Disband the Horde

[Wimbert-die-aldor]

@Gorbathust-draenor

Orcs & Dark Spear Trolls are too intertwined to be openly hostile.

I don’t think so. Yes, they are on the same page on most things, but put orcs into conflict with a loa, for example, and you could have some nice drama where the trolls stand against them, not because they hate the orcs, but because they are fighting for what is theirs. Not to mention that orc politics can widely vary with its leader. You yourself mentioned Garrosh, and the troll-led rebellion against him was not that long ago.

@Gorbathust-draenor

Problem is that everything is build around the current 2 faction system. There’s no reason why they couldn’t make all races start as somewhat neutral and then make different faction stories available depending on what your character creation parameters are.

And if people worry about how pvp works, it doesn’t even matter as they’re basically just instanced scenarios, you just get thrown in team 1 or team 2 and that’s it, race doesn’t matter anymore. If anything pvp could become even more interesting as they could design bgs that have 3 or even 4 teams fighting over the objectives!

I don’t think race has to matter at all for that. Indeed, I’d be all for divorcing the story of racial politics from the player’s character choice. If there is one thing about all this “you are the super special champion of Azeroth, Maw Walker, titanslayer”-stuff, it’s that there is no reason at all to treat you like a grunt that a king can order arond, just because you share his race. The old factions may continue, or fall apart as the story wills it, but the player doesn’t have to be tied to that level of politics at all.
The main story just isn’t about some soldier of the Horde/Alliance anymore, it’s about a few heroes.

And yes, if you want pvp that’s as loosely tied to the lore as it is now, you actually don’t need to have armies behind you. You need different teams of equals to band together with. Like the covenants, but hopefully with a bit more hostility between them. Which shouldn’t be too hard, if there are actually ideological differences to clash over, which is something the factions haven’t really had for a long time. And since we aren’t talking about armies, but powerful individuals, there is nothing wrong with newly creating these organizations on Azeroth. I actually had an idea along these lines quite some time ago with some bare-bones ideas about how such covenants could look:

@Wimbert-die-aldor

To make my personal, and not very thought-out list:

• Minders of Azeroth: Basically a nature-themed faction consisting of the Cenarion Cyrcle and the Earthen Ring, saving the world Captain Planet style. Ruthless towards those who hurt Azeroth and its creatures.
• Designers of the Future: We’ll build a suit of armor around the world that can deal with any threat! …or something like that. A science- and technology-focused faction not very strong on empathy, but strong on results. Might include Kirin Tor stuff, too.
• The Protectors of the Innocent: Well, the name is kind of self-explaining. Focussed on the people of Azeroth, these guys would first and foremost be interested in saving and protecting lives. The super heroes that save the village from the monster, heal their sick and bring food to the starving. Real altruists… I mostly thought of Light-wielders and monks for this, but should be general enough to be a possible fit for most.
• Slayers of Evil: Well… I think you can guess what those guys have on their minds. Whatever new threat we might face in this hypothetical future addon, they really, really want to smash it. Find it, hunt it down, kill it. The best defense is a strong offense. We can always rebuild later, but first we have to ensure that there is a later. Whatever the cost. The DK, rogue and DH class missions come to mind, but a more aggessively minded pala might fit just as well.

So… the basic idea here is that we have one faction focused on the world, one focused on powerful stuff, one focused on people, and one focused on the enemy. I think most characters should fit there, somewhere… And those factions might even last longer than one addon. They could, at least.

And concerning future racial stories and conflicts… well, either the player is in a neutral role, ferreting out the evil manipulative cause of the conflict, like heroes in such situations tend to do… or they can just have the opportunity to choose a side that they like, if Blizz is still willing to give us two versions of the same story.

I don’t even think they would need more content for that than they are making for two factions. The content would just have to be about conflicts of a much smaller scale. We might not see specific tauren content apart from a few mentions here and there for years… but neither do we now, they just assume that tauren fans would be happy with general “Horde content” as well.