Ok, so Blizzard commited to Faction cooperation, and also made it quite clear that a new large-scale Faction war can pretty much be ruled out. Considering how much the Factions are defined by their opposition to each other… well, it’s quite understandable that people feel that the Factions are being killed right now.
On the other hand, Blizzard also referred to Faction identity being central to the game experience, and that they aren’t planning to give up on that. Now, we could easily enough dismiss that part as them wanting to boil the frog slowly, so that the resistence against these changes isn’t too strong. But what if we don’t?
From the standpoint of the player experience, there is something which arguably has a lot greater influence on Faction identity than the inabilitay to run dungeons together with the other Faction: Seperate questing. And while some of that questing is about the Faction conflict, most of it isn’t. In the classic WoW experience, players interacted with a wholly different set of characters, and often used the same zones for widely different stories, which had some more Faction-specific flair. Indeed, that’s what we did in 8.0, where Horde and Alliance got their own continents and their own almost fully independent stories. And I’d argue that this was among the best parts of the BfA experience.
Now, we always had neutral, shared questing here and there, but BfA showed that Blizz certainly still has the ressources to create largely different story experiences, and even patch campaigns for the factions.
So, take a whiff of that copium and think about it.
Could Blizzard actually still be willing to do this?
Would it be a good idea?
Would it be enough to feel good about the Factions, even if you can group up with the other side?
Or would the Faction experience without the Faction war experience feel meaningless?