Removing faction restrictions on race?

[The Butt Witch]

What if Blizzard made the factions be determined by ideologies instead of race? Any race could choose any faction upon character creation.

Alliance being defined by honor, sacrifice, rule of law.
Horde being defined by pragmatism, freedom, anarchy.

This will give players full freedom when choosing a race, and not force them into choosing a certain faction just for wanting to play a certain race. This will also make sense lore-wise after the recent events in the lore. And it will also do wonders to faction number balance across various realms.

[Kalontas]

I like how the poll is constructed to say option A is the only valid choice and implies option B is stupid.

I'm not against it. I'd ideally prefer to just make away with the old two faction system. There was this idea making rounds in the tail end of BfA, but before Shadowlands was announced, that there would be a faction split. So we'd be back to the four factions from WC3, with night elves and possibly draenei and worgen splitting off as the Sentinels, and undead, blood elves and goblins becoming their own faction, a "Scourge-lite". I thought it was actually a cool idea, but it seems the writers are too stuck on orcs vs humans.

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And it will also do wonders to faction number balance across various realms.

If by wonders you mean it would completely neuter the faction underrepresented faction on unbalanced realms, then yes. It would just make it so that, say, all the Horde people on Argent Dawn EU would switch to Alliance if they can keep playing their blood elves.

[Pothole]

Alliance being defined by honor, sacrifice, rule of law.
Horde being defined by pragmatism, freedom, anarchy.

I love how you can stereotype people and characters.

[Unlimited Power]

It would just make it so that, say, all the Horde people on Argent Dawn EU would switch to Alliance if they can keep playing their blood elves.

If they haven't already switched to Void Elves, they'll likely do it when patch 8.0 hits and Void Elves will be able to look like High Elves with voidish hair styles.

[Azerox]

I rather have something called friendlymode.

So you can queue up for raids etc with the other faction.

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

Could you not shove your opinion into the poll? People can want the factions to remain intact without thinking "change is scary".

[A Chozo]

What if Blizzard made the factions be determined by ideologies instead of race?

They already are.

One of these ideologies is a big bucket of racism against anything spawned from the opposite faction and quite the intolerance for turncoats.

Couple this with culture - most Warcraft characters are quite devout to their default faction, which is a important characteristic in this game (it's focused on Factions), and you have loads of barriers.

[Saltysquidoon]

There is no need to have races change faction to allow cross-faction grouping and/or guilds.

Neutral factions have existed and our characters have been a part of them before. Hell in the lore DKs and DHs are all neutral.

[Nathasil]

~2 months into a new expansion player numbers usually drop off sharply. That happens every time, even in good expansions. BFA was a terrible expansion that drove a lot of players away from a game they once loved. These players will take a look at the features SL promises and they will see....not a whole lot. No new races, no new class. No new "prime time" feature...just Thorgast as an upgraded version of Horrific Visions.

BFA drew lots of people in with the shock moments in the prepatch. And the cinematic. Blizzard promised large-scale faction war with that cinematic and did NOT deliver with BFA at all.

Long story short: I don't think SL will sell very well. It would need AWESOME features to wash the bad taste of BFA out of peoples' mouths - and it does not have that. It may have "good" content, but it really lacks an "in your face"-feature. Being demoted to lvl60 and Firemages getting Frostbolt back is NOT that kind of feature.

So i would really be surprised if SL even manages to get anywhere close to BFA with the launch numbers and after the usual drop-off after 2 months there will be so few players left on the Alliance side that Blizzard will be FORCED to make changes.

That's what i anticipate to happen. Let's wait and see.