With the next reset, we will receive patch 9.2.5, which will enable cross-faction play for the first time in World of Warcraft. While the feature is playable in different scenarios, raids are only theoretically a part of it.
The problem right now is that if you create a raid team of lets say 12 Horde players and 8 Alliance players, neither guild will get the kill credits for the bosses. In a mythic raid instance, 16 out of 20 players must belong to a guild for it to count as a guild kill. On one hand, you might say, “It’s not that important to get the kill achievement as a guild, is it?” and for some people it really isn’t. On the other hand, if you are a guild that is actively recruiting people, not getting the kill credits is bad. Of course, you can approach people and tell them, “Hey, we’re doing cross-faction raids,” and so on, but in reality, fewer people will apply for your guild if they can’t see how many bosses you’ve already killed. No one will go into kill/log details if they apply for a handful of guilds. Also, guilds that raid for the hall of fame will no longer be able to participate. I do not know if there will be a hall of fame in S4 (I guess not), so this might not even be a problem right now since the S3 hall of fame is almost done. There would be time until 10.0 to fix that part.
I have gathered from various posts that cross-faction guilds are a technical difficulty that will need to be worked on for a while. But that doesn’t change the fact that the currently planned implementation will prevent people from playing their favorite race.
My suggestion for the time until we get cf guilds is that the requirement for how many members it takes to count as a guild kill is lowered from 16 to 11 (always half + 1 member, so it can’t count for 2 guilds). This shouldn’t be too hard to implement and would open the way for most of us to switch to the race we want. (R.I.P. to the guilds that have 10 Alliance and 10 Horde members in a mythic raid, but you can’t have everything, I guess).
Definitely this. I want a dark iron paladin preferably to raid on but i prefer the horde faction honestly, so ill prob just gear the pally i have on argent dawn. However if they added cross faction guilds i would race change in a heartbeat . Also make cities and such cross faction too when not in warmode
I completely agree with what you are saying. Blizzard has only gone half way with this feature and I feel that they MUST make cross-faction guilds a reality.
I think that a lot of guilds are going to be a bit hesitant to invite players of the opposite faction to their raiding community, partly for the reasons that you’ve listed, but even if we consider a situation with a horde guild that has like 20-22 members that want to add 1-4 Alliance players to their roster; getting the Alliance players to integrate with the horde players and coordinating raids is going to a hassle compared to if all players were off of the same faction, seeing as the Alliance player’s won’t have access to things like the guild bank, the guild calender and perhaps most importantly the guild chat. I worry that there will be a social divide between Horde and Alliance players as long as cross-faction guilds are not a thing. I would love to switch several of my characters over to Alliance but as long as there is any kind of barrier between playing and interacting with friends I will never consider doing it.
Maybe I am wrong, after all I have never even tried out the community feature.
They could form if they took a charter into a cross realm instance and get both sides to sign, I don’t know if that meant both sides could invite as well.
I presume they didn’t want to delay the mini patch any longer.
I mean I suppose as soon as you make a member of the opposide faction part of the pool of people able to invite others that would work. Now that might mean small low level contraints like alliance characters not being able to pass guild invites on to horde characters… But really I see that as a small inconvienience that doesn’t warrant delaying the feature over. Other similar “constraints” on the technical spectrum are most likely along the same level, to which I would have the same argument and opinion.
Of course they could enable it immediately like the bug did, but then we’d get a totally un-tested version that might end up corrupting player characters. Programming isn’t that simple
They never had the time to make X-faction guilds ready for this patch, just wait for Dragonflight and it’ll come
That is extremely speculative of the very worst outcome. The game has had bugs go untouched for years in its history and what you suggest has never happened
I won’t disregard your argument completely but lets just say that I’m not as worried for the consequences
There’s a big difference between small-time bugs that you determine have no bad, possible outcomes and then there multi-scale bugs like x-faction guilding that they remove on PTR ASAP. The game is not coded with x-faction guilding in mind, there’s a billion possibilities for terrible outcomes if you brute force it and try stuff like instances with it