Hes wrong though. There are plenty of alliance pushing +20 keys all the time. And for raiding, there are no issues there unless your thing is world first mythic raiding…
How’s the group finder? The biggest difference to me was how few groups there were for m+ in the group finder but I did check when I was 411 ilvl and I know a lot of groups set ilvl requirements so my own experience is useless on how dead alliance pugging is for PvE.
Well,
I don’t buy this one either. And that is most of your “gameplay” reasoning.
We seem to have an issue: Faction (im)balance.
I do not think skipping steps to loosening the borders between the factions is a reasonable solution. A solution, I do not have either. But the Factions are quite a holy grail. You won’t beat that one down with “players don’t have time to maintain active in guilds/communities”.
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When it’s about pugging 19/20s Alliance is definitely noticeably more dead than horde.
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Merging factions is not the way forward,
Let’s honestly look at this
- there’s no way with all the races you can play two RL friends can’t decide on a faction to play.
The only situation this would exist if you took two strong RPers who hated each other’s favourite factions.
The population isn’t that unbalanced several charts have proved so. The problem is the content that is a majority.
For example RP realms are mainly dominated by the alliance. Their still players reguardless if you discount them for not participating in competitive gameplay,
On NA the alliance are higher in population .
The likely reason this isn’t being changed and factions are staying is simple.
Anyone that gives no bother to faction loyalty. Or sense of establishment for reasons to do with lore or the characters of that faction
Can simply
A) use your boost with the expansion to swap factions
Or
B) pay for a faction change at the cost of gold or RL money
The only people who would be for such a change don’t care about horde lore or are some sorta loyaltist to their faction.
So why not just make the simple fix yourself, as you as a player can fix the problem by swapping.
At the end of the day, I actually prefer alliance races but as u stated. My friends play horde. So I chose horde
Majority of friends In the same situation would play their friends faction. There’s so much choice in what race you are you will find a cool race reguardless of the faction ur going on.
Faction choice is one of the very few things we as players can choose without the game forcing our hand.
Let’s not remove even more choice from the game… espically after we’re all fighting as hard as possible to undo the removal of that choice.
“I want to play a werewolf”
Specifically. No other race other than worgen can fulfill that fantasy. Everything else after that is a compromise. One that I don’t feel anyone should have to make to be honest.
Boosting or faction changing is a band aid not a solution.
I mean I think it’s obvious the constraint a game presents to you when the lead dev tells you" if you wanna play a fair blond elf the horde is a place for you."
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Maybe there should be 3rd faction for furries only /rofl
The faction system was doomed from the get go. Wow have had multiple examples of the inevitable conclusion if we look at how what happened with most servers. They usually starts fairly even, but then it becomes clear that one side is superior which caused players to either switch side or server. This lead to servers like Al’Akir which was almost only Horde and plenty of others servers with the same issue.
Sooner or later one of the factions is going to be dead on multiple ends, and right now it’s already clear that the Alliance is in a bad spot pvp and to a lesser extent pve wise. This issue will only escalate and no faction adjustments will stop it.
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That’s an interesting thought, I agree; writers are bound to Factions, they need to justify allegiances with debatable decisions or absurd excuses.
In my opinion it’s difficult to write a good story for WoW. World of Warcraft has a great amount of lore behind.
Writes should keep in mind those details that make the story and characters relevant.
I think the main issue with WoW story nowadays is that -in my opinion- some characters actions seem to be force or ‘Out of character’.
You see… I’ve played Horde and Alliance and I still feel Faction pride is strong, when you talk to a WoW fan most of the times they’ll ask what Faction do you play, and most of the times they answer pridefully; I honestly think is one of the biggest reasons why they haven’t merge factions.
I think Blizzard values that aspect of the game, like it or not in the end it’s one of the main thematic when it comes to merchandise.
Faction pride is one of the pillars of WoW, and it’s one of the top selling points, I highly doubt they’ll abandon a ’successful’ idea.
I agree that the situation in Alliance is dire, people have left Alliance because in Horde they can find more opportunities. I cannot think how Blizzard will fix this issue.
I think merging factions would not be a well received solution neither neutral factions.
I’ve seen some players like the idea of cross faction gameplay, maybe that could be work. Problem is, it contradicts one of those infamous ‘pillars of WoW’.
We already have neutral factions in-game, some more than others. A good example are the Knight of the Ebon Blade, they’ve no place among the living, even if they collaborate with the Horde or the Alliance (when you’ll see a Death Knight peacefully walking in SW? Hmm…). Another example are the Druids from the Cenarion Cirlce, their main purpose is to protect nature.
They could be split by class or beliefs.
They could work as mercenaries or for a common purpose.
They could use neutral cities.
Finally, I like the idea of neutral faction but I honestly think it’ll not happen anytime soon.
I think that’s an over statement. In the sense that we’ve been saying it over an over a lot and gave it so much weight. But are they really?
It’s this sort of contradiction I keep seeing. Like… the community kinda sees it that way. And blizzard supports it out of the game. But in game Saurfang looked at me and said " are home is Azeroth. We are breaking the cycle."
So on the one hand you have a side that keeps saying " no the factions are a staple don’t touch that." But then the writers of the story keep saying" but look! There’s another way"
And it’s not like it’s new either. As early as Wotlk(argeant tournament) some character would look at us and say" hey wouldn’t it be great if we worked together?".
It’s gotta stick at some point, no?
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Too many undead rogues have eaten my corpse over the years for me to let factions be neutral.
You do realize factions are the #1 selling point of the game rigth? This game has achieved what other have failed to do and you want it to go.
Almost every other game have acknowledged that hard locked factions is a lost cause.
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Yeah. Factions work kinda like sports teams to be honest. Then again aren’t there sports fans that just partake because they enjoy the given sport?
I will never expect the factions to vanish. In fact I don’t want them to. Simply because even lorewise I can’t see everyone agreeing to be friends. Ever. It’s unatural.
But choosing to leave your faction behind should be an option to be concidered more seriously, in my opinion.
We can’t keep calling this game an RPG among other things when your role is so predifined.
Unless you happen to want to be a tall, blonde, fair, majestic elf, then the Horde is waiting for you 
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We had two expansions with a heavy faction focus: WoD and BFA - most players will agree that these two compete for “worst expansion”.
If you have two players who want to PvP but happen to both be on the same faction, this means no PvP for anybody.
If you have 5 players who want to run a dungeon and 3 of them are on the one faction, 2 on the other, none of them gets to play a dungeon.
BFA featured 6 leveling zones compared to Legion’s 4 - yet thanks to factions each player only gets to play 3 of them. So Blizzard invested 50% more resources to give everyone 25% less content.
This extends to max-level, content, too, as Worldquests in the “other faction’s zones” are far worse than those in yours…and imagine how much better the Nazjatar story could have been if they would not have spent their resources to tell the same story two times.
Those are the facts about the “benefits” of having factions. It’s not hard to figure out. It’s Blizzard’s job to draw the right conclusions from it.
Fact: Nobody will praise you for telling TWO mediocre/bad stories in your game instead of ONE good/tollerable story. Especially when you completely forget to even include one of your two playable factions in ~80% of the expansion’s story.
BFA has made it extremely clear that Blizzard does not have the resources to tell two good stories. And even if they had: In that case it would still be better to tell one excellent story.
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Or a human pirate conspiring with the Horde.
Almost every game which had factions let them go because it was either that or the game’s fall. Wow keeps going because of it, and certainly it won’t be falling for it. People’s concern about the game are of other matters, this is just a distraction that takes away from the real issues within the game.
WoW keeps going, not because of factions but because it manages to still ride off on being the most successfully mmo in it’s genre.
Remove the factions as a gameplay element and it would take less then a week before people would forget that it was even a thing.
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Remove factions and wow will be no different than any MMO out there. It is what makes this game different and special. It’s rare for things like these to work but here it works. You can pick whatever faction you want and still find great population on your and on the enemy faction.