Am I the only person who thinks that faction parity in terms of power is bullcrap? I support faction parity in the amount of attention given to either faction, in content given, in morality and motivation. But to demand that the two factions have to be evenly balanced in terms of political power really limits any faction war storylines.
Imagine that, in the next expansion, either the Horde or the Alliance (I prefer the Alliance because of my support for a darker, genocidal take on this faction, as exemplified by Garithos, Daelin or MoP Jaina) wins the faction war. The focus on the next expansion would be on fighting the common enemy, but at the same time a concurrent side storyline would run where the Alliance heroes maintain order and squash the remaining Horde resistance, while Horde heroes are the plucky underdogs trying to survive.
This would serve to further differentiate the two factions and I think it would be really cool. Wildstar did something similar, too.
If you tilt the proverbial faction power balance, you open yourself to the question about how is it possible that the powerful one isn’t simply stamping the other one into the ground and taking advantage of the situation to force whatever terms they please upon the other.
Specially given all the bad blood that’s been going on between both sides.
There needs to be some leverage. Otherwise you have one painted as either blundering incompetents unable to finish the job, and the other as weaklings playing second fiddle.
I don’t mind either side going full genocide on the other…for as long as the fight is presented in “clash of titans” way that has two superpowers going at each other. The Horde deserves to feel like powerful too. Cataclysm was needed.
I don’t think the “underdog” thing would work anymore given the geopolitical landscape. It only worked in Vanilla because both factions had just finished a bloody war, we’re tired of fighting…and most importantly, because the Alliance had a list of problems within its own ranks that rendered it incapable and unwilling to open the can of worms by poking at Thrall (who seemed more than eager to maintain the status quo even if it meant harsher conditions for his faction).
I said in another thread that there would be many interesting stories to come from both being the victor and loser in this faction conflict, but the thing is… People have too much faction pride, they can’t deal with the fact their faction is not number one or as good as the other.
Winning could actually cause division in The Alliance. With Anduin wanting to settle this diplomatically, Genn and Tyrande want revenge and harsh treatments of The Horde and so on. Meanwhile The Horde has to deal with building themselves up in the shadows and maybe one of the leaders is a puppet of The Alliance or just have to be covert about giving messages to help The Horde regain it’s former power.
Naturally this works the other way too, but again, it’s not easy to pull off and Blizz prefer the Michael Bay approach to writing and not the political intrigue and ACTUAL morally grey dilemmas a victor would bring to the story and of course, the faction pride won’t allow for it either.
So every expansion will end up with us teaming up to fight some greater threat and we will realize that friendship is magic.
The faction conflict is just dead to me. I just don’t want to compete with the other side of the playerbase over who has it worse anymore. One side winning is better than pretending a situation of parity could hold forever, but neither do I want to be the oppressor, nor do I want to force other players who haven’t chosen it into the role of the oppressor.
It would be much more interesting to me to be conquered by an NPC-force like Yrel’s Lightbound, and to resist them - if we have to have an overarching narrative at all, which I personally don’t think.
here’s an even more revolutionary idea: what if, canonically, the faction conflict trash was dumped into the background where it belongs while our characters run around just being adventurers again?
As a faction conflict / wpvp person, I have to agree. There have been 2 faction war centered expansions (MoP and BfA) and while I enjoyed some parts of both of them, the overall story was unsatisfying and frustrating to me. Blizzard seems to be completely incapable to execute on this idea and I find myself enjoying expansions more when they center around other things, while I can still kill Horde scum in the open world.
vanilla, TBC, wrath, even cata to an extent, all xpacs with bigger fish to fry than a stupid war between two political factions. the war still occurred, it just happened in the background, and doing it that way meant there was no need for a last-minute “wait let’s work together!” cop-out, because we were expecting it all along due to the aforementioned bigger fish
with the low-level war in and around ICC i’d argue Wrath was actually a better faction war xpac than BfA…
100%
Wrath was full of cool faction war stuff without even being about the faction war at all.
Siege of Undercity and Hotheaded Garrosh vs Varian during the Ulduar meeting & TOC were 2 of my favorite faction war lore moments of all time.