The Shadowland Campaign have maintained a development where Alliance NPCs are aiding Horde NPCs - and vice versa. The faction leaders and important story characters are pals hanging out in Oribos, and all Alliance players have aided in finding a new axe to Thrall as well as aiding Anduin in healing Baine.
The Horde and the Alliance is at a merging point where the only gameplay obstacle is the ridiculous forced language barrier. Come on…
- The Orcs including Thrall from the encampment in Hillsbrad Foothills had no issues communicating with the humans sympathetic to their situation.
- The High Elves had no issues communication with the Alliance and teaching a few selected humans the use of Magic. When the story went on and 90+% of them identified themselves as Blood Elves, they joined the Horde and suddenly are unable to speak with their previous Alliance allies? And yet the Blood Elves who became Void Elves have no issues with the language?
- Alliance Human gets killed and raised as Undead by the Lich King - and suddenly forgot how to speak their language but instantly know how to speak Orcish?
- Yet Neutral NPCs of all races and cosmic origins have no issues being bilingual???
It is time to drop this abomination of nonsense and get the factions merged.
Onwards…
Blizzard made it clear that they are not interested in a Cataclysm 2.0 with Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms revamp (with preservation of the past zone phases) despite how beneficial it would be for the world story immersion and becoming future leveling content. Instead we got the Dragon Isles, and I hope the devs can get their poop together and stay away from cheap faction conflicts. Even Zovaal (hypocritically) warned about how a cosmos divided wont do for what is to come.
We are on our way of getting cross-faction PvE, and cross-faction guilds is probably in the works right now.
But what about PvP?
Easy, the current faction-based PvP and War Mode changes to become team-based. All players entering /pvp or War Mode get assigned to either Team A, or Team B. Both in the open world, and in instanced PvP.
This also gives us the opportunity to spice up the PvP by adding a new ‘All versus All’-mode.
This topic is a revamp of the old Let's have a faction merge in 10.0!, and that topic also discusses the possibility of maintaining the two-faction gameplay by adding a new secondary all-race faction to play with the merged Alliance&Horde. That development was heavily tied up against getting an Azeroth revamp, thus it is not included here.