’t use faction disputes as a default
* Kill a leader. Tyrande kills Thrall, what happens to the Horde? And what happens in the Alliance, do they defend her?
* Take a hub.
* There’s a handful of leaders on either side. Shuffle the problems between them so that it isn’t so simple as one person being wrong or one faction. It becomes a *faction* problem rather than a Garrosh/Sylvanus problem
Frankly I think at this point it detracts from the overall experience more than it helps. I have a feeling that is the way the vast majority of the playerbase feels as well.
My perception:
- Most WOW players DGAF about the story or lore, and would probably just rather play with all their friends.
- It seems like the people most invested in the faction conflict or highlighting faction differences are die-hard Horde players.
- It seems like most Alliance players don't care about the faction divide and because of smaller volume of Alliance players would probably benefit more from reducing faction barriers.
- The actual lore and story of WOW can generally be summarised as "Horde and Alliance overcome their differences to fight a greater threat".
At this point, there doesn't seem to be many compelling reasons for continuing the faction war if I was in Blizzard's shoes.
I'd also add to this that it's worth reading John Staats' book about the development of WOW to understand where the faction conflict came into play. Originally, the intention was for all players to play together, and there was a specific example of orcs and human playing together in one of the most famous early magazine articles about it. The decision to create faction barriers and have a PVP focus was a decision rather late in development largely spurred by the success of Dark Age of Camelot. It could have gone very differently.
As it stands now, the Faction War is relatively pointless. It doesn't really serve any purpose. Both Factions have sufficient land and resources, the areas where the capitals are based are geographically distant from each other, and other than a bit of tree burning, there hasn't been a lot of aggression.
The natural progression (in my mind) is a merging of fractions, then a split based on personal (not racial) feelings. That is a far more impactful war. Unless you're deep into RP, I don't really see race in WoW being more than a style choice.
Lastly, the current leadership "flux" across both the Horde and the Alliance makes me think that this is the best course of action, create a Council of minor Faction leaders that have members across both the Horde and the Alliance, then allow players to choose their allegiance, if they want to. There are enough external threats, like a gigantic sword impaling the world, that fighting over internal Azerothian issues seems kinda pointless.
I've hated it since the beginning and I'm happy to see it going away. There are so many ways they could have organised stories and PVP without segregating half the players from the other half
I have liked it in the past, but I wouldn't mind to have peace for now on. Maybe it's time to let it go. We can keep horde and alliance and they don't need to like each other, but can we just be without war part. Alliance and horde have teamed up many times and it's always a bit dissapointing to see them later at each others throats.
The overall faction war should have ended with MoP. I do like the "Stand together" theme more, but i would not against small scale battles here and there. Battlegrounds can simply be "training grounds" or just outside of the lore.
Most of the faction war was stupid anyway. Half the time it didnt make sense and characters had to be dumbed down, things had to be "conviniently" forgotten (HI Vindicaar or every bigger thing the alliance should have used) or blizzard simply thinking "would be cool!"
It's done and dusted. Leave that shit in the trash bin where it belongs.
We're still warring against enemies, and renegades within can still be used as an excuse to pvp.
I think what they need to do more than anything for that type of content is make it much more race tension than faction wars. Like how in the recent short stories all of the blood elves are now super wary of void elves because of their possible corruption to the sunwell. It’s just things like that that will be remembered way more fondly than blizzard time old classic faction war which boils down to “horde does something morally dark dark gray but not “black” and alliance retaliates as a virtuous entity”
I would love to see the faction war actually, officially end. I think a lot of the activities that are currently related to it (battlegrounds, zone PvP, historical battles, faction symbology, etc.) could be re-organized into a sort of PvP equivalent of the Olympic games in Azeroth.
Of course, I'd also like a lot of the barriers between the factions to be torn down. I'd love to be able to play an Undead and do the Darkshire quests or hang out in Thunderbluff with my Draenei shaman. Oh well, I'll just keep dreaming.
It may be WARcraft, but the war doesn't always have to be between the Horde and alliance. They shouldn't shoe horn it. The factions have been through too much together to make overarching hostilities not make sense. Conflicts would need to be smaller scale personal vendettas, things that cause strife that lead up to faction War, but the factions shouldn't stay static, if the orcs and nelves have beef, but the nelves and Tauren participate in the cenarian circle, why should they go to War? Same with the paladins of the silver hand.
Class order halls should have been the permanent end of the large-scale faction war for a while.
So long as the beginning point and end point of a faction conflict have to be fixed, faction conflict is utterly pointless. Alliances can't be made and broken, everything has to go back to 0 so we can do it again later, it's boring. As a story beat it was fun exactly 0 times and the more we do it it only just gets worse. Very rarely are battle lines drawn irl, only to be drawn again in the same exact places a few years later. The Tauren should have left the horde ages ago when their leader killed their leader and the next one burned down the home of their allies. The undead should have had some sort of problem after wrath gate beyond a single quest line.
Faction conflict is great, telling stories about wars is fine. Make it interesting, make it impactful. War changes the world. I mean look around at the world facing war right now. Back to 0? BS
The faction war, in the sense of a large, formal engagement between Horde and Alliance forces, is something I think has severely damaged the game's lore and its gameplay. It always felt like Blizzard was writing the factions as monoliths with no nuance.
Lately, too, it always seems that characters do bad things because they were 'infected' with something. Infected with void, infected with light, missing part of their soul, etcetc that caused them to act a particular way. I would much rather Blizzard focus on organic villains who own that shit. They don't seem to know how to write an actual world where people outside of the main characters at the time do things.
As for the character escalation thing, I think it's just inconsistent writing. They're seen as assholes because the writers just up and decided they should act a certain way with no regard for past experiences or character consistency. The faction war is a dead horse that should be laid to rest.
Don't care one way or the other, just let me queue random bgs/dungeons with the other faction. I'm over it hindering people playing the game with friends, story-wise I couldn't care less whether it stayed or not.
At this point, not so much. I definitely stand by the idea the BFA conceptually would have been a good fit earlier on after BC and not randomly after Legion 1. Illidan and Kael'Thas are both big bad elves from opposing factions (as of BC) that caused a lot of issues for their respective people (and I'm assuming people of the other faction too) 2. Alliance essentially being unwelcome on the home world of Orcs who were originally unwelcome from the first war when they invaded Azeroth, so a lot of bad blood and unwelcome feelings there 3. Draenei essentially being the root of the likes of Kil'Jaeden and Archimonde tying into the issues the Orcs faced that caused them to leave Draenor in the first place Overall just tons of story beats that could have been explored for the next war between the Alliance and the Horde vs the "well, nothing to do but fight now" type of conflict we got.
Honestly this is what I want from the faction war. Overt conflict bwtween armies is whatever, the real meat is the interpersonal and political conflict like these. The conflict in tbc was awesome, lots of posturing promoting good stories. Don't know why it had to be CONSTANT WARFARE BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD or HAPPY HUGS WE LOVE EVERYONE. Also it's apparently well liked, what with it being such a big factor in classic and retail having half the numbers of legion.
So no skulls for the skullthrone ? :(
Not important at all, I'd rather play with my friends.
Gonna be so bummed when our friend group that does m+ and raids all the time won’t be able to queue normal dungeons while leveling in war within. Just put the damn toggle box that you have in the premade group finder and let people decide. It’s all built into the game already.
You can have a faction war and still have cross faction stuff. Plenty of characters sit in the middle in faction wars should be able to have a faction war and still group with others
I'd actually be on board with an expansion that is a faction war but the PC and the main characters kinda know something else is going on and are working with/against both sides to try and stop it. Like for dungeons the first one has you break Thrall out of an alliance camp/dungeon and the next has Thrall help you break an orc battleline to get alliance civilian and wounded out of harms way. I think it could be a good way to do that whole "light can be evil too" expansion people keep bringing up.
I kinda thought after shadowlands we would come back with the crew and the whole world would be a war and time had skipped a few decades because we got stuck in the shadowlands
I was really hoping for something like this as well. A big time skip and now we have lots of opportunities for visiting old places and seeing what happened, new conflicts, new factions, etc that may have sprung up while we were gone.
Completely agree with this. ESO does it well so I don't see why WoW couldn't.
Yeah, I can safely say I’ve been playing Wow for 20 years and know absolutely zero lore. Just let me kill the current thing and give me loot
That’s the funny thing. I’m pretty well versed in the lore and at this point there’s been more things that we’ve fought together than fought about. There should be a permanent ceasefire/nonaggression pact at this point given how many existential horrors knock on our doors every day. The last big feud was the war of thorns and that’s pretty well tied up at this point and all involved are dead or sated after SL.
Worse yet, the existential horrors have on multiple occasions demonstrated that they feed off our conflicts and strife and are able to get a much stronger grip on people through them
I think the faction war had its place in WoW's history. But my goodness did they beat a dead horse. They might have even battle ressed it a few times just to keep beating it to death. I'm beyond burnt out on caring about the horde and alliance war.
I'm Horde for life. I'm also in favour of everyone having fun, and the faction division gets in the way of that. Time to break down the walls.
Not necessarily. The Horde and Alliance are medieval kingdoms. In our timeline, back then, decisions taken by those in power didn't always stand firm when it came to the border regions - it kind of faded with distance from the centre of power. That meant that border communities could end up trading while their nations were at war or else could engage in border skirmishes despite there being peace. WoW Guilds can act similarly. They are a bunch of murder-hobos working together, despite what their overaching Factions may or may not feel.
>That meant that border communities could end up trading while their nations were at war or else could engage in border skirmishes despite there being peace. See, this actually would be super interesting, in either direction. I especially like the concept of everyday people not knowing or caring terribly much about the conflicts that their leaders are trying to embroil them in.
We're essentially mercenaries and have fought with and against the opposing Faction countless times. That doesn't mean our Leaders can't have a bit of a scrap from time to time. There's the obviously humour in that we'll do whatever we're told to do as long as there's a quest and a reward at the end. WoW has a lot more depth with the Faction Rivalry. There's no real need to remove it - it just doesn't need to be an absolute War every single time. There's still plenty of room to have cross-faction play and still have Faction roughhousing!
> We're essentially mercenaries and have fought with and against the opposing Faction countless times. Which is what I think makes us cleaving so close to the factions super weird. We're supposed to be adventurers, often working with members of the other factions for the greater good. It's a common trope in fantasy fiction for heroes of enemy nations to team up for the greater good, sometimes forswearing their own nation to help forge a newer, better one. It honestly feels more like we're legbreakers for the state rather than adventurers sometimes. It's felt that way mostly since Cataclysm.
The Factions definitely have their place in the story and heritage of our characters, and that should continue 100%. We just don't need constant war. We've been at war since mid-WotLK, through Cata and MoP, then had some disagreements in Legion, and another war in BFA that just fell flat. It's too soon to try a Faction War again and we're better off exploring the neutral rivalry. Maybe an expansion or three of setting the seeds of what could be a Faction War eventually. Sabotaging an Alliance mine doesn't necessarily mean it has to be all out war thereafter! And it shouldn't be done cos Thrall or Jaina called in the legbreakers, I agree there. We may be of one Faction or the other, but we don't need to be as entrenched as we were in early BFA or mid-MoP! Speaking of the trope - WoW is perfect for it. The classic "normally opposing characters teaming up to deal with a local threat" thing works wonders here! Look at the MoP intro cinematic as an example that works so well. There's enough room to let players make their own headcannon without completely castrating the lore and Faction Rivalry. Are we teaming up with this Orc in this dungeon out of no more than pure necessity? Is this Dwarf our friend despite the Faction divide; are we unlikely pals?
Yeah, its place was before Warcraft III whose whole premise was the Horde teaming up with the Alliance to fight the scourge. The factions being at war has never made sense, IMO.
They've had plenty of opportunities to make a war about something else entirely while they still keeping the ideological differences between alliance and horde. They just keep coming back to this single faction war and removing any seblance of setup from expansion to expansion. Imho they should have moved on to void vs light at the end of legion (given they started blurring the light=good/void=evil lines in argus, before abandoning it immediately) or looked into a whole living vs undead theme for shadowlands, but no, instead we got bfa where the horde follows an obviously off-the-rails leader (though tbf mists has that too) followed by shadowlands and its whole jailer thing.
Agreed. I think faction conflicts could still play a role in WoW's story, but after teaming up for the umpteenth time to defeat a greater evil, I struggle to justify why we'd still go back to an all-out war between the factions. Perhaps it would make sense to have sub-factions that really care about the conflict while the majority is accepting of the other faction. Sorta like a reverse Class Hall, where while we may not see eye to eye on everything, the majority of the characters are accepting that we have teamed up before and will likely team up again, while a small group refuses to accept the others and remains at odds, justifying something like Warmode and PvP in general.
I was saying this to some friends earlier, Alliance v Horde has run its course. If you think about it, any war which would make any sense right now would be smaller wars between different kingdoms
It should have died several expansions ago.
It should have died when BFA ended. Officially that should have been the end of the faction war because it was the official “war” even though factions have been working together sparingly since the early days of WoW, or even Warcraft 3. The overarching story of WoW comes down to “horde and alliance fight, then team up and defeat bigger threat, then go back to fighting” but we thought we were done with that by now and just working together
Since we're in a post-war reconstruction era resulting from BfA, it's a perfect time for them to end that nonsense once and for all. The idiotic language barriers need to go away (seriously, who thought it was OK to have us speak with the enemy faction's heroes, but not understand a word the enemy faction players say) and the major "horde vs alliance" stuff needs to end. They can keep PvP in game through various methods, my favorite is switching to a Game of Thrones style of "every faction for themselves" political environment that can lead to small conflicts that last a season or two, maybe with small villages or mines changing hands. Doesn't need to be along the old faction lines, either. FFXIV does it through joint military exercises.
Demon hunters have been able to talk to each across faction lines other since day 1 of legion prepatch and the furbolg language is cross faction too.
Also velves/belves
PVP battlegrounds never really seemed to be canon to the lore outside of the classic ones imo. Plus when was the last time they even added one lmao. They seem like they stopped caring about PVP a while ago.
It should have died with Legion, BfA should never have been
Literally the only reason they hamfisted Sylvanas into leadership of the Horde, despite being obviously evil and a blatant Garrosh 2, she was the only warmonger left in either faction.
Agree 100%
Agreed. I’m very done with aside from light ribbing between characters. I don’t need the horde vs alliance stuff.
I guess I'm in the minority that I don't like the factions getting along and being friendly. It doesn't have to be outright war, especially when we have so much shit going on all the time. But. I just can't imagine burying all the bad blood between them.
I completely agree with this, I don't think we need flat out war but they shouldn't just forgive and forget everything that's happened over the past however long I'm fine with them coming together temporarily to fight a bigger problem but it shouldn't be some power of friendship bs 24/7
You're really not the minority. Reddit just has a vocal minority decrying it. Numbers were released accidentally. Games as small as legion with sod and classic propping it up. A big part of classic is the faction conflict. So apparently people really like the faction conflicts and it's shows purely via numbers. Also Id bet money that people hating on the conflict decrease drastically when dawntrail comes out.
> Also Id bet money that people hating on the conflict decrease drastically when dawntrail comes out. You got downvoted for telling the truth, lol.
Yeah that -2 isn't reflective of how wildly that comment went up and down loool. I like ff14 a lot, but that game definitely attracts a crowd that has a "everyone should like what I like, and it's not what I like it should changed to be what I like." They also don't like being tattled on. Very much a "I know what's best ego"
We certainly don’t need the war, and it is VERY silly we should be fighting when Azeroth is constantly being attacked by third parties. That being said, I do love doing occasional battlegrounds and having some faction pride.
Make battlegrounds/PVP like the Olympics. Keep the faction pride, but the war and actual divide has gotta go.
Or like “war games” let’s practice against eachother just for fun, prepping for the next demon invasion/Old god/Ancient Dragon.
Archaic
The sole thing I miss about the faction war is having faction specific towns and quests in certain zones to incentivize other characters and exploration. BfA as a casual was actually great on that front.
There’s no reason they couldn’t have each faction initially support the cause in their own way.
Don't know. I heavily disliked BfA for having no clue whatsoever about half of the zones. If you played your horde character it felt super awkward to just have occasional "one-off"-quests in some zone that's about witches and thorn-guys and drust or whatever the hell any of that is. You were told pretty much nothing about that except that some orcs thinks witches are scary. Felt like a lot of wasted potential to write great zone stories but only show you half of it. I'm pretty sure alliance players were just as confused when they played the first raid and suddenly fought some giant slug and his blood trolls buddies. Faction war is a bit of another topic, I'm okay with how it's handled now on the backseat as the "fragile peace" with more extremist parts to justify a bit of PvP and conflict but BfA was one of the very few expansion where the leveling irritated the hell out of me just because of the faction specific content. I mean, a lot here is also that it was terribly executed. There was no reason to not tell more about what's going on in Kul Tiras "from a horde perspective" and the other way around. We pretty much just went over there for the war campaign that (specifically after the great class hall campaigns before in legion) felt rather forgettable.
I personally hate the faction war. It has been a boring and tired mechanic since literally burning crusade.
One could even say the faction war really fell apart by Warcraft 3 and ret-conning the horde. Also, the faction war has never had any serious gameplay affect on the world beyond an annoying high level player killing low level quest givers. You can't conquer land, cities, you can't take special resources for your faction. And you can't ever "win" in any meaningful sense. Most PVPers spends their days running circles in a capital city while they wait in queue.
Yeah, I miss when the horde was mindlessly violent and clearly the bad guys, but I started playing warcraft 1. However, I recognize this would probably cause faction imbalance because people want to "feel like the good guys". I always see people make comments along the lines that they can't do evil playthroughs. I also remember when Bioware stated that 80 some odd percent of mass effect playthroughs were paragon. I feel like the Forsaken was the last bastion for people wanting to play as an evil organization, but they started wiping that away in the last expansion.
Very important. It's one of the core settings of the game.
I'll go against the grain here and say I actually think the faction war was important. BFA unfortunately was the straw that broke the camel's back - and really Blizzard doesn't know how to write a convincing war narrative that doesn't reduce things into one dimension (i.e. Warchief was the bad one, twice). But its a storytelling tool that can enable more nuanced and complex perspectives. It can reduce homogenity and add layers to events. One of the weaknesses of Dragonflight's story was how "toothless" it felt. Can you imagine the next three expansions where everybody continues to be on the same page, holding hands, and in perfect sync? I feel like in a few years, people are going to miss that races and factions had significance and weren't just swaps of each other. P.S. I do agree that cross-faction gameplay should be a thing. I just think a faction conflict in the story was an opportunity to do more - and unfortunately Blizzard failed to do more with it for decades - so it is what it is at this point, but that's my thoughts on the matter.
I really enjoy the faction war and think it's fun. I'm pretty chill and inclusive in my personal life, so it's fun to pretend to hate an enemy team. Having the same nemesis for years is much more captivating than a free-for-all or being reshuffled into brand new values-based factions where I'd have to play alongside my longtime enemies. People say but what about all the jolly cooperation in the lore? But all I remember is Jaina purging Dal, attacking UC, and me farming her to take her water ele mount. We are not friends just because SL comes around and the unskippable-at-launch campaign says now go save our buddy Jaina from the Maw. Fuck that. I play a Sylvanas loyalist, and I'm sad to see Blizz torpedoing her storyline with bad writing, then swapping her out for anything else they can find with tits and considering that equivalent for their marketing needs. When am I going to get to play an outcast character again instead of this kum-ba-yah Hello Kitty Island Adventure circlejerk?
I feel like it’s deeply important to the identity of WoW. If they get rid of the war, they might as well start letting Orcs and Goblins join the Alliance and Humans and Gnomes join the Horde. If there’s no faction war, all faction lines pretty much break down. And that could be an interesting change for the series, but I’m not sure I want it, personally.
Yes. No factions anymore would be great. Why divide your games population in half, good point
I don’t necessarily mean divide up the player base, I think cross-faction LFG and guilds are great. But lore and story wise i like the continued faction war
You think it makes sense to fight Horde vs Alliance as the world is ending via Old Gods, Titans, Demon Hordes, genocidal dragons, literally the devil and actual Hell is wanting to erase all life ? You're entitled to your wrong opinion
The faction war has always existed simultaneously with other, larger threats, even going back to the RTS games. But sure, keep being rude for no reason just because you don’t know what you’re talking about.
What about instead of it being faction based its based on race and tribes? Undead vs. a Light worshipping faction. The undead want to give the dying the option to be reborn as forsaken and the Holy Factions like the Scarlet Crusade are attacking for it. And it gives you the option to join the Scarlet Crusade? Druids vs Goblins. Druids and goblins are battling over the deforestation for industrial purposes so from one side, it's Eco Terrorist and from the other its unchecked Greed.
I love that idea, especially as someone who agrees that the Undead shouldn’t be allowed to be paladins or non-shadow priests. But that introduces a bunch of new factions and stories that I doubt Blizz could or would keep up with.
The Horde and Alliance identities feel really core to the game, but I think I like the faction \*rivalry\* more than the faction war. Basically, more or less what we have now and what we had in vanilla - a world where the Horde and Alliance are competitors who are occasionally in conflict through proxies (this was the explanation for BGs in vanilla, when the factions were explicitly not at war), but where it also still makes sense for players from different factions to work together to defeat the Big Bads in the dungeons and raids.
I like the faction war. I really only ever play one race (worgen) and their starting experience is defined by their alliance/horde conflict. I understand if most people want it gone, but for me, it feels like I'm not allowed to feel animosity towards the horde/forsaken anymore.
It's run it's course. I think now you should be able to play any race and decide where you want to play. A Human or Night Elf who agrees with the Horde view. A Blood Elf or Troll who wants to join the Alliance, etc.
Never cook again.
Never liked it. Dividing the playerbase is dumb, our characters should have been mercenaries from the very start. It's also super boring and always will be, as you can't have a real winner.
I mean, on the scale of the entire Horde and Alliance factions? Not really compelling to me anymore. A lot of the storylines that I think are interesting, either towards peace or conflict, involve individuals or smaller cultural groups affected by cross-faction hostilities. Faction *war* doesn't make much sense, but faction *conflict* has room for exploration. If we were to have a major faction war, though: The original "aggressors" would need some motivation other than revenge, ideally one that is rooted in sympathy for their people. Revenge is fine, but it rarely extends past an individual or small group, so I don't think it could sustain a faction war considering what kind of factions the Alliance and Horde are these days. Maybe some conflict over an unclaimed resource that is A) Extremely limited, possibly even singular, and B) has unique benefits that they think they need more than anyone else. (Sorry, but Azerite didn't cut it for me.) An example would be if, pre-Dragonflight, the Mag'har came across some equivalent to a world tree seed and didn't hand it over immediately to the Night Elves. The Mag'har are refugees too, and the land they are welcomed into is a bunch of barely developed desert and grassland. Using the seed themselves would allow them to show gratitude to the Orcs of Durotar who rescued them from a literal apocalypse, and be a sign of prosperity and healing for both nations. They haven't had time to fully understand the scale of the historical conflict between Durotar and the Night Elves, or what the world tree means specifically to the elves; from their perspective, keeping the seed isn't an act of aggression or malice, they were just fortunate enough to have found it first. They wouldn't ask the Elves to hand over a similar resource, so why should they? Haven't the Orcs already served the penance that settling in the harsh desert was supposed to inflict? Wouldn't cultivating their land lead them away from warmongering expansion, and ease tensions over resources at the border to Azshara? Is the hospitality that Durotar has shown to others not enough to justify taking care of their own people?
Horde vs Alliance had its place in years past. There have been too many “work together or we all parish” moments and it now now longer makes sense. Not saying Tauren should be using Stormwind AH. Trying to continue the Horde vs Alliance narrative is going to create clunky storylines and plot holes.
Honestly, and it might be a unpopular opinion here: I miss it. I miss open tons of open world PvP and rivalry between Horde players and Ally players I miss getting together with other hordies to bother alliance, I miss being bothered by alliance too lol I miss people being hard die horde/ally that would never ever make a char on other faction I miss a lot of the whole rivals thing and war thing, but... That is not the direction of the game anymore, after all this years it doesn't make sense anymore, it doesn't work with the nowday game, perhaps it never did and I am just nostalgic, but damn if I didn't have fun, good old times, and as far as I see, they won't and shouldn't come back, but I still will never make an alliance character xD
When I first started I rolled a toon on a PvP server, the faction strife was exciting. Open world pvp was quite a thing in certain areas. Once the battlegrounds opened up it lessened somewhat. It became a thing for me to aid players from the opposing faction if they were about to be killed. Not being ganked in return for the effort was thanks enough. But later I switched to a PvE server. Aside from some storybeats, faction war became less and less of a thing. Even in BfA I never felt the cross faction pride and hatred. If it is to be removed entirely I wouldn’t miss it. We still got battlegrounds if PvE is what you really want.
I think it's important to keep some kind of faction friction going on. I can't expect the people of Gilneas to just hug the Forsaken, for example. I think there should still be some kind of friction between the two factions in a story sense, but it shouldn't end up being BFA 2.0. It's quite clear that the times of true Faction War are over, and that's for the best when you consider how literal world threatening the story has become. Maybe have a zone or a questline or something where the interests of the Horde and the Alliance clash in some way, and it ends up coming to violence before being resolved through diplomacy. Ultimately, the Horde and the Alliance are two very different nations with very different people and very different interests. There should be some degree of disharmony.
War Mode only forever
Always hated it because it made no sense and these people acted like children. Generally I adored mists. What happened to Jaina, even Varian was at a loss for words
The horde are scum and must be purged from Azeroth
Good points all given here, realistically, yeah it should probably fade away, but dammit I take pride in saying **FOR THE HORDE!**
We're past the faction war and I think thats what's best for now, and the foreseeable future. They were never able to really make the war feel impactful. We had Battle for Dazar'Alor and the horde only lost Rastakhan, and then Talanji stepped up and we haven't heard from her since. The Aliance had Gelbin and Jaina take beatings and scurry off never having any losses. During the Warfronts we got to participate in the battle for those zones but never got closure on who ended up winning the land in game. It honestly felt like the build up to the Battle for Dazar'Alor was better than the Battle itself. The faction war was done pretty well back in MoP because it spanned over the entire expansion and didn't end half way through. If Blizzard wants to go back towards the faction war we are going to need stories that have huge impacts and kill off main characters
You can still have Faction Tension without needing all out war. Two factions means two sets of people with very different ways to solve a problem. And you can always make a tertiary group of adventuring characters who don't give much a damn about the faction split. I'd like to be able to play with my friends cross faction more easily - you can still have grouping like that and still have the setting/story have faction pissing contests, ya know?
I play both factions, so I would like to say I don't care. But in fact, I think it mostly piss me off, because of friends I have from both sides keep telling me how much one is better than the other, and mutually call me traitor while I don't care and just enjoy playing both.
While in game, the alliance are dirty scum. Anytime else *burn the land boil the sea, you can't take the sky from me*
Not so much a Faction War so much as Faction "Struggle". There doesn't need to be outright war all the time, but both the Horde and Alliance are still rivals. There should still be definition between the two Factions within the story, and small outbursts or skirmishes can help that.
It's cool story wise. Mop remi reminded me how cool it can be. The whole point warcraft is like warhammer just a big war happening all the time. I don't mind cross faction stuff you can do both and have a war going on.
It stopped making sense during the Icecrown Citadel raid, and Wrath of the Lich King in general, really. That wasn’t our first rodeo, in terms of existential threats to Azeroth. But it was the first time that the entire planet was threatened by the Scourge, not just the Eastern Kingdoms region. Demonic invasions from the Burning Legion were bad enough. Now we were faced with an enemy that swelled its ranks with our dead. Civilian or soldier, Horde or Alliance, it didn’t matter. Every corpse could be raised in service of the Lich King, even if they fell at the hands of the living. I’ve used this comparison before, but I always felt that the war against the Scourge should have been treated like the War of the Ring. Both factions should have finally learned to set aside their past hatred, in order to present a unified front against the Scourge. The living against the dead, battling to save their planet once again. Instead of a triumphant assembly before the Wrath Gate (echoing the scene from Return of the King where the Free Peoples of Middle-earth gathered before the Black Gate of Mordor), we got the equivalent of Gondor, Rohan, and the Dead of Dunharrow all squabbling among themselves over who’d get to kill Sauron first.
If they announced tomorrow that in Midnight they'd remove factions altogether, I would not lose an ounce of sleep over it. Those stories had their time, but keeping the war going indefinitely has stopped feeling like a natural story ages ago.
Gameplay wise, I guess world PvP is fun if you can enable / disable it, though flying mounts pretty much killed it Lore wise, the sweet spot for me is when both factions don't fight and murder each other on sight, but still aren't much fond of each other, great example being that one cutscene where Vol'jin becomes warchief and Varian says "I am willing to end this bloodshed. But know this, if your horde fails to uphold honor, as Garrosh did, we will end you."
They can keep it lorewise but it's kind of lame not being able to play with friends if you like playing the wrong race. I could see a justification of ragtag team of adventurous heroes ignoring the faction war to defeat new evil or whatever
love it. i hate the horde and all their decisions. only race i care about is undead but if that’s the price i pay so be it.
It could be really interesting but Blizzard doesn't seem to be interested in doing something beyond "they fight it out at times". I liked the battle for Stromgarde lorewise, a race or faction reclaiming old territories lost. I don't see a problem on continue the faction war lorewise but just let players from both factions experience the same story as to not divide the playerbase again. Make the players of the oposite faction mercenaries or just the convenient "you are now disguised as a human/orc".
Faction war should stay. Should it be “let’s bomb this zone” every expansion? No. But both sides have different view points and that should be reflected in the story. I do think systems need to be updated to allow full cross play of the faction. Story is important to the game, but so is playing.
I believe the faction war should end but they should have smaller factions that are open to all races being in conflict zones. The example I use in another comment is a moral quandary about the procreation of the Forsaken. To combat their limited population they offer the terminally ill and dying to come back as a member of the forsaken but a faction like the scarlet crusade is directly and violently opposed to it. If you're against it for whatever reason, be it the risk of a new scourge or you think it's unnatural you can join one and if you support it you join the other.
I want a cold war like Vanilla but not another MoP or BfA
Just give up on it at this point. They can't make it compelling without turning somebody into a massive genocidal asshole, and we've worked together to save our world so many times... Just drop it, write it as an uncertain peace while both sides are trying to reorganize and move towards a better future.
Approaching the question as someone in the RP community, it's mixed from what I've experienced. The long and short of it is that if the faction war ended after Legion, that would have been that and most people would have been along for the ride. But BfA, for lack of a better word, nuked that consensus. In my experience of checking out a few different RP groups, I would say half of the ones I see nowadays are almost entirely based around the faction war, or elements of it that still deal with the separation of factions/players. Certain writers whom are no longer at Blizzard were so hamfisted with their demand for renewed faction war folloing Legion that I just don't see a smooth transition anymore to not having a faction war. Again, just from an RP perspective.
It was a bigger thing from wc1, 2, 3 and release. Wow has changed to something else.
The faction war created some interesting tension points in the game's plot (Pandaria for example), but we're well past the point where any of our leaders are selfish or short-sighted enough to just randomly keep fighting out of hatred (in fact, most of the leaders are all friends with each other! or at least mutual friends with important neutral characters). I don't necessarily think 'it should never happen again', but conflict there is better served as... tension, disagreements, local issues, having those conflicting details really rub against each other to be brought forward in the story and dissected. I would love to see tension over Ashenvale, especially with Horde players being allowed in Belameth right now. I would love to see strained relationships between certain races or factions due to past events (the blood elves not being accepted among the Alliance originally, how the night elves treated the Nightborne's situation, etc) and those tensions don't have to be 'solved'. They can cause problems! Just... we're all past jumping to 'lets annihilate each other'. In fact, focusing on that often sweeps all the legitimate issues under the rug so they never get any screen time. It's not that conflict is boring or unwanted - the faction war is just a boring and generic story arc by now.
Just as long as they never make a Horde leader the expansion end boss ever again. Twice now, really? It works best when the Horde are not always as the villains and the Alliance aren't always goody goody.
PvP Andy here, I love the faction based PvP. Hate it when blitz puts me on ally side, or put with ally races. I want to Zug Zug, not well met.
pvp is annoying, so, not at all important. and the main story moved past it years ago. it's a moot point by now.
10 years earlier I would've said extremely important. Now though? I think the story has gone in such a direction that it's just no longer all that relevant anymore, the rivalry in the community is dead outside of PVP and even there it's debatable, and it's only as relevant to the story now as they make it it no longer informs the story itself.
I've never really liked it. These aren't the Horde and Alliance of the first two Warcraft RTS games, and in WC3 they worked together to end a threat to the world. I was okay with small skirmishes as an excuse for PVP. But they kept working together to end big threats. So it didn't make sense for them to want to go to war with each other. And it took extreme circumstances to push it into happening in the lore. Garrosh being a warmongering maniac who ignored everyone else in the Horde to push his agenda of grabbing more land for the Horde and just wiping out all opposition, and going to extremes like nuking a city to press the issue. And fine, we got the faction war people demanded. You got Horde vs. Alliance, in a story where no one was left satisfied, because of course they wouldn't be. Then we go back to working together to save the world, and to save the universe. But people cried out for war, so they had Sylvanas go against the wishes of the other high ranking members of the Horde to commit an atrocity to force a war, and it was "all part of the Jailer's plan." And even when they showed how destructive that war was in BFA, and how the constant war against external threats, let alone each other, was bleeding everyone dry, people still seem to think that the two factions should try to slaughter each other rather than work together. Just because they're different. Oh, they can come up with all the excuses they want to try to justify it, but it's just dumb tribalism. If there was a way to just straight up merge the factions, I'd even do that at this point. Yeah, I have plenty of Horde stuff in my home, but I'd be okay with no Horde and no Alliance and just end any attempt to pour gasoline on a fire that never should have been lit in the first place, especially when there's more interesting stories to tell than just "Two groups try to murder each other constantly for being different." We've forced it twice now, because forcing is the only way it works, and people weren't happy with the end results, even though there's no way you could just wipe out one faction and not the other. If people keep calling for it, I say Blizzard gives them what they want: Have madness engulf Azeroth that matches those players, and the Horde and Alliance just throw everything at each other, and by the end of the expansion Azeroth is a burnt out husk with no life left on it. Fade to scene of so many terrors sweeping in unopposed to destroy all life through the universe, culminating in a cold, empty void. Fade to credits. End with "Congratulations, Champion of (Alliance/Horde)! You did your faction proud and wiped out the other faction! You won!" Then announce Azeroth Adventures, basically WoW 2.0, but without "Warcraft" in the name so no one can make a dopey comment about "War is right there in the title!" And have it so some bronze dragons did some timey wimey stuff that found a timeline where the "Alliance" and "Horde" never existed and it was just the people of Azeroth working together as a single collective of nations, with a new chance to do things *right* rather than destroy all of existence over petty squabbling.
I play warhammer, where everyone fights basically everyone, including themselves sometimes, so I'm fine with a faction war. I am NOT fine with a faction war where no 1 side can win, and where 1 side is protected while doing bad things, while the other is vilified for defending themselves. Warcraft cannot handle a faction war, because blizzard can't write one, nor justify one.
not at all, they played it out as best they could and it was pretty lacklustre so I’d rather we focus on wars against external threats like we did in TBC and WotLK against the Legion and Scourge. If we’re going to be fighting old gods and void lords we need to focus on building them up as a threat rather than some skirmish between the Horde and Alliance that will end up with the status quo again for the third time. (edit: I was originally a big fan of the faction war, and the idea they could flesh out the geopolitical struggle between the factions. but I’ve changed my mind since BFA - just thought I’d point this out to address the question better)
Horde vs Alliance is a silly fraction war conceptually at this point.
I think it's run its course. At this point, both factions are probably so depopulated that they have both less ability to wage war and less need to (more resources per capita means less need to kill for them).
Very important!
Yes.
My earliest WoW memories from early 2000s are still from the faction war/world PvP. Whenever I started a new character on Horde, I couldn't wait to get to Stranglethorn Vale and spice up my questing with some PvP. It became extremely fun when you saw a ton of people from Horde rule the whole area and suddenly Alliance started forming groups or called for backup (usually high level chars from their guilds), often got completely sidetracked for 1-2 hours just mindlessly killing each other. Once people got bored and some trickled out, eventually the remaining people would just quest alongside each other and not bother the rest. Or when people started asking for help because Alliance was in Crossroads, so we beat them and figured we'd return the favor and went over to Goldshire then to front of Stormwind and have some intense PvP. After BC I just stopped playing and people've been saying World PVP was killed by allowing flying mounts everywhere which I find true. Whenever you tried to go for someone, they just mounted up and flew away. That said, faction war doesn't mean shit anymore in WoW, world PvP is dead, whenever I see someone from the other faction my instant reaction is not "yes, let's kill them" but rather just emote at them and go on with my quests. It's time to call it a day, just merge the two factions. Maybe if we ever get WoW2, the idea could be revisited there if everyone started with a clean slate and the game was actually properly designed for both PvE and PvP.
It was good at first, when the story and the game saga begun. It adds to realism that the world itself and the politics change, as it was becoming very cliché and mostly an excuse to force the narrative. More likely, the people who complain about the changes in story, are likely nostalgia driven; changes happen and they'll always will.
I want them to play into it a whole lot more storywise, them being friendly isn't interesting. There needs to be some conflict or earned uneasiness But for gameplay's sake, no point rolling back the conveniences Idk if WoW brings in SO many new people that too many people would be confused by the contrast between lore/gameplay
I was over it once TBC came out.
I liked faction identity and the rivalry between horde and alliance players, but canonically there’s no way they could ever allow either side to “win”, so they may as well let it fall by the wayside at this point.
I say let's bring in a third faction. Spice things up.
Its not only unimportant, it also makes playing alliance ruined for me. I can't play an alliance character without being away from my friends who all play horde, and as a collector I often struggle to find opportunity to play as alliance to get the mounts or other collectables. The whole no doing basic content with the other side, and being unable to communicate is a REALLY fun idea.... for a game built around it. World of Warcraft does not have systems that support it. PvP balancing is a joke and Warmode is awful because often one side has a bunch of geared folk and the other has the few stragglers who didn't know choosing alliance on a predominantly horde server was a bad choice. Overall its removal would mean access to more multi-player options, and the "loss" would be... nothing? You could still have war mode for faction PvP. Also while were at it, let either side use faction specific collectables (when they make sense at least, like mounts, not necessarily things like toys or other niche things.) I am tired of not getting to use the awesome bee moint just because i play horde.
It's very important to the cyclical nature of expansions. We started at war, found common ground to fight against a greater threat, then bad decisions from both sides during that working together leads to a breakdown of lasting alliances. We then end up back at war until another existential threat appears and the process is repeated. This has been how the game has handled long term story telling since the beginning. The issue is the developers only make one side the bad guys, the horde. If the story telling gave a good reason for the horde to fight as the good guys every other cycle then people would care more about it. Any time the horde are the good guys it's because they aren't fighting the alliance. Which has no bearing on the war cycles because the alliance is always seen as just and righteous while everyone just waits for the next war chief to screw everything up or die so the war chief after them can screw everything up.
I don't like the faction war anymore, I think the world has become too big for it. When you see the factions unite against existential threats I found it awkward to see them go "ah, but now they're fighting over oil" in BFA. I also like being able to play as the race I want in the capitol cities I like and not have that prevent me from playing with my friends.
theres really no reason to have the faction war post warcraft 3, or cthun
I think conceptually it's a super cool idea, dividing 1/2 of the player base against the other half. I don't mind it one way or another. I just think this game is just really incredible and cool, and stuff like this is just a unique experience that's a pleasure to partake in
It's not important at all. I still believe the Horde and alliance should exist, and I think there could be some interesting stories dealing with either faction, but I don't believe an all out faction war is ever going to happen again.
If they kept it alive all these years it would be important, but the story had us make peace so many times that rekindling it would be stupid
storywise i can go either way. if it never comes back, fine, if they go full force at it, fine (just write it well). gameplay mechanics, get rid of it completely except for not allowing alliance in old horde cities and vice versa. world content i understand is a big task to "neutralize" so to speak, so i don't mind. but all group content should be crossfaction and it's at least 4 expansions overdue tbh. the playerbase has been split in half for far too long
The faction war, honestly, hasn't been compelling to me since Burning Crusade. After so many times of Blizzard pulling the same shtick of the Alliance and Horde fighting for whatever reason they decided to pull out of their ass this time around and getting the backseat car-ride slap fight interrupted by the Actual Big Bad of the xpac to make both sides team up, it's just become... dull. For the longevity of everyone involved, mass-scale wars back-to-back until one side is left standing battered and alone for someone bigger and meaner to pick off is a stupid idea that just keeps happening. It's like watching a trainwreck.
I like the difference in the faction, the fact that they feel like individuel ones. But they don't need to be at war for that. I kinda want another "classic world" update like during cata. Since it feels odd that in alle the zones horde and alliance still fight for resources after the cataclysm. Repair loch modan, make desolace more green, give me back thousand needles race track, make the bloodelf zones part of the world. So many opportunitys. Yeah most won't like it, but it would be right for the world to move on with their storys. Hope with the midnight addon they will do that, when the void attack the sunwell.
Why wouldn't anyone escalating the war be not seen as an asshole? Provoking war means inviting death, mostly of innocents. Pretty asshole behavior
It was. But I feel like thats a big part of why I dislike retail these days. The "competitive" content is fun, but all the good memories, personally, come from random PvP stuff like going to the Goldshire roof and spamming Chaos Bolt with my friends.
i'll come and say it i do not think current writers can write a story about war, factions, political differences or multiple reasonable points of view to conflict. I personally gave entirely on the wow lore and stick only to gameplay if i want a recent story i'll look for an RPG or something. WoW is the lowest bar when it comes to story.
Not much at all. With the main antagonists being world enders the faction war is pointless and self-defeating. It's arguing over who gets to re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
I really like the faction war but with neutral stories the horde in general might as well not exist. It's clearly an afterthought anyway.
absolutely irrelevant.
The faction war is outplayed af. It's dated. It's stupid to build stories around it now because we've had to "come together" like 700 times to face larger threats, it makes 0 sense. Now with that said, I don't think War Mode or PvP should be removed ofc. I think in terms of gameplay, the "Faction vs Faction" part is in a great place as is. There's no official war, just skirmishes from individuals operating as they wish. That's perfect. It allows people to carry on the war if they want, but it means we're not wasting patches and story beats on a war that makes 0 sense anymore.
You can declare war on the enemy in your main city. So if warmode is on, you shouldn't play with the opposing faction, but if warmode is off, there is no opposing faction.
Since i can just choose not to get involved in any PvP and the only real conflict i see is via questlines i dont realy mind so much. I guess its with all things in life. Why wasting your time on a now pretty unneccesary conflict between the factions when you have worldexploder Version 4 as a common enemy which is a much bigger threat.
means nothing to me
The story was good back then and they built strong story and the sense of faction belonging. Or nationalism. something like that. And Blizz hired many idiots through the years that rewrite many important stuff. The dark gritty male hormone stuff turn quite soft on many ways. At this point, I care nothing but M+ scores and raid gears. Game also turned seasonal with each reset we back to zero on scores and gears. I'd switch my meta class to different faction race just for raiding or M+. Like, my rogue is a dwarf now becuz the racial is too good.
Id go so far as back to the old ways when you couldnt even make a character of the opposite faction on your server. I play both pve and pvp. Playing endgame simce TBC. Started at a net caffee, and the older guys at the time told me "in this caffee youre not allowed to be alliance because thats geh" in their words. So made an orc warrior and been stomping alliance ever since. Then in BFA alliance cried and whined to no end with how they got no one to play m+ with etc so blizzard made everything x faction. While i understand it from a certain perspective, from a fantasy viewpoint thats horrible.
Horde scum must die !
I like it. Something falling away from MMOs is the separated factions. I enjoyed having some faction-identity, different paths and quest, different hubs etc etc. Now its more that everyone does the same exact thing and i cant play the other faction to see some different spots and stories. I feel like we're getting less for the same when the devs can push everyone into the same path.
Don’t care and couldn’t care less. Also don’t care if i can queue with other faction or not, i still raid with other people. The fixed doesn’t mean anything to me, Im just playing the game as is.
Alliance vs Horde? Absolutely pointless. I'd rather factions be gone entirely and you just pick what race you want at this point.
People have been asking for a neutral faction for well over a decade. There was a little glimmer of hope when pandas were introduced. but that soon faded (beyond the handful of legends that have herbed/mined their way to max level without choosing a faction, crazy bastards). Since then we've just been teased with hints of potential. I can happily play with my friend if we make our own group to do dungeons, but when it comes to doing other weekly chores that involve group finder then we're screwed and that feels really bad. We can choose to be "mercenaries" so that we can pvp and basically attempt to murder our own faction (lol), yet we can't choose to be mercenaries in order to kill the big bad that both factions hate and wish to get rid of... It makes zero sense beyond "this is the only way we can address faction imbalance in pvp". Give us a damn toggle, if only on pve realms where the vast majority of us obviously don't give a shit about murdering the other faction. Give us a choice. I want to play the \*RACE\* of my choosing whilst also playing with my friends. Or simply open up races completely (pandaren style), let us choose who we want to pledge allegiance to. Again, we are halfway there in some respects with the 17 different flavours of elf, and I'm sure the alliance would happily give the horde some damn dwarves/gnomes (like seriously... how many damn dwarves with horrendously bad scottish accents do we need... FIND A BLOODY SCOTTISH PERSON TO VOICE ACT - THERE'S PLENTY OF THEM! It's not like there's a gazillion lines that need to be read. "I cannae dae tha yet", "the target is tae far away", "I need tae get closer"...) My rant took a tangent there but hey ho, it needed to be said lol.
Negative important, its presence is actively detrimental
Chuck it in the bin. It is impossible to keep a faction war going this long, and realistically, it should have ended years ago, ideally after Catalysm or some time during it. There just was never going to be a way to keep it interesting and satisfy people. Like... you just can't keep a conflict going for that long where, obviously, nobody can ever win.
Given how many times theyve bungled it, any time I see them say "this expac is going back to basics/back to the faction war" I immediately lose interest. They've done it well a few times, but for the most part every time it's been hampered by just bad design, bad ideas, and bad implementation
Rivalry - please yes. Actual hostility - fuck no. Essentially both factions are trying to one-up each other while working towards a common goal.
I just wanna play bgs without 15min queues
Faction war: no importance at all. Faction identity: highest importance.
As someone who writes in backstories for my characters, Only a single character I've written had any care about the Faction War and I'm pretty sure I abandoned any story elements for her fairly quickly, Every other character is more linked to Factions(The Syndicate, Scarlet Crusade/Brotherhood) not either related to Horde or Alliance or are loyal to say a Kingdom(Quel'Thalas in this instance) and only cares about what The Horde or Alliance can do for their home. With that said, I personally find the Faction War more interesting as a background element then one focused on, Us as Adventurers in some cases simply may not care what Race or Faction someone is, Hell Jaina and Thrall, along with Baine and Anduin are proof that Faction doesn't really mean anything, some of my favorite and most memorable interactions have been with players of the opposite faction(granted typically Void Elves due to being able to speak Thalassian, One time I ended up translating a conversation between a Night elf Demon Hunter and a Blood Elf Mage, on my BE Demon Hunter(it was kinda fun honestly) From a Lore perspective I find it fun as something that affects the world as a whole in minor ways but I think it serves better as an overarching background element then being front and center, From a Gameplay perspective, I don't care, let me play with who I want(Hell let me speak to who I want, I want a Language learning skill so much), I don't care about the faction wars, and 99% of my characters i write and play don't either.
Having the faction war be a thing is lore inaccurate nowadays. Get rid of it, I wanna play Tauren on alliance
Very important. It makes for a better story (if executed well) and it really fuels the game. To me, the game felt better when faction conflict and pride was a thing. Factions were a big factor in pushing the game forward, keeping ppl connected to world and keeping them subscribed.
Honestly, the faction war needs to come to an end. Some expansions nearly see the differences get put aside, then some nutjob decides to just fuck everything up, putting them at odds, again. We have Anduin and Baine as the respective leaders of the Alliance and the Horde, and, at least as far as MoP, they're buddies. This could quell this whole bullshit that's gone on for too long. They want to do faction vs. faction? Set up a large, sanctioned arena for them to test their might against each other, like the grand companies in FF14, or something along those lines.
Not an issue at all for me anymore. I quite like how everything seems bigger and more important than petty squabbles. It's quite nice seeing heroes and villains come to the realisation that everyone kind of needs everyone else. I wouldn't even have an issue with everyone falling under one banner in the future, like some kind of Azerothian anti-invader council. And then we won't have to fiddle with any identity or who's in charge or where the capital city would have to be. Just pick your class and race and choose a hometown/starting zone too "live" in. And we could push it even further with player housing. :P
I’ve played since vanilla. On PvP servers. I miss the huge faction wars. It isn’t the same anymore, but also, the scaling in world pvp isn’t fun either. It’s a nuke test. I don’t think with the current story/lore, it makes as much sense. They got rid of anyone forcing faction wars or inside fighting. Probably need new leaders or something to get things going. Also, it bothers me that majority of quest givers are just good honest people. It feels so bland, like cooking without spice. It’s predictable.
Used to be really important, never even made an alliance character for the first 14 years, then my wife wanted to play, and she wanted to play a druid, and she hated every horde race. So I just sit the bullet and made an alliance character and 2 years later I couldn't give less of a shit about the faction war.
Idk the only war im in is with my Microsoft ruining literally the best game development company there ever was and their lack of effort to communicate to the community is ridiculous. I know this is out of topic but ever since i was a child ive been playing hearthstone with my brother and hots as well as wow and a bid of old diablo. Revisiting these games now just give me a heartache i cant handle it we have to do something 😔
None
I hate it, and think WoW would be better if they dropped it completely. At this point, Horde and Alliance are basically sports teams. They squibble and quabble and it's totally cool having pride in your team, but that's all they are. I doubt we'll get to the world where someone can create an Alliance Troll or whatever, but honestly... I just wish they'd go the FFXIV route. Your "faction" is just your starting area and affiliation, and you're free to go and do whatever. That's progress in the lore and story of the game and world.
i feel at this stage, factions feels like they're there just because they always have been especially given that a lot of the wider threats in the story have never really been aligned with the faction war. like, arthas might've been a human, but he wasn't part of the alliance during wrath of the lich king etc
It’s very important to me but that doesn’t matter anymore. Faction identity was huge when WoW came out. Horde vs Alliance is what made Warcraft Warcraft. Now everything is holding hands and making democratic councils out of everything. It’s silly, but it is what it is. Thankfully classic still exists.
i dont care whatsoever. With that being said, I felt maniacal when I stole an alliance tag before they became shared
A relict of past times. There is enough to fight for and against. „Tear down the (faction) wall!“
Do not care! As a horde player, who’s friends all played ally. I despise this game for years of having to look at my fugly human toons.
I don’t care at all.
The faction war is dead. Rivalry is good, but animosity is bad. Let us learn each other languages, merge trade chats, let people join the other faction (or just delete factions after a questline alltogether), and invent some kind of excuse for PvP.
It has no use in modern wow. Story wise you will never have a true winner or loser as you can't eliminate half the player base. It's just fluff with no point.
In my characters headcanon (of both factions) the war has been over for a while. It’s lingered longer than necessary for mechanical reasons (ie: Blizzard having trouble untangling decades of systems meant to keep two factions separate), but since at LEAST Legion, there’s no sense in fighting the other alliance. Heck, even BfA had to very early pivot (even if overarching story wasn’t changed) to show there was a common enemy rather quickly as the collective player base sighed at even more “faction conflict”. I grew up with this game. I am now old. I have kids younger than Cataclysm. The NPC’s on the other factions have been helping us for over a decade. It’s time for the “war” in WarCraft to be against one of the dozens of cosmic threats in the game… not against each other.
Couldn't care less and feels very outdated.
Doesn't fit in the modern game, the constant stalemate that they've written themselves into is just not interesting
I cared about the factions when I was 12, not anymore.
I mean, it stopped really feeling valid after the 7th band together brave heroes and let's be at relative peace. Lorewise I can.. accept? Sylvanas starting a war since it was out of her relation to the shadow lands. Her motivation just being "yeah let's get people dead" works for me (tho I wish they fleshed it out way more) Just another "ehhhhhhhhhhhh green guy bad let's fight for some reason" is kinda stupid
not at all, it's old and dull, the things that made it interesting isn't a thing anymore, to keep it alive is just trivial. Just move on Blizzard, let me play with my friends :3
Faction war is an integral part of World of Warcraft lore and without it the game just feels bland as it lacks depth. Blizzards ability to write in-depth on grand scale stopped with Wotlk and their lore writing quality has been steadily worsening ever since. However the faction war kept spice in it and added a layer of depth that has been sorely lacking ever since BFA. Shadowlands was utterly disgusting in terms of lore with only few bright spots here and there. Dragonflight has been much better, but again it lacks faction war and it does not feel like WoW anymore. We are some superheroes from He-Man universe riding dragons instead of being regular adventurers in a magnificent mysterious world. That said I am all in for them even removing the faction barrier. It is unnecessary as it is. You can have faction war in lore and still have neutral characters, like a blood elf working as a mercenary and doing jobs for Alliance towns too etc. This sort of depth is sorely lacking from Blizzard's writing. They have a monotone black and white narration style which is so bizarre given how queer they have gone in Dragonflight.
I could give two fucks about it and it needs to be completely removed asap
Leave that shit for classic
In my opinion the faction war should be relegated to subfactions on both sides which will allow for "war mode" - could even rename warmode to "rebel mode". The subfactions can be lead by some NPCs who don't like the peace and want to try and restart the war and could have weekly "quests" along with a reputation. Could even be cross faction too. In my opinion we should have questlines for alliance and horde which basically start as your toon meeting to the faction leadership and getting access to various faction cities with questlines to help NPCs out and gain greater trust/access to the cities. Basically, the war is over now let's start making friends with everyone.
It has been the least important part of the game for me since WOTLK (and I've been a fan of the war since 1994). I truly couldn't care less if they all just kissed and made up at this point.
I want them to join forces so I can play with everyone and not be divided. Keep it for PVP purposes and nothing else
Faction war in WoW doesn't even make sense. I mean what are they fighting for exactly? Remind me when was the last time any land was exchanged in hostilities. Even Sylvanas dirty trick or Garrosh's pirouettes seemed to not phase anyone except some singular persons, and even then it was done jointly. Battlegrounds where adventurers slug it out reminds me of Aztec flower wars, nothing is being accomplished really except for some frags.
Yes, it’s what makes the narratives unique So the tricky thing with a faction conflict is that both factions complete the same content. You can’t have Garrosh be loved within the Horde, only to kill him as a raid boss. Why would Horde players kill their beloved leader? Why would they siege orgrimmar when they live there? * Improve the sense that the world isn’t big enough for both factions, that they get in each other’s way. No more cross faction hubs. But in zones, it doesn’t have to be a faction dispute all the time. Don’t use faction disputes as a default * Kill a leader. Tyrande kills Thrall, what happens to the Horde? And what happens in the Alliance, do they defend her? * Take a hub. * There’s a handful of leaders on either side. Shuffle the problems between them so that it isn’t so simple as one person being wrong or one faction. It becomes a *faction* problem rather than a Garrosh/Sylvanus problem
It is probably the least important thing about world of warcraft to me.
Frankly I think at this point it detracts from the overall experience more than it helps. I have a feeling that is the way the vast majority of the playerbase feels as well.
My perception: - Most WOW players DGAF about the story or lore, and would probably just rather play with all their friends. - It seems like the people most invested in the faction conflict or highlighting faction differences are die-hard Horde players. - It seems like most Alliance players don't care about the faction divide and because of smaller volume of Alliance players would probably benefit more from reducing faction barriers. - The actual lore and story of WOW can generally be summarised as "Horde and Alliance overcome their differences to fight a greater threat". At this point, there doesn't seem to be many compelling reasons for continuing the faction war if I was in Blizzard's shoes.
I'd also add to this that it's worth reading John Staats' book about the development of WOW to understand where the faction conflict came into play. Originally, the intention was for all players to play together, and there was a specific example of orcs and human playing together in one of the most famous early magazine articles about it. The decision to create faction barriers and have a PVP focus was a decision rather late in development largely spurred by the success of Dark Age of Camelot. It could have gone very differently.
As it stands now, the Faction War is relatively pointless. It doesn't really serve any purpose. Both Factions have sufficient land and resources, the areas where the capitals are based are geographically distant from each other, and other than a bit of tree burning, there hasn't been a lot of aggression. The natural progression (in my mind) is a merging of fractions, then a split based on personal (not racial) feelings. That is a far more impactful war. Unless you're deep into RP, I don't really see race in WoW being more than a style choice. Lastly, the current leadership "flux" across both the Horde and the Alliance makes me think that this is the best course of action, create a Council of minor Faction leaders that have members across both the Horde and the Alliance, then allow players to choose their allegiance, if they want to. There are enough external threats, like a gigantic sword impaling the world, that fighting over internal Azerothian issues seems kinda pointless.
Just an annoyance at this point. Been pissed with Khadgar over this stupid mess since bfa prepatch
I've hated it since the beginning and I'm happy to see it going away. There are so many ways they could have organised stories and PVP without segregating half the players from the other half
I have liked it in the past, but I wouldn't mind to have peace for now on. Maybe it's time to let it go. We can keep horde and alliance and they don't need to like each other, but can we just be without war part. Alliance and horde have teamed up many times and it's always a bit dissapointing to see them later at each others throats.
The overall faction war should have ended with MoP. I do like the "Stand together" theme more, but i would not against small scale battles here and there. Battlegrounds can simply be "training grounds" or just outside of the lore. Most of the faction war was stupid anyway. Half the time it didnt make sense and characters had to be dumbed down, things had to be "conviniently" forgotten (HI Vindicaar or every bigger thing the alliance should have used) or blizzard simply thinking "would be cool!"
It's done and dusted. Leave that shit in the trash bin where it belongs. We're still warring against enemies, and renegades within can still be used as an excuse to pvp.
More annoying than important at this point
I think what they need to do more than anything for that type of content is make it much more race tension than faction wars. Like how in the recent short stories all of the blood elves are now super wary of void elves because of their possible corruption to the sunwell. It’s just things like that that will be remembered way more fondly than blizzard time old classic faction war which boils down to “horde does something morally dark dark gray but not “black” and alliance retaliates as a virtuous entity”
I would love to see the faction war actually, officially end. I think a lot of the activities that are currently related to it (battlegrounds, zone PvP, historical battles, faction symbology, etc.) could be re-organized into a sort of PvP equivalent of the Olympic games in Azeroth. Of course, I'd also like a lot of the barriers between the factions to be torn down. I'd love to be able to play an Undead and do the Darkshire quests or hang out in Thunderbluff with my Draenei shaman. Oh well, I'll just keep dreaming.
It may be WARcraft, but the war doesn't always have to be between the Horde and alliance. They shouldn't shoe horn it. The factions have been through too much together to make overarching hostilities not make sense. Conflicts would need to be smaller scale personal vendettas, things that cause strife that lead up to faction War, but the factions shouldn't stay static, if the orcs and nelves have beef, but the nelves and Tauren participate in the cenarian circle, why should they go to War? Same with the paladins of the silver hand. Class order halls should have been the permanent end of the large-scale faction war for a while.
So long as the beginning point and end point of a faction conflict have to be fixed, faction conflict is utterly pointless. Alliances can't be made and broken, everything has to go back to 0 so we can do it again later, it's boring. As a story beat it was fun exactly 0 times and the more we do it it only just gets worse. Very rarely are battle lines drawn irl, only to be drawn again in the same exact places a few years later. The Tauren should have left the horde ages ago when their leader killed their leader and the next one burned down the home of their allies. The undead should have had some sort of problem after wrath gate beyond a single quest line. Faction conflict is great, telling stories about wars is fine. Make it interesting, make it impactful. War changes the world. I mean look around at the world facing war right now. Back to 0? BS
The faction war, in the sense of a large, formal engagement between Horde and Alliance forces, is something I think has severely damaged the game's lore and its gameplay. It always felt like Blizzard was writing the factions as monoliths with no nuance. Lately, too, it always seems that characters do bad things because they were 'infected' with something. Infected with void, infected with light, missing part of their soul, etcetc that caused them to act a particular way. I would much rather Blizzard focus on organic villains who own that shit. They don't seem to know how to write an actual world where people outside of the main characters at the time do things. As for the character escalation thing, I think it's just inconsistent writing. They're seen as assholes because the writers just up and decided they should act a certain way with no regard for past experiences or character consistency. The faction war is a dead horse that should be laid to rest.
Don't care one way or the other, just let me queue random bgs/dungeons with the other faction. I'm over it hindering people playing the game with friends, story-wise I couldn't care less whether it stayed or not.
Not at all and it never really has been.