“Minor banditry” wouldn’t be the big plot, no. But it would be what keeps the peoples of Azeroth from moving their few remaining troops out. If “minor banditry” includes all of the minor races, deserters, bandits, monsters and cultists we know and love. This also wouldn’t really be a new idea, since this is pretty much the situation we see in Classic.
If there would be a story driving plot at all, I would really like it focused around the player character and the threats from outside. I think “mundane” armies and mundane troubles are important to get right in world building. But the important thing in an RPG should always be the player character, and that usually gets lost in these great war stories. We can’t be the commanders of the armies, because if we were we could decide where the story goes. We can’t be more powerful than armies, because then the armies become insignificant. So just keep us and the armies out of each others way, and give us seperate ptoblems to deal with. The armies have problems with keeping all their land protected from an overwhelming number of threats, and we heroes help out and go for the big threats that are out of reach of the soldiers.
Nah, I don’t know if I see any use for factions at all. Just for peoples. I know Blizzard doesn’t want to do away with them… but I certainly do. With so many so different races on either side the idea that these are supposed to be stable alliances that survive any calamity is frankly ridiculous.
Actually I had my own ideas about that, see here:
I would like to use the covenant system as something that isn’t really focussed on the big armies, but to distinguish between the different kind of world-saving heroes we play.