Factional "Never say never" is borderline insulting at this point.

[bowlink]

I am behind Blizz on this one - basically once you hard merge factions, that's it - it's the end of the road. You can't "unmerge" it - it's a final decision.

Say what you may, but Horde and Alliance are cornerstone of Warcraft and I don't think the gains are worth the losses down the road.

So is waiting till the only people playing alliance are:

RPers that don't give shit about raiding, dungeons and what not.
Horde alts to collect all new allied races and heritage armour.
And lastly jaded assholes (yours truely) who are to stubborn to switch.

Look at the faction inbalance as 2 companies.
Horde is booming and their is room for corpirare growth: normal --> heroic --> mythic.

While alliance is downsizing because the can't make targets because they can't find compitant applicants, because they can't garantee room for growth, which leads to down sizing and the cycle repeats.

Who would go work for

[Diaphin]

And then they go back to fighting each other.

Which is literally unpopular with a waste majority of the playerbase and only enjoyed by a fringe minority who enjoy the game the most when the Horde commits genocides and resembles various real life governments which history won't treat nicely.

[huth]

PvE raid and m+ faction balance is pretty easy to achieve, just repeat the reasons why people moved to horde in the first place - buffs.

* allow more loot drops for the underdog, 2x, 4x times, as high as it takes to make it worth for people to switch factions.

* allow the same reason why the horde migration happened, buff racials or the whole faction so massivly that it trivializes content in PvE, make it impactfull enough to offset YEARS of watching this letting it to happen without any balancing changes for the most stupid reasons. ("we dont want to offset HORDE guilds allready farming the content, so no balance so the imbalanced faction dont have to change their FARMING STRATEGY") <== stupid reasons like this was worded for reasons why there was never a real balancing change

We dont need merged factions, just make it worth for people to switch(-back).

Whats the point in PvE balance, when the factions in high end PvE are 40:1 for the horde.

They dont even need any new lines of code, they got allready extra loot drop auras for holidays, they got global aura buffs, everything is in game and allready in use. Turn it on for the ally side for a few months and watch what happens to 40:1.

Nothing, because those benefits are useless when you can't kill anything.

They don't just need an incentive to go Alliance. They also need something to lower the opportunity cost of leaving Horde. That's what the faction barrier removal is about.

[Izzyfurious]

piss off alliance dog

And this is exactly why i avoid playing my horde chars in general. You guys may have the bigger pop in PvE activity and seriousness. But when it comes to how you treat us. You are just as awful as trying to pug for endgame content as that is for us.

- - - Updated - - -

I am behind Blizz on this one - basically once you hard merge factions, that's it - it's the end of the road. You can't "unmerge" it - it's a final decision.

Say what you may, but Horde and Alliance are cornerstone of Warcraft and I don't think the gains are worth the losses down the road.

Same. Turning WoW from it's absolutely Core of the Franchise and defeating it pretty much entirely, will be the absolute destruction of the Core of the Franchise in general.

If people want so bad to Play with their Cross Faction m8s, then go and play games where you can do that and you don't have Faction Differences outside PvP.

[evertonbelmontt]

You don't need to merge anything. Just enable crossplay. The tech and lore is there already, was always there. It is basically liie that for the last years anyway, they just don't show it in game.

[LionSinMaikeru]

Just remove this faction barrier and finish it already. What is the point of the barrier anyway??? PVP? Hahaha.

They said it would be confusing but IMO that argument went out of the window when they allowed Pandarens to be neutral.

[Unholyground]

I know for a fact it is coming, simply put Ion said there are even co workers that have been forced to play a faction they hate for guilds and it shouldn't be that way. And when the dev team wants something they get it.

[AngerFork]

I am behind Blizz on this one - basically once you hard merge factions, that's it - it's the end of the road. You can't "unmerge" it - it's a final decision.

Say what you may, but Horde and Alliance are cornerstone of Warcraft and I don't think the gains are worth the losses down the road.

I don't disagree with that. Once you merge the factions, there is no going back. But something absolutely needs to be done. If it isn't, the problem will only continue to get worse as we've seen happen in a ton of other spots in this game.

As a counterpoint, what this then comes down to is that a cornerstone of Blizzard's flagship product is, in the words of Taran Zhu, "little more than a race war." Which means essentially that Blizz is seemingly hurting gameplay for many Alliance Mythic raiders to ensure their flagship product maintains having an admitted race war intact. That feels like a weird reason to hold back the change, though it absolutely would be a massive change that to your point is undoable once done and would for sure remove one of the major pieces of WoW's history.

[Vampyrr]

They absolutely shouldn't. When they remove the barrier they become the same as the other failed MMOs like ESO who had to break down the factions because their playerbase wasn't big enough.

Warcraft is built on the Alliance vs Horde conflict, it's its identity. If they bring down the walls EVERYONE will just roll Human.

No thanks.

WoW was NEVER built on Alliance v Horde conflict. Even during the "faction war" expansions we had to team up repeatedly to get shit done. Its outdated and horrible for the game.

[huth]

They said it would be confusing but IMO that argument went out of the window when they allowed Pandarens to be neutral.

Let's not forget Void Elves. That argument long lost any credibility.