This is amazing news, cross faction guilds will make so many people happy! They can easily make it so you can still opt in for world pvp for the die hard faction loyalists and let the rest of us be happy
About bloody time.A shame it took the game croaking on itself and the hubris of the devs prior to, to get this.
Ion promised us a war between the Horde and the Alliance.
faction war itself is really antiquated at this point. it's also abundantly clear that the vast, VAST majority of players don't care about open-world PvP as evidenced by the situation on classic servers. great change.
Finally. Faction war does not make sense any more. For a decade or more now, we get one faction war expansion, one kumbaya expansion. Then rinse and repeat. Its about time they decided where to land on that topic.
If they do a Light Vs. Void expansion, make it where it is just Light Vs. Void. Cross faction play then you decide what side you fight for, light or void. A whole new division line would be kind of cool at this point.
Oh Ion, it is hard to believe anything from your lawyer speach. Pretty sure he was the one talking not that recently ago about the "core of the WarCraft" or something similar xD Regardless, good to see less faction wars stupidity after all the cosmic threats.
I'm against cross faction, blizzard can say anything but WoW has always been about Alliance vs Horde. And I think this decision was taken simply because the game is nearly dead.As always, blizzard pointed their finger to the players saying they did this because they listened to us, as to say "if this doesn't work, it's not our fault".
The people complaining about the lore of it are forgetting that cross-faction grouping has been in the game for years in PVP, where it made the least sense. It makes a lot more sense for it to be in PVE, when the NPCs have been cooperating cross-faction against common enemies for a very long time. Additionally, faction RP is so trivial at this point when balanced against the day to day struggles of the high-end M+ers and mythic raiders in forming groups. There are literally triple the number of high keys listed on Horde in Area 52 LFG (highest pop Horde server) compared to Alliance keys listed on Stormrage (highest pop Ally server), for instance--despite the fact that the population numbers are similar. Most of the competitive players moved to Horde, and this badly damaged the day to day experience of the remaining competitive players on Alliance who for various reasons cannot or will not faction change. Cross faction PVE will be a 3x increase in the pool of competitive players for Alliance, 30% increase for Horde. I feel like anyone that believes faction RP is more important than quality of life and convenience at this point is clearly disconnected from the competitive scene and therefore won't be affected by it anyway.
Some people on other sites are even somehow misconstruing this post as saying they "have" to play cross-faction.Literally all you need to do to avoid this change is keep playing as you are. You have to go out of your way to real ID/Bnet friend someone on the other faction, communicate with them, create a group and go to the instance to get into a cross-faction instance.If you don't have any cross-faction friends on your friends list you shouldn't even be able to *accidentally* end up in an instance with someone on the other faction. I don't understand the problem.
I think this is the best thing they can do. This might potentially revive the game/servers a bit. Although, I will believe that when I see it. Been burned too many times by blizzard so lets wait and see if it really happens.
Personally love the idea + cross faction guilds MAYBE in the future.As long as it doesn't have huge implications on the story going forwards. Smaller power struggles vs huge faction war is always more interesting as you can devote more meaning behind it. Skirmishes between say orcs of Durotar and displaced nelves of ashenvale is always going to be something that happens. The way they're doing this cross faction raiding is great. You choose it if you want, don't like it don't use it. LFG and random BGs are going to be faction specific and it's taken a long long time. Just give us guild housing and I'll be happy. (I say guild rather than player because you can do so much more with it.)
I hope this is just the first step to region based server, combining all the servers in one region to a megaserver, not just clusters.Also allowing cross server guilds so one does not have to transfer or, in my case, quit playing if there is no suitable guild on one's server.I also hope that is will be possible to play a hord race on alliance and vice versa.Also on my wishlist, one char, all classes and specs like in FF14 :D