Here’s a quote from Blizzcon 2019, courtesy of wowhead:
Q: With the faction war settling down, would you consider loosening faction restrictions on grouping with friends?
A: I understand you want to play with the opposite faction and it would be easier for you, but mechanically, it is a pillar of what makes Warcraft Warcraft. That division has value, although we do want to look for ways for you to play with lots of people. However, formal cross-faction play is not in the cards.
And yet we have ‘Mercenary Mode’. You would think that PvP is more faction/Division than PvE, but apparently not.
With Mercenary Mode you can eliminate the main disadvantage of Horde (long Battleground Queues) and pretend to be Alliance for shorter queues. If a few AV’s I’ve been on have been anything to go on, you can also spread the Toxic hate, check someone on battle-net and their’s a good chance that the complainer telling everyone how bad the Alliance are in BG’s is a Horde on Merc Mode.
I’ve previously not bought into the ‘Horde Bias’ claims against Blizzard Devs. But I do think they have unconscious bias against the Alliance.
I’m playing as a mercenary all the time and I never “mention” it. People with Elvui or people with a rough idea of realm population of course notice anyways. Also, people who try to whisper me because that also doesn’t work.
All in all, it happens about 1 in 10 BGs that me being a mercenary is a topic. Almost never it’s a negative topic. If someone mentions me being a mercenary, the most common reaction is a joking “oh lol then maybe we have a chance at winning”.
That being said, the Alliance win chance is roughly 50% and so is the Horde one. I can proof this with every toon of mine that has been first played in BFA. For instance my Alliance warrior.
I am playing a lot of random battlegrounds in general because it’s relaxing. It’s fun on both sides and there’s rarely any toxicity if you compare it to some years ago. It’s a fun, non-competitive PVP in which you can just do your best and hope your team will as well. Horde queue times are too long.
I only play Horde during peak times because then the queue is just 10ish minutes. I won’t wait 20 minutes for a battleground when I can play 3 of them during that time.
IMO, mercenary isn’t the issue. There is a lot of other issues with Random BG queue instead. The easiest fix would be to restore faction balance. I very much enjoy playing my Blood Elf, but I’d rather play Human than not play at all. If all my friends weren’t Horde, I’d go Ally full time. Draenei are much cuter anyways.
Also I suspect, that Mercs are being put in another priority of queue, because:
on Maelas the queue is shorter than on Kyrel as Merc
with Kyrel I’m often in majority merc groups (like a 10/15 merc Arathi) while with Maelas I often only have 1-2 mercs
I dont really care, i dont do pvp, but if faction pride is so important and such a fundamental core to the game, then yes, merc mode should be removed.
This.
Either all cross faction is out or all cross faction is allowed.
Personaly i want to get rid of the factions.
So many times i encountered a player i end up helping despite being the other faction.
Tho for some reason alliance fears me when i am near despite warmode being off.
At this stage in the game BGs are going to need faction-less teams (thus mixed) if you remove mercenary mode.
If you remove Merc without changing anything else you may aswel just disable the option to queue for BGs, it will completely kill it (again, grantes that it stays roughly the same - faction imbalance, lack of rewards etc etc).
What faction pride? Most of expansions or even AQ and Naxx is everyone joining forces or doing same thing for same reasons. Not to mention that race doesnt equate to faction for NPCs/lore characters.
Their entire statement is nullified because of the existence of mercenary mode. Alright admittedly being a mercenary only works for non-ranked-stuff like brawls, random bgs and so on, but you could to it in a similar way in PvE meaning you could play with people from the other factions via LFD/LFR-tool.
Come on now that statement is wrong. The mode was introduced in WoD to help out the Alliance because during that time the Alliance heavily outnumbered the Horde in PvP because of the human racial which allowed you to use two DPS-trinkets.
So it has helped both factions. This changed in Legion with the introduction of PvP-talents (giving everyone a free insignia) and a nerf to the human racial…ironically that was also the point where the Horde started to become the dominant faction in both PvE and PvP content.
They could change it to work like this:
On random unrated battlegrounds, everyone would have choice to queue as mercenary. When you queue as mercenary you are put in a game, where everyone is mercenary and is randomly divided to horde/alliance teams regardless of your original faction. This way game can start immediately when there is enough players to form 2 teams, without having to wait certain amount of each faction. This new mercenary mode would be still optional, so those who really care about playing their own faction could still do so if they wish (with probably at the cost of longer queue times).
I know, but according to Ion we cant have cross faction pve because factions and their conflicts are such a core part of the game. Just doesnt make sense to be able to merc as opposite faction with statements like that
Alliance complaint that the most PvP part go to horde.
Then they complaint this part use mercenary to join them in bg
Joke aside, sometimes with friend we use it (well … because we’re hope to match against some toxic people we “play” with ) but we’re still playing the bg no matter the color.
They can remove it if is it incorpated in the games, when you queu/your group queu they place you Horde/Alliance (depend where people miss)
I understand you want to play with the opposite faction
No. Everytime I used to play other MMORPG games I looked back to WoW and wished other games made world and faction warfare like it was in WoW. It was one of the things that made WoW great. So yeah, I am rather opposed to merc mode than pro. Also everything should not be instant, because if you everything is instant players start to be like they are now. 1 min into game-“This game is lost” and then they proceed to slack off. They know they can find next bg fast, so they rather play the luck with matching than try to win.
i love the horde, i just love draenei more 
