The only thing pertaining to cross faction play I could find was that Q/A wherein Ion affirmatively stated that such a system was not in the cards.
Also found a more personal interview where he affirms how deeply fundamental this division is. Quite interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3Fwh7b37FE&feature=youtu.be&t=507Yes.
No, itâs from one of the unknown developers as far as I remember. It was not Danuser, it was some random guy they have interviewed who confirmed that they are testing cross-faction features.
I would agree, but this does not apply to just belf players, there is (I wonât say majority) but I will say a significant amount of players who are not interested in the lore aspects. Those that do, thatâs great we each play the game how we wish. I am not saying that the new Velf customisations will bring back a huge amount of players, what I did say was that I believe it might bring back players to Alliance. Now whether it would be enough to counter the current imbalance, I donât know, but it is a factor that should be considered 
Discount High Elf customizations will only boost RolePlay population of Alliance and I donât think roleplay servers need more Alliance 
We needed good allied races to balance it but blizzard kept failing us, we needed good racials instead they butchered the only good racial we had EMFH, we needed good story they didnât deliver. A pair of blue eyes wonât fix anything.
It will take something dramatic to âfixâ faction imbalance. Fix in this case means either you rejig the game so itâs no longer relevant, or you change the game to manhandle the balance back into place.
Making it irrelevant - the only way to do this is to allow cross faction play. Iâm not opposed to this for PvE and if blizz are testing it, great. I know others see it as fundementally opposed to the game, thatâs fine. Myself, I see the two faction system as incurring additional problems that otherwise donât have to be there if you allow something as simple as for raid/dungeon PvE, you can cross-faction.
Manhandling the faction balance. This would require extremely heavy handed approaches. Not just adding something âyou think players will likeâ, it has to be something so obvious thereâs literally no degree of interpetation. Races alone cannot do this because with races there is always a degree of disagreement.
Therefore the only options that realistically remain are giving Alliance an objective, undebatable advantage when running the content theyâre underrepresented in to essentially force players serious about competition back towards the faction. This could be acheived by generic raid buffs for Alliance, or by buffing their racials across the board to absurd levels in PvE content only.
Both of these have the issue of reversing the problem rather than resolving it. Even if you âturn off the tapâ halfway through when the fation balance is equalised, you have no guarantee people wonât just go back to Horde. Thereâs too many moving parts to know for sure. Not to mention dealing with outcry from alliance whom enjoyed their power levels only to have them taken away, it would appear to be a disingenious move on blizzardâs part.
I see cross-faction play as the only solution that doesnât incur more headaches. Some people will leave because of it, sure, but it will âsaveâ the PvE scene by making the faction divide in numbers irrelevant, encouraging people to play with friends irrespective, and youâll see guilds composed of high-performing alliance and horde races. The significant thing is it doesnât cause additional problems to manage âdown the lineâ unlike hyper-buffing racials or whatnot would.
Adding new races with super racials to avoid the âhyper buffingâ of current racials incurs the same problem, it would never realistically last and theyâd eventually be brought back in line due to outcry from anyone who doesnât like the raceâs theme and thinks itâs unfair. So it wouldnât last.
I donât think blizzard has the stomach for it either. Initial racials for Mechagnomes were incredibly strong whichcould have been seen as a conscious move on blizzardâs part to engineer their popularity (if they had remained in that state I maintain serious PvErs would have overlooked they were Gnomes and rolled them anway because their racials were absolutely whack). However they nerfed them into line before release, and what weâre left with are âdecentâ racials but by no means ridiculous ones:
Combat Analysis - Nerfed from 400 primary stat to 250 primary stat.
Emergency Failsafe - Nerfed from 30% healing on a 2 min cd to 15% healing on a 2.5 min cd.
HOLO: Nerfed so they do not deal any form of recognisable damage, whereas early mines showed them to be a significant dps increase when summoned (this may have be unintentional from the beginning in fairness).
But we can see the potency of CA and EF were absolutely gutted prior to release because âbalanceâ. I would not trust blizzard to surge ahead with making new races with ridiculous racials to tempt the balance because theyâve shown they always back down into making them ever-so-slightly better than horde ones (regarding ARs) as opposed to making them an advantage is is hugely obvious and not up for debate.
This is such a narrow view, not all players who pick a, shall we call it pretty race, are role players. I know Mythic raiders who love their character looks and mogs equally as much as they love raiding. Visualy appealing characters are not the domain of one part of the player base.
This is a good point; the exictement of ânew looksâ has the biggest buzz on roleplay servers where alliance typically outnumber horde 2:1 already.
Itâs not going to be solved simply by âcool lookingâ races, itâs actually irrelevant whether theyâre cool or not, they would need to have racials are crazily obviously more powerful than horde ones.
A vast swathe of people (most pertinently the top end PvE scene and those who follow their every move) will roll and raid as a race of socks with googly eyes if they had racials like âYour crits deal 50% more damageâ and âActivate to remove all debuffs and grant immunity to all debuffs for 6 secondsâ. etc.
So mythic raiders will faction change for blue eyes whilst they have access to the same stuff on their side via Blood Elves? Does it make sense, I donât know if my point of view is narrow or yours. It is not peculiar to Void Elf 
I too see this as the most viable solution
While you suggestions are blunt and direct, there is something better we can all do. (more effective and easily managed)
Fix the problem at the root. Fundamentally Ion Hazzikostas is not up to the task ( empirically) so we should definitely look for ways to replace him and his team.
I didnât say any Mythic raiders would change sides for blue eyes, what I said is that not all players who pick what is known as the pretty races are in fact just Roleplayers.
This infographic was linked recently and seems relevant here:
https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/49862-wow-demographics-for-class-race-and-faction-infographic/
The races that seem to appeal to most people are blood elves, humans and night elves. If this says anything, itâs that the Alliance do not need more monstrous races to be appealing - they need more pretty ones. Of the recent allied races, Kulâtirans, Mechagnomes and Dark Iron Dwarves arenât what would be considered âbeautifulâ by most people (regardless of the fact that they clearly do appeal to some). Perhaps prettier void elves will have more of an influence than we expect? Although personally I love their existing purple look.
Me too Ceranity and I got more excited for the purple eye look rather than the blue for my velf 
Yes I already know that, there are considerable number of people who care about appearence, unpopularity of gnome and goblin races is a clear indication of that already. The point is people who have expectations like âBlue eyes will fix imbalanceâ is wrong, not telling to you directly I speak generally.
Ehm ehm, saxe blue
Thatâs actually a good idea.
If we look at raw stats, this is true. Itâs very much a double-edged sword however. It seems that the most popular races are indeed âhumanishâ ones, but ones that look conventionally attractive at the same time. Y there is a definiive feeling on the alliance that one of the reasons Horde seems to be more popular/favoured is because they donât keep receiving â50 shades of humanâ and get a variety of races.
So adding more and more stuff like half-elves, or wood-elves, or different-kind-of-human-01 may increase the popularity of the alliance a bit, but it will also majorly peeve a significant portion of them as well because it just reinforces their view that Horde get ânew racesâ and Alliance gets âhereâs another human with another horse mountâ.
Monstrous races that are supplied with strong racials, and âcoolâ in a generally agreed way are the only thing that would satisfy everything thatâs brewing as discontent within the alliance at the moment. I donât think iâve heard complaints of there ânot being enough human-like racesâ in the alliance so it seems those people are satisfied by whatâs already on offer (mostly humans, nelf, velf) itâs those who are switched off by alliance because they are by and large âhumans, pointy eared humans, short humans and a couple of sidekicksâ that need to be tempted.
We have enough pretty ones. We have abomination and ugly ones too, so it would be accurate to say that we have variety but in a bad way.
Still waiting for Satyr race here
Best way to solve this is making to include the KTs into the human character slot and based on the design they will the racial in question. I donât know if this approach would work for the Worgen though.
I agree and although I do love letâs say my âpretty belfâ hunter (damn she does look good) I also love my Zandalari Troll druid and my Orc, I donât think I need to go on. I agree that the Horde have a more diverse choice and that Alliance do seem to be lacking a little on this side. I was more making the point that all players are different and it is not the domain of one playerbase to choose what I would call the âpretty racesâ. Although for myself I am quite shallow and do tend to go for the better looking races - just for mogging - donât judge me 
This is a possible way to extend the variety in the racial slots without losing the customisations we already have in case of Kts, DID and MGs etc.