I can appreciate the war fatigue aspect of it but as you also put it, I don’t think it’s feasible to expect there being no bad blood or past grievances. In which conflict should be expected when you are trespassing. As someone who enjoys conflict in RP, since it’s infinitely better than just playing second life but WoW, I fear that sometimes this comes off as gatekeeping a hub or some other personal grievance when it’s not.
Faction conflict ended 7 or 8 years ago, so I don’t see why cross-faction should not make sense. Asking ‘does crossfaction RP in faction specific zones makes sense to you’ is like asking ‘does one person going to another country makes sense for you’.
Whilst you can use this I will lead it up with;
Is there examples of Horde characters being able to freely visit things explained in lore or any books?
Is there examples of Alliance just casually strolling into Razor Hill or Orgrimmar and being nodded at and allowed in exist in lore or books outside the established world leaders in this case?
If both answers are no then we can’t use this example.
Sure war is bad afterall it never will be seen as a ‘good thing’ but to completely disregard it in the sense that has been witnessed is an absolute tragedy.
If you claim for the Horde and hate Alliance you can’t exactly then go chilling in Alliance settlements trying to make pals with everyone and then going back and talking about how bad the Alliance are.
Same vice versa.
In this specific case and mentioning in reference to the OP thread of all should Alliance and Horde be able to visit eachothers cities freely? If so then fair dos so long as everyone can agree and it’s then stated in lore a possibility.
If no, then you can kinda see where people are coming from.
Preaching world peace is one thing that will get you in conflict and whilst the most notably younger generations that are RP’ed and as time goes on will have less meaning to hate on either faction of that we can agree that they haven’t seen what the older generations have and that’s why they are going through to understanding one another, etc ,etc.
For a collective people who have gone through so much in this setting where it’s shown that grudges continue to carry on along the tree then it’s that’s why I referenced;
Going to edit to add a bit more in line with your point Kayt;
This I can agree with some races probably don’t want the war to continue and I can understand it, it’s a good thing to debate IC politics of the world setting.
But as I said prior above; I just don’t think every race should suddenly be on board with it.
Your littler folk like the Vulpera or the other races like Tauren and probably even Elves are more than likely not wanting the war to continue.
Your other races like Orcs, Undead and Trolls probably do want it to continue.
(Especially Zandalari those guys got done dirty)
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Uhm, why? Books and lore do not cover every potential possibility. The fact that nobody stated that it can happen does not mean that someone stated that it can not happen.
Because then you’re headcanoning it and going against the flow of the story.
If you want to RP in Stormwind go for it by all means I will not and cannot stop you.
If you want to play your alliance char in Org then by all means go for it.
But that doesn’t meant I have to agree with it or agree with the concept.
Also ask yourself why your character wants to visit these places, why they want to go and why they should go.
I follow a pretty simple flow chart if it’s stated in lore then we can do it, if it’s represented in lore we can do it. If it’s not then we tend to not do it.
Sure you can bend the rules abit and make it work but I just don’t think at this point in the story we will be allowed to visit eachother’s capitals free willy nilly.
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Because fantasy races and even real people are quite capable of holding even centuries old grudges (that they can barely articulate or rationalize) just as much as being burnt out from antagonizing another party.
Azeroth doesn’t exist in the EU or APAC or the Commonwealth, it exists in a state where there’s either a world war or a doomsday scenario occuring every year with one notably chill 5-year period for the past 3 decades. A human adult from Stormwind, Alterac, Lordaeron or Arathor, if they have lived this far, has experienced no less than 3 instances of the Horde starting a genocidal world war against the Alliance at this point, whereas usually one such declaration of war has caused permanent diplomatic distrust and antagonism in the real world.
You can argue and move goalposts about how the Horde and the Alliance also united against common threats (by often letting their murderhobos work together instead of deploying their entire armies against something), but that doesn’t create some strange equilibrium against the instances they were duking it out.
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I’m gonna be entirely honest, the discourse around faction conflict makes me want to just avoid it entirely despite the fact that the solution to it is extremely simple - characters are individuals, skirmishing groups are representations of some groups whereas crossfac groups and pacifists are representations of another.
The existence of small-scale skirmishes don’t invalidate the existence of peaceful agreements, nor does the existence of a slow increase in diplomatic relations deny the warbands and merc groups of Azeroth the chance to set things on fire and blow things up.
But it feels like every time you RP with a group that’s peaceful it’s like “nooooo you can’t acknowledge the faction war!!!” and the inverse is true too - IC is IC, that’s whatever, but I swear to god some folk in these warband guilds will literally act like “eugh, hippie 
” OOC as well and it’s lame, it’s so lame.
Ultimately a simple concept which can be understood with just the tiniest bit of compromise instead turns into a boring rigmarole of “well, the BOOKS say and the QUESTS say” and if you have to do that much justification to just play the game then you’ve lost me, frankly. RPing itself is a lot more enjoyable than discussing why your RP is good and their RP is bad.
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Flow of the story for last two expansions have been that there is no faction conflict. shrugs You can like it or not like it, but it is how story currently is right now.
It is a place they have not been to, and that would be interesting to visit to expand horizons.
I never said that everyone should be okay with that. Locals of these capitals can feel free to show their disliking of that in forms they want to, since there is indeed a lot of bad blood in Warcraft lore.
But there is nothing that explicitly forbids for that to happen. When you come to the not-your-faction capital you should realize that a lot of people can still remember that Stormwind was rebuilt not that long ago. But how to behave in cross-faction RP and how to react to it is up to each individual player and character.
Partially true but it is also known there was a recent conflict in Arathi between the Kor’kron and Humans of Stromgarde.
Thus, meaning the mistrust is very much still alive and it only took a few one liners for the enemy to rally to purge the Horde.
Thrall was almost killed because of it.
Very interesting if it’s your Orc that wants to do this with the history of their people but, understandably if that’s your goto for some RP.
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Last time I wanted to check out the fountain at the Cathedral of Light I had 50 Stormwind Guards bashing my face in so there’s absolutely something in place that prohibits me from entering faction hubs that’s not part of my faction.
And this is patently wrong because you dismiss the fact that people bring their aims of Crossfaction RP to a faction specific hub. That’s the topic of the thread. People aren’t here forming pro-war picket lines at Booty Bay or Dornogal, it’s Tauren herbalist chefs being coddled at Gilnean reclamation campaigns - Both of which are equally silly scenarios, but the latter is being defended while the former is sensibly not being perpetrated.
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I might be confusing Tramur with someone else, but I believe that character is a half-orc which I think would have more of a basis for wanting to see how they’d be accepted in Alliance societies as opposed to Horde ones - Too human for the Horde, but too Orcish for the Alliance. Not necessarily forbidden from either faction, but maybe never accepted by the same token.
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Ah that’s fair enough then and I have no qualms with such a concept.
Unfortunately we don’t exactly have TRPs on the forums so I wouldn’t be able to tell what the character is 
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You are right, Tramur is a half-orc, tho not half-human, but half-draenei, which is not really that important in current context, since in both cases his has some form of relation to Alliance.
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Definitely not within the Worldsoul Saga though. But I think after it, we have a lot of room to start building up to one. We can just hope it’s done well and that Blizzard would consider (I know it won’t happen, but a girl can hope) race mobility between factions and changing sides so to keep things fresh. By that I mean not members of certain races crossing faction lines, but entire races and leaderships with their people changing sides for some further spice. A vain thing to dream of course, since in-game logistics would get in the way.
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I´ve seen people do this in Stormwind back in BfA, except saying Alliance is bad and Horde good. There´s just a subsect of players who, for some reason, have this weird obsession with RPing the people who boldly stand against the injustice (even if said injustice is not real) in the most obnoxious way possible.
Do you want to RP a character that thinks the factions are BS? Join a neutral guild, it´s really as simple as that.
I don´t think that´s going to happen. Not only because of the design approach Elfculler mentioned, but also because the idea of another full faction war isn´t even something that all people who like faction identity and conflict want. More often I see the opinion that smaller scale conflicts, based more around the idea of Vanilla BGs or races fighting each other are preferable to world war.
Also, while I can´t provide proof because it´s only something I´ve seen other people mention, but apparently Metzen didn´t even want factions back in Vanilla. It was decision from higher ups that WoW should have PvP and divided factions and the PvP got tacked on later in the development. Which I don´t find hard to believe, given how pretty much everything in Vanilla at launch was PvE, with PvP getting content only in the patches.
Point is, I wouldn´t put hope on Metzen restarting faction conflict. Not when so many in the community don´t want it and even those who do can´t agree on how it should look, while also highly increasing the amount of work Blizzard would have to do to make it reality.
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Damn right! Does that mean that Hordies are allowed to visit Gilneas then
I sometimes wonder if a lot of this noise isn’t a bit of a stigmatization: would it be so far-fetched to have, say, non-Horde members of the Kirin Tor in Orgrimmar? Or non-Alliance races in Stormwind (ie. valeera or goblins)?
While those may have to fill some papers, bureaucracy is hardly an infallible tool, and I doubt that out of wartime there would be strict controls that a shady adventurer couldn’t outwit.
There is Horde in Amirdrassil. Aside from that hub, the most egregious example of an Alliance character in a Horde city is arguably Arator living in Silvermoon. He might be an exception, or some borderline neutral paladin as he is Silver Hand (which it can’t decide if it is Alliance or neutral) but an example still; and so diplomats of the Alliance were invited in Suramar during Thalyssra’s marriage, or there are high elves pilgrims at the Sunwell.
Overall it may be premature to think for example a human would be allowed inside a city like Orgrimmar willy-nilly, but we are not that far off right now in the lore, and it has never been more plausible. I wouldn’t be surprised if in an expansion neutrality will be much more widespread, and maybe one day we shall see different factions allowed in old cities.
For now? I’d be inclined to say better avoid it, but the path’s there.
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Its simple:
Just unite the factions. And alongside that having on both alliance and horde renegade organizations show up that dont like this step and seek to return to the old formula.
So story gets grounded with an unified Horde-Alliance fighting against groups of either faction that disagreed with the unification, went rogue and do their own stuff to bring back faction war etc.
That, funningly enough, could make a pretty good story about “overcoming the past” that Blizz desperately tries to tell over and over during TWW and DF with mediocre results thanks to lackluster execution of story and especially worldbuilding.
Alliance and Horde has potential for renegade organizations in that scenario. Pretty much all races got their strife with other races. Sure there are those open-minded and those of neutral organizations that go along well enough, but there are also those who would just seethe at the thought of working with alliance/horde. At least I dont see your common troll being really cheerful at the thought of working together with a kaldorei… unless working together includes making a toy out of the kaldorei’s head for their children.
Cross-faction rp could be implemented as much as faction-conflict rp. Same as pvp etc. They still got that mercenary-system somewhere around, right?
Although I doubt that Blizz would take that step. They rather just let the factions become irrelevant storywise or have some playful jabs at each other for nostalgia. And instead they focus on a character-driven narrative, just that the player character t-poses in cinematics until the main characters said their lines.
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Honestly, I’d rather it come to a conclusion this way rather than the in-between state we are hovering right now. Having it so that it’s the Azerothian Republic (or whatever name they’ll come up with it) vs the dissendants would make so much more sense going forward. Idk, maybe I should lay down the pipe sometimes, these dreams are starting to get to me.
Per the terms of the armistice, we specifically know that trespassing in enemy territory without permission will have you tried and executed for espionage.
Would you be interested in taking up a paid position to explain this to people roaming around Duskwood or the Thalassian’s in SMC?