Factions opening up should look like this.

[Syegfryed]

no ti should not, faction opening should look like nothing, because it should never happen.

[reiserfs]

too complicated and restrictive.

just let guild chose to be neutral to invite everyone, but keep factions restrictions like enter faction cities and faction quests. Let ppl group with the other faction, and make PvP open in neutral territory.

[T-34]

This is just a repeat of Covenants, where people that focus on gameplay were restricted in their choice of faction due to considerations of optimal gameplay.
Either we have the current system where you either can only play with Alliance or Horde or a system where all can play together in competitive content.

People that play the game for lore/story reasons should never be "punished" for choosing lore over gameplay, just as people that play the game because they like to play competitively with other people shouldn't be punished for lore/story reasons.

Let people group up/be in a guild with whomever they want for competitive purposes (dungeons, raids, pvp) and then Alliance and Horde can still bash each other's brains out in cities and in the open world.

[RobertMugabe]

<snip>

I hate this.

The entire point behind all that cross-faction discussion is gameplay related. You should be able to do endgame PVE content together with anyone you want regardless of faction.

But otherwise the factions should remain unchanged in the open world, pvp (the mercenary system is good and it can be expanded, but not more than that) and especially in the lore. What we have is simple/easy to understand and it works well outside of endgame pve content.

Your suggestion feels convoluted and honestly quite stupid for so many reason. The only "appeal" I see here is for a few RP'ers (which are already almost non-existent).

[Mysterymask]

I mean the issue with trying to merge it with the lore is the fact that most of the things people group for are in themselves NON CANON

Arena isn't some AVH war thing and there are plenty of in lore examples of cross faction arena teams. One of the most famous is a Blood Elf, a Human, and a Night Elf all owned by an orc slave

Dungeons are only canon on the first run through and we can theorize that the normal dungeon while leveling is the canon one. After that there isn't a lore reason to continuously kill Kagarth Bloodfist in Heroic to make his Fist Weapon drop so who the fuck cares who you bring.

With the exception of a handful of raids they aren't faction specific and the ones that are can easily have BoD's solution where off faction characters change based on their race and class.

Lore's important but in an MMO its VERY difficult to be completely adherent to the lore and this solution is waaay to complex to be implemented smoothly

[Holdodlig]

We don't need new lore to ally with other side. There's been plenty of groups with mixed races since vanilla.

[Mysterymask]

Even if a lore justification is needed, there's no need to look further than Thrall and Jaina working together. If they didn't need more to wrap BfA up, I don't see why we'd need a bigger reason in this situation.

Lore justification

Guilds: as a band of mercenaries membership is at the discretion of the guild and is not affiliated with the as per mentioned governments unless they want it to be (see RP guilds that do this)

As players are adventurers with their own mind and thinking process they should be able to talk to whomever they want to and group with such people. It's up to them whether they hate the alliance so much that their offer to help you kill the universe ending dragon is rejected or not

Arena and Rated BGs: As these can be swung as little sporting events watched by the masses (see the NFL in the real world, Huttball in SWTOR, Blitzball in FFX) membership not only being faction neutral doesn't only make sense but for the goblins running it would be encouraged. Shit make those run by the Steamweedle Cartel and you solve that issue completely. Unrated is still actual military skirmishes so therefore outside of mercenary mode is still faction locked

With only a handful of exceptions raids and dungeons aren't faction locked and have no reason to be.

Opposite faction still can't do faction quests and enter city's. Call it an uneasy truce and the war can go on but everything else still works and lore is still happy.

[Luck4]

What a ridiculously overly complex system.
What factions opening should look like: Horde and alliance players can join groups and guilds together. It has no influence on the game lore whatsoever.

I couldn't write it better, well done. The cross-faction proposed by the OP is so lame that Blizzard should not even bother implementing it. Any kind of cross-faction without guild is DOA.

[shadowmatrix]

After decades of fighting and truces the Horde and Alliance leaderships have decide to Azeroth towards breaking the cycle of hatred. While they want to bring peace to the situation they know it will be a long fragile project, you as a seasoned adventurer will be part of the first group to work with both sides to bring those plans to fruition. As for the common people, that will take many years of healing to solve.

[Julmara]

blizz will make a fortune with race change on this one

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

I could definitely see some of the races as neutral akin to Pandaren, but like, Night Elves? WHAT?

[AngerFork]

Honestly, this is far more convoluted than it needs to be. This feels like a solution that not only wouldn't solve the problem, but gets you further away from your goal of uniqueness than you would be either going with no races or all races as cross faction.

Open up some races to both factions, but keep some races core off.
Open up raiding, grouping to faction team ups.

These distinctions are arbitrary, especially with the options allowed to cross-faction group vs. the ones that aren't. Why lore-wise does it make any sense for my Night Elf (who just lost their home city to the Horde) to group alongside the Horde, yet my Human (under the leadership of Anduin who has wanted peace forever) can't do so? Why of all the races that you'd first hold back would the Mechagnomes be that choice (given how they worked with the Horde) as opposed to someone like the Kul'Tirans?

However guilding would require a changing faction with your character - yes if you can join a guild in the opposite faction with your race, even if that race doesn't work with that faction - it's an individual choice.

This would completely destroy the gameplay reason for cross-faction play. This keeps the barrier in place & puts another blocker in place of properly choosing your guild. How would this do anything to help with the mass exodus of high level players from the Alliance to the Horde?

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

I like the "idea" of having a few core Alliance and Horde races and then some various races that could go either way. Goblins would be a good example. It would be akin to mercenaries. Probably not possible anymore, but it would be neat.

[MyWholeLifeIsThunder]

While I do agree that some races could go neutral while preserving the faction dichotomy, it does feel like a parallel concern to the cross-faction raiding issue.

Cross-Faction grouping would easily be served by Guilds themselves becoming Neutral, and lorewise be treated, or aligned, to a number of already lore established neutral factions, from the Kirin Tor, to the Cenarion Circle, Class Halls, Pandaria, etc.

Sure some races could fit both factions, within each's paradigm (specially AR's) but a neutral system just seems like an easier and lore compliant way of doing so without *even* considering the faction system.

[Sialina]

Imo Cross faction play should just be that Horde and Alliance can see each other in the group finder and potentially the guild finder.

Lore reason could be as simple as new Neutral faction leader says: "We need every hero for this quest, all we ask is while you work for us you put aside your differences"

[shise]

What they should do i sit in the design room and delete all race and faction traits. Have a blank sheet for each race and start balancing their traits from 0.

Then see how that looks Alliance/Horde wise and tweak things around a bit as needed. Then offer a free faction swap or drop their prices to half or less for a limited time, as a means of "restarting" the factions.


It can not be any worse than now. If something, if it is well balanced, you will have people picking purely what they like over the marginal performance boosts. And the least played races can always get a bit of a trait boost to ensure that someone at least plays them: cna even be stuff like unique mogs or mounts... just play with the pixels as the numbers move.

[Sialina]

What they should do i sit in the design room and delete all race and faction traits. Have a blank sheet for each race and start balancing their traits from 0.

Then see how that looks Alliance/Horde wise and tweak things around a bit as needed. Then offer a free faction swap or drop their prices to half or less for a limited time, as a means of "restarting" the factions.


It can not be any worse than now. If something, if it is well balanced, you will have people picking purely what they like. And the least played races can always get a bit of a trait boost to ensure that someone at least plays them.

Alliance has better traits at the moment, people are still flowing to horde, there are no people playing alliance at the upper end, you can't recruit, noone wants to be the only turd in the septic tank.

[Coldkil]

We literally simply need cross-faction guilds and instanced PvE. The rest doesn't need ANY touch to be basically working.

The issue to solve is the difficulty in finding/building groups. Removing the faction barrier to build guilds/groups is what we need.

[Beloren]

We literally simply need cross-faction guilds and instanced PvE. The rest doesn't need ANY touch to be basically working.

The issue to solve is the difficulty in finding/building groups. Removing the faction barrier to build guilds/groups is what we need.

Surprising that this is what I am essentially saying,, albeit in a a round about way.

However, the removal of the barriers, makes the entire reason for the heavy alliance/horde lore push irrelevant, as such the story /lore needs to also adjust to reflect this. So changes must come there too.. this is why i go into detail. If you want ot protect some modicum of the story/lore you have to make adjustments to this too.

Sad to see some gamers are completely blind to the importance of story/lore and that it means a lot to everything going on and in particular a fairly large portion of the playerbase, this includes a large chunk of your casuals. They need the fantasy a hardcore gamer doesn't care about.


TLDR VERSION

Listen guys, it's not complicated at all. Just because I go into detail on what could become of the state of the different races, doesn't mean the interaction is complicated.

1. If you are a player, you can play for whatever faction you want. Group/guild/raid with whoever you want. However you make your character and start in the traditional faction, before the choice to choose comes.
2. In the lore/story - only humans/gnomes/dwarves are alliance exclusive and on horde Orcs/Trolls/Tauren - this doesn't affect players (players can still choose any faction), all the other races have left the faction unity, and are doing their own things. New friendships and enmities exist on a per race bases

[Relapses]

Surprising that this is what I am essentially saying,, albeit in a a round about way.

However, the removal of the barriers, makes the entire reason for the heavy alliance/horde lore push irrelevant, as such the story /lore needs to also adjust to reflect this. So changes must come there too.. this is why i go into detail. If you want ot protect some modicum of the story/lore you have to make adjustments to this too.

Sad to see some gamers are completely blind to the importance of story/lore and that it means a lot to everything going on and in particular a fairly large portion of the playerbase, this includes a large chunk of your casuals. They need the fantasy a hardcore gamer doesn't care about.


TLDR VERSION

Listen guys, it's not complicated at all. Just because I go into detail on what could become of the state of the different races, doesn't mean the interaction is complicated.

1. If you are a player, you can play for whatever faction you want. Group/guild/raid with whoever you want. However you make your character and start in the traditional faction, before the choice to choose comes.
2. In the lore/story - only humans/gnomes/dwarves are alliance exclusive and on horde Orcs/Trolls/Tauren - this doesn't affect players (players can still choose any faction), all the other races have left the faction unity, and are doing their own things. New friendships and enmities exist on a per race bases

Approximately 0% of players give a shit about faction story enough to jump through additional hoops to be able to do the cross faction content. You're basically arguing to annoy everybody with a fundamentally pointless system. Everything that players need to understand about cross-faction play can be explained with a text box that says, "Hey, opposing faction people can now apply to your guild/group."