To be fair, Blizzard understood they couldn’t really enforce the “no circumventing the language barrier” rule as CrossRP was far too popular. Remember the days of say/yell broadcast in other faction’s raid chat.
From what I have seen, it improved roleplay greatly. Roleplay is inherently a self-driven drama developed by the players. All drama needs conflict; cross-faction relationships are pre-packed conflicts that are great to build on & exploit. I have held events where horde and alliance raced to acquire an artifact - but I also held events where they faced each other down in heavy negotiations and agreed to pool their resources. And isn’t /that/ what we also see all the time in the canon storywriting?
Assuming it’s the thread I am thinking of (going back to check its OP, it seems to be), it seems to have enormous support among the PvE community.
In the US, the Horde massively outnumbers the Alliance to such a degree that the latter suffers greatly for it, which seems to have sparked a popular demand for increased cross-faction measures.
I have no problem with this - even if it’s purely for game mechanics I’d appreciate getting to play with all the many friends I made in my Horde days, and if they decide to move the story too (fat chance, status quo is profitable) I wouldn’t mind seeing a diplomatic shake-up there either. I know people crave their war, but wars could be different, such as between subfactions.
Never existed unless your character literally never used Common - A strange stance to take given how apparently everyone regardless of time, space and state of existence can understand and speak it.
It has not created situations like this, it merely helped them. People have been doing the abysmal pardoned blood elf in Stormwind City, Shal’dorei looking like a Night Elf IC who defected to the Alliance or neutral void elf frolicking in Orgrimmar for Argent Crusade recruitment shenanigans concepts with or without the elixir, so it’s not brought anything new that hasn’t already plagued the community.
CrossRP and Elixir of Tongues have single-handedly made large cross-faction events possible, many of which I have enjoyed greatly. This includes, but is not limited to, the Dalaran Magic Faire, the Grand World Tournament, the Uldum Bazaar, and various tournaments and festivals in Pandaria.
I don’t recall single Warcraft book or in-game scenario where members of one faction were 100% unable to understand the other.
Language barrier between factions is there to prevent people from going full angry gamer at the other faction, it doesn’t exist in the lore (unless you want to claim absurd thing like how no blood elf or Forsaken knows Common).
Tongues basically opened the opportunity for emote RP-PVP between factions.
While personally I prefer “Old” RP-PVP myself due to finding enjoyment in the spectacle, I think Emote RP-PVP is a more immersive/less-headache-to-organize type of conflict that has been streamlined way more with tongues.
As a Death Knight, it has been a blessing. Prior to that you had horde dk guild’s and alliance dk guilds. The latter was always more popular than the former which made being a horde dk somewhat isolating from the wider dk community.
Now as Tenasa has said I forget that we are even on two separate factions. It has Integrated the Death Knight community together and I imagine the same goes for all neutral concepts.
Yeah I remember when Cairne and Thrall met for the first time and Thrall was all “Zug zug?” and Cairne was all “the heck is this orc saying???” and they couldn’t converse and it was really awkward and then they all got killed by centaurs because they didn’t know how to work together.
This is an example of an event where, without the elixir, we’d have had to resort to addons, battle-tags or Discord servers simply to interact with one another. Instead - I just had to pop that consumable and I was immediately free to attend lectures and pick up on cross-faction gossip.
I ran the CrossRP battle.net community server for AD (when it used those to broadcast to the other faction before Elixirs were implemented), and it maxed out at 1000 people in a couple of weeks.
Even in those hacky* days, it showed how much of a want there was for it. The original reason for removing some vanilla beta cross faction languages was because PvPers were using it to harass each other.
In short, it’s great for RPers. Just don’t let PvPheads near it.
*And exploitable, it was all publicly readable lol
Not that I think it’d matter all that much now compared to Classic. Most competitive PvP is done in arenas where you can play against your own faction anyways
Reminded of my Ex (playing an undead blood DK) typing the lyrics to “The amazing horse” at another undead blood DK in arena in cataclysm because they couldn’t kill each other
i’d take that with a grain of salt, really. Language barriers are just not too good for telling a scripted or dramatic story. WoW’d be really hollow if everyone was just gesturing madly and speaking a broken version of each other’s languages, that’s the sole reason all the cutscene-approved NPCs understand each other regardless.
