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  1. #61
    Epic! Pheraz's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by GreenJesus View Post
    Alliance has gnomes & mechagnomes and werewolves. That pretty much ruins your "pretty" faction since they are butt ugly.
    Orcs, trolls, tauren and nightborne males alone overshine anything else with their ugliness.
    This is no match for gnomes in terms of ugliness.

    Just zoom into that derpy orc faces... Seriously. They - the gnomes - also provide some intelligence in opposite to orcs lol
    Last edited by Pheraz; 2019-11-14 at 07:49 AM.
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  2. #62
    Quote Originally Posted by Jujudrood View Post
    Which brings me to two, the narrative as a whole.
    The faction war is what Warcraft is about, what its always been about, and to remove it would further remove any identity the game once had.
    Outright removing factional divides would basically ruin the game and take away a level of conflict that's need to make a rich and diverse story.
    Of course, one can argue the story is a trainwreck and I wouldn't necessarily fault them, but it's more about the possibility.
    This is the polar opposite of what WoW's faction divide provides. It's lazy, stale, outdated, and hardly necessary to maintain the feel of Warcraft (which since WC3 has been so much more than just red vs blue). Given the various story beats we've had over the years, it really makes no sense to maintain unwavering hostilities between the factions. Too many pivotal characters have joined together too many times for this to still be a thing. Additionally, too many poor narrative choices have been forced just to maintain this silly, never ending war.

    The whole idea that Warcraft is defined by this part of the game (the immovable divide) only shows a lack of imagination. It's also a terrible thing for an RPG. One of the biggest draws to real RPGs is choice. If the faction war is such a pivotal part of the game, then the fact that it's boiled down to a single choice during character creation is an abysmal failure. After that, players are just dragged along for the ride at the mercy of the writers with zero agency of our own. The fact is that you can still have conflict and strife without the Alliance/Horde divide.

    Ending the "war" and allowing all characters the opportunity to group together would be objectively good for the health of the game. Allowing players to pick whatever race they want without worrying about what their friends are playing and completely nullifying the faction imbalances that have developed. To build from there, you could then have renegade factions or splinter groups that could be tied to a story that actually progresses. Players who choose to side with Sylvanas instead of Saurfang, or Tyrande instead of Anduin, can have a more immersive experience with PVP and possibly even PVE ramifications beyond just one extra super lame cutscene. These allegiances might change as the story does, and players could have the option to make peace or make war from one expansion to the next.

    Now THAT could be a true Warcraft RPG experience.
    Last edited by Adamas102; 2019-11-14 at 08:29 AM.

  3. #63
    Quote Originally Posted by jellmoo View Post
    I don't care about faction imbalance. I don't care about racials not being balanced. I don't care about Mythic Raiding problems.

    What I do care about is the fact that factions are idiotic and an absolute writing crutch that has pigeonholed the narrative and use an overly simplistic view in order to get around having to tell meaningful and interesting stories.

    Shitty storytelling absolutely is an issue. Nonsensical groupings of races is an issue. Having a story never actually evolve, to the point that they literally just retold the same "Horde Dictator Bad" story is a big fucking issue.
    I don't see how that is tied to removing factions. There is no reason that writing becomes better because cross-faction play will be possible. Characters becoming bad will still be a thing in a unifaction unless they write the Unifaction as being a utopia where everyone agrees. Won't happen and characters will disagree and have disputes regardless of a unifaction or not. All that determines if that dispute escalates or not is Blizzard.
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  4. #64
    Quote Originally Posted by Kumorii View Post
    I don't see how that is tied to removing factions. There is no reason that writing becomes better because cross-faction play will be possible. Characters becoming bad will still be a thing in a unifaction unless they write the Unifaction as being a utopia where everyone agrees. Won't happen and characters will disagree and have disputes regardless of a unifaction or not. All that determines if that dispute escalates or not is Blizzard.
    Here's the thing. Bad writing is bad writing, there is no way around that. True.

    But, continually pigeonholing your narrative around the faction mechanic limits the possible stories you can tell. Instead of stories of inter faction betrayal, or stories where individual races are at each other's throat, and not whole factions, you get stuck with the same silly narrative of red vs blue, with no subtle nuances.

    And the idea is not having a unifaction, it's having no faction at all. Having treaties and alliances that can and will change. Just like in the real world. Let the narrative play out around the player, where we can have a living, breathing world that absolutely isn't black and white.

  5. #65
    Quote Originally Posted by jellmoo View Post
    Here's the thing. Bad writing is bad writing, there is no way around that. True.

    But, continually pigeonholing your narrative around the faction mechanic limits the possible stories you can tell. Instead of stories of inter faction betrayal, or stories where individual races are at each other's throat, and not whole factions, you get stuck with the same silly narrative of red vs blue, with no subtle nuances.

    And the idea is not having a unifaction, it's having no faction at all. Having treaties and alliances that can and will change. Just like in the real world. Let the narrative play out around the player, where we can have a living, breathing world that absolutely isn't black and white.
    To have treaties and alliances you require factions. I mean, we just had horde characters working with alliance characters against another horde character. Factions aren't pigeonholing the narrative to Alliance vs Horde at all times. I would argue that is the exception rather than the rule. I can't really think of a story that doesn't work with the current faction system. If they want to make a story that works only with "no factions" they can just write in a peace treaty, like it currently is between the two and then do a story from there.
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  6. #66
    "faction balance" is such a non-issue.

    For PVE who cares which faction has more players? Min-maxers gonna min-max, that's nothing new. There will always be an ideal piece of gear in a slot, spec to run, or race to be for a certain use case.

    It only matters in PVP- and even then only world pvp- not instanced PVP- and thanks to sharding the fix is simple- balanced shard numbers between factions. Server identity is basically gone now anyway, so why not take it a step further and create the ability to pull players from any "server group?"

  7. #67
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    Storywise, it literally makes no sense for there to be a faction divide anymore and since WoW is very heavily story-driven I think cross faction play is a legitimate discussion. We just got done talking about how we need to work together and to break the cycle and change our ways for the good of Azeroth and all that bullshit and now we're going into Shadowlands STILL divided. For what reason? What could possibly be the reason why we're still at odds with each other? It just makes no sense and it feels more forced in than ever before.

    People say it's what Warcraft is all about and these days especially I just think that is total nonsense. Maybe like 10 years ago yeah but we are at a point where the Horde and Alliance are more understanding of each other more than ever before and you mean to say that it makes sense to keep fighting each other because that's what Warcraft is? So it's all about fighting each other, working together, fighting each other, working together over and over again? Doesn't make sense to me.

  8. #68
    Quote Originally Posted by Kumorii View Post
    I mean, we just had horde characters working with alliance characters against another horde character.
    Except none of that really mattered from the perspective of the players because we weren’t given any meaningful choices. Sure, we got some fancy cinematics, but there was no real truce between alliance and horde, Sylvanas loyalists and Saurfang loyalists continued to mill about together in the same cities, Anduin and Saurfang loyalists were still PVP flagged for each other, etc. Nothing changed for the players.

    I explained this only a few posts up... Conflict is good, but the unchanging faction division is terrible for the story.

  9. #69
    Quote Originally Posted by Kumorii View Post
    To have treaties and alliances you require factions. I mean, we just had horde characters working with alliance characters against another horde character. Factions aren't pigeonholing the narrative to Alliance vs Horde at all times. I would argue that is the exception rather than the rule. I can't really think of a story that doesn't work with the current faction system. If they want to make a story that works only with "no factions" they can just write in a peace treaty, like it currently is between the two and then do a story from there.
    You absolutely do not need factions to have treaties and alliances. A faction is the opposite of that in it's current incarnation. What we have right now are groups of races that will not change allegiance because of these factions. Because they need to maintain the faction status quo, there can be no shifts. We cannot see stories where:

    - Stormwind and Ironforge are in conflict, leading to war
    - Undercity is attacked by some new force and need to petition the Alliance for help
    - Ancient Titan tech is uncovered in Mulgore and the Goblins attack the Tauren to get it
    - Gnomes decide that their homeland is more important than wars that have nothing to do with them and leave the Alliance

    Factions are a crutch that are simply not needed. You can have races/kingdoms align and push the narrative forward, without creating nonsensical groupings that put their respective faction ahead of everything else. Instead we have this continued red vs blue style of gameplay where every single Orc will attack every single human on sight, or every single Gnome will attack every single Tauren on sight. It's ridiculous.

  10. #70
    Horde remain the cool faction millennials want to be.

    We have diversity.

    Meanwhile Alliance are just boring humans in different shapes.
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  11. #71
    Quote Originally Posted by Exhuman View Post
    Horde remain the cool faction millennials want to be.

    We have diversity.

    Meanwhile Alliance are just boring humans in different shapes.
    I am both a cool millennial and a boring human being according to this

    Boring and cool human millennial!

  12. #72
    All those people claiming "It's WARcraft not PEACEcraft" are missing the fact, that PvP, which puts the WAR in Warcraft, was the first thing to be changed because of imbalanced factions. It's called mercenary mode, look it up. And it enables you to fight for your opposing faction in BGs. Also as far as I know same faction Arenas are already allowed as well? So yeah. So much for the importance of factions for "War"...

  13. #73
    Quote Originally Posted by jellmoo View Post
    You absolutely do not need factions to have treaties and alliances. A faction is the opposite of that in it's current incarnation. What we have right now are groups of races that will not change allegiance because of these factions. Because they need to maintain the faction status quo, there can be no shifts. We cannot see stories where:

    - Stormwind and Ironforge are in conflict, leading to war
    - Undercity is attacked by some new force and need to petition the Alliance for help
    - Ancient Titan tech is uncovered in Mulgore and the Goblins attack the Tauren to get it
    - Gnomes decide that their homeland is more important than wars that have nothing to do with them and leave the Alliance

    Factions are a crutch that are simply not needed. You can have races/kingdoms align and push the narrative forward, without creating nonsensical groupings that put their respective faction ahead of everything else. Instead we have this continued red vs blue style of gameplay where every single Orc will attack every single human on sight, or every single Gnome will attack every single Tauren on sight. It's ridiculous.
    Why can't they? We just had horde fighting against horde...twice already. We've teamed up across factions multiple times.

    Undercity can obviously ask alliance for help... Baine literally took help from Jaina and helped her in BFA, this can easily be written to encompass entire races and their rule. Legion was all about teaming up with opposite factions and guess what they managed to do? They kept the grudges between Sylvanas and Genn as a side story. A lot, if not all, of the PvP story was between Undedas and Worgens, not so much Alliance vs Horde.
    This can also be written in the opposite way or in any variation.
    Gnomes can easily not engage in any more wars. They just do like Baine did and oppose to it, but instead of working against it they just do nothing and stay out of it story wise.

    I'm also curious how this will be reflected in game... lets say we remove factions. SW and Ironforge goes to war and Gnomes say, fuck it and doesn't participate. Should all the guilds just...split up? whenever there is a story change? Some may chose to join ironforge so may chose to join SW or you just chose where your guild goes.

    I mean, changes in factions WON'T happen for that reason. Choosing your "faction" or "allegiances" as the story goes on would just cause problems among guilds and friends because people want to experience a different path that they don't know about will come in the future. Who knows who will go to war next and for what reason and which side you want to join. Factions are a player convenience and not a crutch to the story because faction haven't deterred any fighting within the factions or any differences between the races...you are just assured that you don't have to choose from splitting up from your friends or experience an allegiance you want to.

    Lets take the Sylvanas and Saurfang choice... In my guild it was fairly even split of who picked what... should this result in us not being able to play together? I mean we chose different allegiances? I would hate that.
    Last edited by Kumorii; 2019-11-14 at 06:45 PM.
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  14. #74
    The problem is that horde racials were way too superior for like forever and most of the good alliance players just went horde because horde racials made a difference like for real. You could save weeks on progress just because of those good stuffs. Now horde has the better player base and hardly anyone play alliance. You can't turn this around easily. They should literaly make OP racials for alliance to make horde players willing to swap and build up a playerbase there slowly.

  15. #75
    Quote Originally Posted by Kumorii View Post
    I’m also curious how this will be reflected in game... lets say we remove factions. SW and Ironforge goes to war and Gnomes say, fuck it and doesn't participate. Should all the guilds just...split up? whenever there is a story change? Some may chose to join ironforge so may chose to join SW or you just chose where your guild goes.

    I mean, changes in factions WON'T happen for that reason. Choosing your "faction" or "allegiances" as the story goes on would just cause problems among guilds and friends because people want to experience a different path that they don't know about will come in the future. Who knows who will go to war next and for what reason and which side you want to join. Factions are a player convenience and not a crutch to the story because faction haven't deterred any fighting within the factions or any differences between the races...you are just assured that you don't have to choose from splitting up from your friends or experience an allegiance you want to.

    Lets take the Sylvanas and Saurfang choice... In my guild it was fairly even split of who picked what... should this result in us not being able to play together? I mean we chose different allegiances? I would hate that.
    It doesn’t NEED to have grouping ramifications. The whole point of abolishing the Alliance/Horde split is to bring more players together. What it COULD do is affect things like PVP and/or solo PVE content. The point is to give people more of a choice and to increase RPG immersion.

    For example, why wouldn’t Sylvanas loyalists want to PVP against Saurfang loyalists as much as they’d want to against Alliance players? Unless of course the choice doesn’t matter in which case the story is pointless.

  16. #76
    Quote Originally Posted by Adamas102 View Post
    It doesn’t NEED to have grouping ramifications. The whole point of abolishing the Alliance/Horde split is to bring more players together. What it COULD do is affect things like PVP and/or solo PVE content. The point is to give people more of a choice and to increase RPG immersion.

    For example, why wouldn’t Sylvanas loyalists want to PVP against Saurfang loyalists as much as they’d want to against Alliance players? Unless of course the choice doesn’t matter in which case the story is pointless.
    Because I want to play with my guildies who chose saurfang? I mentioned it...
    Also confused that you say they should be against saurfang loyalists because it makes sense, but that includes grouping ramifications...unless the choice is irrelevant to the story and your grouping capabilities are independant of story reasons. That seems to go against immersion.

    It makes sense I would hate Saurfang loyalists in a story perspective... I just don't want that to lead to the guild being split into two because of it.
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  17. #77
    Quote Originally Posted by Bryci View Post
    The problem is that horde racials were way too superior for like forever and most of the good alliance players just went horde because horde racials made a difference like for real. You could save weeks on progress just because of those good stuffs. Now horde has the better player base and hardly anyone play alliance. You can't turn this around easily. They should literaly make OP racials for alliance to make horde players willing to swap and build up a playerbase there slowly.
    I hate to admit it, but the 2 years of legion with arcane torrent certainly didn't help it. I missed it whenever I played a char that didn't have it in legion. Not to mention that stuff like the troll personal berserk remain retardedly OP since forever.
    You are welcome, Metzen. I hope you won't fuck up my underground expansion idea.

  18. #78
    Quote Originally Posted by Kumorii View Post
    Why can't they? We just had horde fighting against horde...twice already. We've teamed up across factions multiple times.
    And the problem is that because of the faction system, it just gets reset into the same status quo at the end of expansion. We've had the same conflict twice now, yes, but there's been zero ramification from it. The factions are still there. They are still exactly the same. Players still have the same limitations. It's silly.

    Undercity can obviously ask alliance for help... Baine literally took help from Jaina and helped her in BFA, this can easily be written to encompass entire races and their rule. Legion was all about teaming up with opposite factions and guess what they managed to do? They kept the grudges between Sylvanas and Genn as a side story. A lot, if not all, of the PvP story was between Undedas and Worgens, not so much Alliance vs Horde.
    This can also be written in the opposite way or in any variation.
    But there is zero impact in game. Because of the faction system, it's still Horde Vs Alliance all the time, even when it doesn't make sense. The mechanic at play prevents the story from moving forward. It always has to reset itself at the end through ridiculously convoluted means in order to keep that faction dynamic. Imagine that scenario where the Forsaken need the Alliance to come save them from, I dunno... Klingons. At the end of the battle, when Forsaken and Worgen stood side by side and are victorious and they shake hands and fireworks go off and we celebrate. Then that Worgen player runs to Undercity to see his new friends and gets cut down by guards immediately. Because factions.
    Gnomes can easily not engage in any more wars. They just do like Baine did and oppose to it, but instead of working against it they just do nothing and stay out of it story wise.

    I'm also curious how this will be reflected in game... lets say we remove factions. SW and Ironforge goes to war and Gnomes say, fuck it and doesn't participate. Should all the guilds just...split up? whenever there is a story change? Some may chose to join ironforge so may chose to join SW or you just chose where your guild goes.
    Of course not, because nothing is ever so ridiculously simplistic as all of one race hates all of another race. The game makes it that way, but that's the point. It doesn't need to be. You can have conflict between races that need not affect guilds at all, since they are separate from any political structure. RP guilds can roll it into their narrative, which would be cool, but those who don't RP at all need not ever worry about it. It doesn't affect them. Guilds are the same. Except now all races can join.

    I mean, changes in factions WON'T happen for that reason. Choosing your "faction" or "allegiances" as the story goes on would just cause problems among guilds and friends because people want to experience a different path that they don't know about will come in the future. Who knows who will go to war next and for what reason and which side you want to join. Factions are a player convenience and not a crutch to the story because faction haven't deterred any fighting within the factions or any differences between the races...you are just assured that you don't have to choose from splitting up from your friends or experience an allegiance you want to.
    Except that need not be the case at all. You can keep the same friends. The same guilds. The same everything. The story happens around the players and the players participate as they want, but it need not exclude anything. Factions dictate exactly what the story is going to be and split everything, to the point that we have imbalances in PVP and PVE. In creates story crutches that force the writers to keep people apart, for no real reason. Why not bring people together and let the story drive the conflict, not the faction mechanic? Let the world grow and evolve and let the story change. The status quo has gone on for 15 years. It's time to try something new.

    Lets take the Sylvanas and Saurfang choice... In my guild it was fairly even split of who picked what... should this result in us not being able to play together? I mean we chose different allegiances? I would hate that.
    Why do you have to? Why is it so binary as that? It doesn't exist in the real world, so why should it be the case in WoW? Guilds can have members with different "beliefs" and political allegiances. It need not create any separation in that regard. There's no reason for it to. That's the faction system. Where everything is one or the other. It's ridiculous and it's that mentality that is handcuffing this game.

  19. #79
    Quote Originally Posted by Kumorii View Post
    Because I want to play with my guildies who chose saurfang? I mentioned it...
    Also confused that you say they should be against saurfang loyalists because it makes sense, but that includes grouping ramifications...unless the choice is irrelevant to the story and your grouping capabilities are independant of story reasons. That seems to go against immersion.

    It makes sense I would hate Saurfang loyalists in a story perspective... I just don't want that to lead to the guild being split into two because of it.
    I think someone else mentioned earlier in the thread the idea that raids and dungeons can be seen as a neutral area where players can group for common goals like treasure and a larger, common enemy.

    I think it’ll be interesting to see how Covenants will work since that could be a good template for how to include separate non-Alliance/Horde factions that entail real story driven choices for players to experience.

  20. #80
    Nah. Factions are garbage and have been since atleast 2012.

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