WoW turns up the heat: Horde and Alliance will soon be playing together!

World of Warcraft has dropped a bomb: Alliance and Horde will soon be able to play dungeons, raids and PvP together.

After many months and weeks of bad news about Blizzard and World of Warcraft, there seems to be good news again. Just yesterday, the WoW developers announced the end of “boosting communities”, shortly afterwards the next cat was let out of the bag:

Alliance and Horde will soon be able to group together to compete in dungeons, raids, and ranked PvP. Cross faction play is coming.

what was said In a fairly long post, Blizzard goes into the plans that they have planned with “cross-faction play”, i.e. the cross-faction interaction of Horde and Alliance.

Basically, when developing this feature, there were two goals that were particularly important to the developers:

  • Focus on Organized, Instanced Gameplay: Where players are forced to group together, barriers should be removed. The feature will therefore be activated for dungeons, raids and rated PvP.
  • Voluntariness is an essential prerequisite: the whole system should be voluntary and optional. If you only want to play with players from your own faction, you can continue to do so. Normal “random groups”, such as when leveling up or randomly visiting a dungeon, will continue to consist only of players from their own faction. It should be an option, but not compulsory.

What does that mean in plain language? Once the feature activates, players will be able to use a range of actions and features with members of the enemy faction. Below fall:

  • Inviting to a party when both players are BattleTag or Real ID friends, or members of a cross-faction WoW community.
  • Organized groups in the dungeon browser (Mytic Dungeons, Raids, Arena, Battlegrounds) are open to both factions. The group leader can decide whether to allow mixed groups.
  • Guilds and content with random player assignment (“random dungeons”, random battlegrounds) are still only for one faction. This is necessary to ensure that the feature is voluntary.
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How is it in the open world? While players can already team up in the open world and use a shared group chat, the alignment of the characters remains the same. An orc and a night elf in war mode can still attack each other even if they are in the same party.

Peace, joy and pancakes! Cross faction play is coming.

What content doesn’t work? Due to some circumstances, not all instances and raids can be played with a mixed group at the start of the feature. This includes:

  • The Battle of Dazar’Alor
  • The Trial of the Crusader
  • The Icecrown Citadel
  • Some more with faction specific content

The reason for this is that these dungeons and raids have a different course depending on the faction. These instances will need to be overhauled first before cross-faction play will work there, but that may not be possible until patch 9.2.5.

When is all this coming? The system is scheduled to be integrated with Patch 9.2.5 and the associated PTR is scheduled to start shortly after the release of Patch 9.2. Although this is a fairly large time window and can mean pretty much anything between 3 and 9 months, it is probably still earlier than expected. Because most have assumed that Blizzard will tackle such a system at the earliest with the next expansion 10.0.

Blizzard doesn’t want to forget skeptics

The developers are fully aware that this decision will not go down well with all players. After all, many players associate something with their faction and believe that there should be no cooperation between Horde and Alliance.

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The developers write:

At BlizzCon 2019, a guest asked us about cross-faction play, and at the time we responded that the Alliance vs. Horde split is a pillar of what makes Warcraft Warcraft. But when you think about it, that’s an oversimplification. In truth, the Alliance and Horde identities are essential to Warcraft. And while that identity has often been marked by disunity and open conflict, we’ve also seen that Alliance and Horde since Warcraft III (especially the last time a Warcraft chapter was called “Eternity’s End”…) find common ground and work together. And there are countless examples of cooperation in World of Warcraft itself.

We have hope that these changes will even help strengthen faction identity. This allows more players to play in the faction whose stats, looks, and characters they find more appealing, and doesn’t feel forced to choose between their personal preferences and the ability to play with friends.

After the events of Battle for Azeroth, an uneasy truce reigns between the Alliance and Horde. The factions are still enemies, and while some of their leaders work together in the Shadowlands, there are countless members of both factions who will never forgive or forget each other’s war crimes. For every Jaina there is a Genn, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. But why shouldn’t players be able to make their own decisions? Especially in collaborative situations where the story revolves around fighting off dark threats together?

What do you think? A wonderful thing that Blizzard is finally introducing cross-faction play? Or is that a wrong decision and just the “next nail in the coffin of WoW”?

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