Take whatever you like. 
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From an IC perspective, you can try to convince them of the error of their ways by trying to convince they were morally wrong to fight this group of hordes, I don’t think there are any other options where you don’t make OOC claims of your character having IC authority over the random strangers that are boasting about their latest RP-PVP event IC, which is an option, but not everyone will just agree with that on an IC level and is more likely to cause OOC drama then not
I also don’t really see why any average stormwind human would care to prosecute their own soldiers over having fought and vanquished a group of horde soldiers, truce or not, but that’s a different topic.
I would probably defend myself by claiming the person trying to persecute me for such a thing as an alliance soldier is an orc lover and a tratior
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I´d say this depends on how the warmongers portray it.
I think the onus here is on the warmongers to have a good argument for why they fought the other faction. Good argument in this case doesn´t have to be true at all, it just has to be internally consistent and told by everyone involved (on their side) in the same way.
“Yes, the Horde attacked a night elf hunting camp, we struck back and killed the orc responsible. We weren´t the ones who started this, but we sure finished it.”
In this case, the peace enjoyer is presented with a dilemma whether to believe the warmonger and it opens up possibilities for investigation or conflict where the peaceful person doesn´t believe the warmonger and calls them out. However, at the end of the day, the paper shield of “we didn´t start it” should IMO be enough to stop things from turning violent (which would then open another can of worms, if this were to happen in Stormwind, guards would probably put people in prison and I don´t think people are that interested in doing that, or RPing out consequences of their soldier/upstanding citizen being put in Stockades). You can criticize the warmonger, mistrust them, but at the end of the day, you will need proof and the only people who can confirm your side of the story are those supposed Horde warmongers.
What to do if the warmonger comes into the middle of Stormwind and says “We attacked Horde village, killed their young, slaughtered their animals and burned down their homes! FOR THE ALLIANCE!”, then I think we´re getting to an “eredar demon lord in Stormwind with papers from Turalyon” territory. If you publicly declare that you attacked the Horde without any casus belli, on the streets of Alliance capital, then the guards should arrest you, not because they all love peace, but because it´s absolutely terrible optics if these people are allowed to walk around and boast publicly.
One thing that pro-armistice people should however realize is that outside of some absurdly rare circumstances, an Alliance human would never trust the word of Horde orc over the word of another Alliance human. The automatic response to someone saying “The Horde attacked us, so we fought back” shouldn´t be “I know you´re lying, the orcs are good, the Horde is good, and the last time I said this everyone clapped and my opponent started crying!”
Warmongers should focus on presenting their case in a way that absolves them of guilt, while pro-armistice people should not be automatically hostile whenever they hear of member of their faction fighting the other faction.
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For some reason I’m just not convinced.
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Honestly, openly bragging about -starting- a fight with the other side would be bad RP in the current setting. But there’s nothing wrong with claiming the other side started it with aggressive posturing.
OT:
An example of a way that people had fun working within the truce, off the top of my head, would be the shenanigans regarding Bella’s IIth Cohort and the Grimtusk.
The former and the latter got into a fight in Arathi when the former spied another horde warband plundering a farm, and the two got into a skirmish that ended with the Alliance defeated. But executing their prisoners after such a confusing confrontation, would have been an escalation by the Horde, who wanted to keep the status as the ones defending themselves.
So instead the Alliance had their weapons and armour taken, were humiliated, and sent walking back to Stromgarde.
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There were other troubles, such as an orc attack on a group of Sentinels in Ashenvale which was in direct violation of the Horde-Alliance treaty. The Sentinels had been skinned and then chopped up into pieces, left for carrion feeders. […] many orcs celebrated this attack. With the Horde’s supplies almost depleted on account of the war with the Lich King and the unusual droughts affecting Orgrimmar, many orcs viewed the night elves’ exclusion of the Horde from their trade routes unfairly brutal. He received a letter from King Varian Wrynn demanding to denounce the attacks and turn over any attackers he could find to the Alliance for justice. Thrall refused to turn over violators of the treaty (he had his own suspects in mind, but lacked any proof, and he felt turning over the violates to face Alliance justice would hurt orc morale) and also refused to apologize
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Thrall
This suggests that any violation of the truce would be a pretty big deal, since even the murder of a group of sentinels “was in violation of the treaty” and caused quite the uproar.
On the other hand, you have tweets (I think it is tweets?) claiming that battlegrounds were still happening here and there, which would imply other such violations happened and nobody cared.
In the end, just do what you want to do. One of the strengths of the setting is its vagueness, and how it allows for player’s freedom.
Strictly speaking, from a canon POV the conflict of several dozens of people - from the military even! - fighting one another probably isn’t very lore-accurate. Does it harm anybody’s enjoyment of the game? Should it be avoided?
I think this is a case of “live and let live”. If people find RP-PvP fun, let them have it.
Likewise, I think nobody really wants to RP the in-faction consequences. People who advocate for faction conflict are there for the conflict and would want to do it again in the future: it would be strange to give them repeated punishments that equal to “slap on the wrist” five times in a row.
At the same time pro-neutrality groups may just attempt to enforce their vision of the world via RP, making it all but fun as an RP session.
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I’m a bit puzzled on the need for consequences (at least in a capacity of law) because ever since the armistice first popped up we’ve had talk of skirmishes still ongoing, we have a worgen and nightborne in valdrakken who talk about how but months prior (i.e late in the confusing timeskip) they would have only met on the battlefield instead as explorer’s equally lost in a new land.
We haven’t really seen an indication at all that anyone in breach of the current armistice would make the stormwind footmen play the human male aggro soundbyte.
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It’s as much consensus and a bid for a common ground and understanding as a late reaction to us WARheads vilifying peacekeepers in the MoP, WoD, Legion and BFA eras.
Not that I blame them, but I made my stance abundantly clear on the topic, which is that anything and anyone’s actions are as likely to be ignored or written off as getting ID’d and dogpiled by a guardsman or grunt, thanks to how large and layered the population of city capitals are in lore. (Queue the plausible scenario of the present footmen turning a blind eye because they love to hear how the Horde got bullied in Outland)
I find that a healthier mentality, as it feeds into a live and let live approach, than try and appeal to a higher authority or try and enforce the idea that the armistice is a global debuff we all are meant to be affected by.
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Another banger post from War- Hatescale!
LIKE THE GOOD OLD DAYS AFTER THERAMORE!
Another point we also recently discussed in discord about is the fact that while Alliance doesn’t need the faction conflict to remain as a faction, Horde needs it.
Horde was built as a faction of misfits and outcasts (paraphrasing) that didn’t necessarily like one another or agree with everything other members of the Horde aspired to and liked, but when push came to shove, namely from the Alliance, they got together and banded to fight back.
Ah, but you could say that they could (and have) banded against non-Alliance foes too, just as Alliance has banded against non-horde targets! So there’s no need for faction conflict for the Horde! Right?
No. This is where the Horde differs from the Alliance.
The Alliance is unified by deep bonds and a much more united culture across the faction than the Horde is, namely because of their titanic ancestry and faith in the light, and their cultures are very, very homogenous (Humans, dwarves, gnomes, draenei). Even night elves, who for the longest time stood out from the rest of the Alliance, have been woven into it through interactions with the Worgen.
The Horde, on the other hand, is the Horde because it -is- bonded together due to the trauma of the Alliance.
The orcs and their internment camps.
The trolls and their exodus from Stranglethorn to the Echo Isles due to Kul-Tirans (and Shatterspear and Revantusk due to NE/Dwarf incursion).
The Forsaken due to being hunted down as monsters by the humans.
The tauren due to encursions from both humans and dwarves to their ancestral lands, and Taurajo.
The Blood Elves due to the sabotage from the Night Elves in TBC and refusal of aid from the Alliance (while the Forsaken conveniently offered it, while they desperately needed it), and for the schism between them and the High Elves.
The goblins due to the actions of SI:7 in the Lost Isles.
The Mag’har due to the enslavement by the Lightborne.
The Zandalari due to Alliance encroachment to Zuldazar and the death of Rastakhan.
The Vulpera due to purge squads of the Alliance in Vol’dun.
The Nightborne being rather left to their plight by Tyrande, so long as the Nightwell was destroyed, no matter the cost. Meanwhile the Horde (namely blood elves) understood their plight and sought for a way to permanently fix the issue.
Asides from the Highmountain Tauren and Pandaren, -all- the races of the Horde are connected together, due to their shared trauma from the Alliance, in one form or another.
There are other bonds too, but they are not faction wide, they are shared between only some of the races. Shamanism connects the trolls, tauren and the orcs. Magic and similar histories connects the Nightborne and the Blood elves. There are more I could write here, but they wouldn’t change the point.
Survival has been previously named by some on these forums as the primary reason why the Horde exists. This is false. It is the outcome from the Trauma of the Alliance, not the root cause. And I will prove it with a thought experiment below.
Take away the trauma of the Alliance from -all- the listed races below, and leave only the desire to survive.
Now, why would your race choose to ally themselves with races/a faction of misfits that frankly do not agree on a whole lot of things and don’t share very much culturally, when they could simply either go to the Alliance, or make their own small factions? They’d be far better off.
Exactly. They wouldn’t. The Blood Elves would be with the Alliance. As would the Nightborne. Goblins would have remained neutral, to rake in more profits from an industrial powerhouse (the Alliance). The tauren would still likely find kinship with trolls and orcs, but they would also be closer to the Night Elves. Forsaken wouldn’t be probably tolerated by anyone.
This is the problem. You take away the faction conflict from WoW, you completely disintegrate the reason for Horde to exist. If you remove and dismantle that trauma, there’s no need for the Horde to exist anymore.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk. HELLBLIGHT AND APOCALYPSE NOW.
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This yeah.
If you want to bring someone to justice for their actions, you should do it IC.
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To be fair, two lines of NPC dialogue claiming they would have expected to fight the other faction rather than get along happily does not make a strong case, especially when it is not accompanied by Blizzard even bothering to spend one line on any actual skirmish that have happened.
It feels an even weaker case when the dialogue is there to suggest that “hey, times have indeed changed…"
For the same reason I have just found a canon source coming from basically a Word of God-level of statement that claims attacking the other faction is a violation of the older truce and ought to bring consequences to those who initiated the conflict.
Seeing how this truce appears stronger than the previous one, and you have groups of Horde directly supporting the Alliance to reclaim their lands, you’d think the point would still hold – now more than before.
In general, what I don’t like about your argument is that it comes across as you telling anti-faction conflict players that they are delusional/wrong for having an expectation that Blizzard itself is reinforcing.
Players claiming that skirmishes still happen are supported by some of Blizzard’s statements. Players claiming the truce forbids skirmishes are also supported by some of Blizzard’s statements, with the faction conflict currently existing in a sort of quantic state, in that it is at the same time valid and not valid.
I’d just try not to count all these loose ends – World of Warcraft is not coherent here. Don’t hold players accountable for Blizzard’s misgivings, it is not fair.
Edit.
I believe people make it a greater deal than it actually was: the Nightborne don’t really have a bone to pick with the Alliance/Night Elves. Most of the Alliance actually helped them, they just made it clear they were not doing it for them, but to stop the Legion.
Tyrande being rude towards the Thalyssra/nightborne is not something that most nightborne would have even known, and it does not feel like they developed any genuine spite against the night elves, even Thalyssra’s comment seem’d more of mild spite/disappointment rather than anything close to “trauma”.
Imho, likely Thalyssra decision was not based out of spite, but simply picked the side which felt more kind to her people. Based on what she had seen, she believed the Alliance would not let them do their thing, so she joined the blood elves.
(technically potentially there is room for conflict - ie. territorial disputes with the Night Elves - but it is not explored or touched upon in any way, shape or form)
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Indeed all the elves should join the Alliance and all the orcs, trolls and undead put up against the wall for a ratatatata experience. Tauren can be spared, they’re the only big Horde race that can actually mind its own business and live in peace.
Great post btw, big approve.
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Also wanted to say that regardless of the OOC drama involved, AD RP-PvP events remain some of my fondest and most memorable experiences on the server. From my time in the Kor’Kron and the Siege of Orgrimmar and the Iron Horde outpour in the prepatch to skirmishes in Arathi to us crashing the server in BfA, warring with the trolls in Zandalar or that one event in the Barrens in which I had PvP gear and the Stormwind Infantry had green questing gear and one of my spells blowing up their whole regiment.
Not to mention the best one - Krasarang. To this day I’ll bring up Krasarang on one of my characters even if only in passing and random folk I’m not sure I’ve ever met before will say they remember it etc. All of the people whom I still keep in touch with from AD I met and befriended during one of these big server-wide events.
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That must have felt damn good (poor guys).
I recall it fondly, and part of it was just how chaotic it was on the Alliance side.
I was also young, wild and free, with a lot of time on my hands. Good times.
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You wanted to blow up my warlock either with the assistance of Wrall or Qeueteron, only to decide against doing so in the last minute.
It was a wild ride.
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I miss Queteron, Wrall and Thornroot.
True antagonists the Horde deserved.
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Oh! Who were you? (If you’re comfortable sharing).
But yeah. I had a blast in that campaign. It was, hats off, an extremely well-organized campaign, with so many parties having an interest at play there.
The saurok, who wanted to slurp anima and ascend to “godhood”. There were corrupt Alliance officers who used some kind of… fel blight? And the Horde group that wanted to cleanse the land (led by Boush’s Zandalari if I recall correctly);
Then there was the Thornroot’s terrorist organization, I remember approaching them alongside Clovus and the interaction was just as tense as you’d expect. Then, Wrall’s failed coup, and his subsequent attempt to fight a guerilla battle in the woods alongside Queteron and others!
I have so many memories - all of them very good. I recall… Hmm. Many good moments, such as when there was this super-powerful worgen (I think it was a warrior?) that went like: “hey, let us attack the Horde”. So we joined his group and he was a beast. We pushed right into the Horde’s base with 5-6 people, staying right on top of the gates with me feeling super anxious because it was technically against the rules to enter the base, so we were a bit in a grey area there. But it was fun. Eventually we never pushed into the base and retreated because there was no one who could truly oppose us, so it was plenty of fun.
(I also had Deep Freeze and gosh, I miss you so much, Deep Freeze - please come back I never wanted to part ways).
But a lot of fun moments were also my mistakes, like when I was running into a Horde tower with the players there being vastly undergeared. I was ready to destroy everything with the other Alliance players and -
- and then I notice an undead clad in black armor rushing into the tower. It was Fearless with his WOD legendary ring. I didn’t even ice block. Needless to say, seconds later, I was dead, and the entire Alliance group had been driven out of the tower or was in the Graveyard alongside me. Good times, good times.
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Neutral gamers should be pro faction war because the novelty of neutrality is only there when not wanting “the opposite faction” dead is somewhat controversial.
Even more so for neutral factions like the Argent Crusade, because those factions become utterly pointless if Horde and Alliance characters can unprompted agree to sit together and fight a common threat without the threat-focused-faction saying it’s important.
Some of my most boring RP moments came from one of the very first campaigns I attended, with Scourge as the big enemy, and every Horde and Alliance group that showed up had a neutral lean and the big mediation meeting we had set up could end in 5 min because everyone just agreed 
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I did read through that section multiple times, but it did seem to boil down to:
The world is so big and we are so small, we are but drops in the ocean who are so insignificant that you can’t do anything about our truce-breaking actions because we are so tiny and few in number and our impact on the world is so miniscule, so who cares what we do?
But armistice-defying raids that end in the destruction of property and the loss of life are bound to upset some player-characters if they hear about it, no matter the scale, and who may seek to bring the culprits to justice.
I’m not saying “grr the guard NPCs would throw you in the Stockades for daring to talk about your warcrimes in public.” I’m just wondering about what other players who want to interact with you and oppose your characters with theirs can actually do about your warmongering.
That’s sort of what I’m asking here, and why I’m asking it.
I’m not arguing against the scale of the situation. Yes, all of our characters are but specks in the grand scheme of things, but part of the appealing of roleplaying is playing out how these people clash with each other and form bonds with each other. What’s meaningless to Azeroth at large isn’t meaningless to them as individuals, so some characters may feel compelled to act.
Asking for warmongers to be left alone, just because their acts are so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that no one should care about them or be able to meaningfully do anything about them, seems like an admission that this warmongering exists in its own bubble.
I appreciate the feedback provided by Clovus, Sylvare and Syelia, and I’d like to provide a recent example of the dreaded CONSEQUENCES.
During late April, there were two campaigns simultaneously taking place in the Ghostlands, side-by-side.
One was a campaign that involved a lot of characters from Stromgarde marching into the Ghostlands to slaughter heaps of Amani trolls around Zul’Aman, with permission from the Horde as the Amani are a mutual enemy.
The other was a campaign that involved a smaller group of characters using the other excursion as an excuse to enter the Ghostlands, with the intention of stealing quel’dorei relics scattered across the ruins of the regions.
The former was a standard campaign with DMs and NPCs, the latter was an RP-PvP campaign, with some Horde characters coming to the region to fight off these plunderers and interlopers.
Several times, the two campaigns crossed paths, with the Horde running to small groups from the Amani-slaying campaign and reacting with hostility, when as far as the Alliance knew, they were allowed across the border in order to kill trolls. The actions of these relic-raiders were making their stay in the Ghostlands much more difficult than it had to be.
Gradually, the Horde in the region came to distinguish between the two groups and even began to communicate peacefully with the troll-killing group. The Horde went through the process of identifying the soldiers of the relic-plundering group and passed along this information to the troll-killers, who swore to take action and impose consequences and sanctions.
And as far as I know, in the relic-looting camp, they spent their nights planning how to justify their actions to the rest of the Alliance, how they could make their actions seem lawful and truce-abiding, how they could try and paint the Horde as the aggressors in that situation.
I don’t know the final outcome of this for the Alliance, as I was roleplaying on the Horde side for this campaign, but I’d consider this a fantastic example of how the truce can be incorporated into RP and how it can be used to generate additional conflict and RP, instead of stifling it.
It’s also a display of how consequences aren’t something to be shied away from and how they can be fun to play through, and not just a tool used by players who are grumpy with you and who want to try and shut down your RP.
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Hellblight
Yeah that’s me
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