WoW: Cross-faction groups – more or less toxic?
WoW Shadowlands will be remembered for many things. Good but difficult raid bosses, a loot system that is far too random, forced decisions and a more than crude storyline. But we will also remember the softening of the factions for a long time to come. Since patch 9.2.5 has been on the live servers, Horde and Alliance players can go together in Mythic Plus dungeons, raids or PvP battles. Opinions on this feature have diverged extremely widely over the past few weeks.
While some players thought the decision was great and the right one, others felt they didn’t want to group with players from the enemy faction. There was teasing and teasing at each other – from “No Zug-Zugs!” to “No Alliance Scum!”. Many also feared that the new feature would not be well received by players and would rather result in more toxicity and hostility. That’s exactly what we looked at at buffed last week and were in over two dozen random groups – from Mythic Plus dungeons to the heroic dungeon master.
Some players are stupid…or spiteful
At every opportunity, Blizzard pointed out that the new feature is completely optional. Nobody would be forced to go into a group with players from the other faction and you can also simply switch it off for the group search. Simply remove the hook and you’re done.
However, that already overwhelms a lot of players. In the first few days (and still today) we could read “No Alliance” or “No Zug-Zugs” countless times in the headlines of the group search. Apparently these players weren’t able to uncheck the group creation option, which would solve the problem. Or they wanted to say “Hey, this is a cool group, but YOU can’t play!”. In real life that would probably fall under racism, in virtual Azeroth we prefer to call it “hateful”.
Accepted by the majority
If you look past the few players mentioned above, you can quickly see that the feature is well accepted by the players. Without having done empirical research, we would say that almost all Alliance members and more than 80 percent of Hordler leave the feature active and are not interested in the composition of the group to which faction the other players belong.
Whether the players are Horde or Alliance – for most players it doesn’t matter.
Source: buffed
The selection criteria are still item level, mythic plus rating and class very high, and the faction seems to be even less important than the choice of soul band. As far as understandable, for most players the success of the group is in the foreground. And the other factors are probably much better clues as to whether the player fits their own requirements. Even if some don’t want to hear that: The choice of faction has no meaning whatsoever as to how well the player controls his character.
Nobody cares – at least not about the faction
But let’s get to the actual groups. More than a dozen dungeons with differently equipped characters at different levels and a few random raids up to the heroic jailer. That was my personal evening program last week. In my search for toxic behavior, I found what I was looking for faster than I would have liked.
In random groups people are still offended. But that has nothing to do with factions.
Source: buffed
However, literally zero percent of the toxic behavior was faction related to the players. Here and there a few sayings came up in the chat, from “Under your tauren I can’t see my gnome anymore!” to “Shall we call it blood now or heroic frenzy?” – but that was it. There was no sign of derogatory remarks or even insults or other toxic behavior with regard to the factions.
Horde vs Alliance? Not necessarily in Shadowlands dungeons and raids anymore.
Source: PC Games MMORE
Of course, people still flamed from the bottom of their hearts. Whether the tank was “an idiot who doesn’t know the right route” again, or the other players were all “too stupid not to fall into the hole” or one or the other in the group “would rather go to die instead of screwing up the key for others” – everyday life in many random groups. I would really like to say that something like this is the absolute exception. But that would be a lie. I would say that at least one in ten dungeons and one in three raids are insulted toxically – the higher the keystone or the heavier the boss, the more often this happens.
Phil thinks: It was a good decision
If I were to draw a conclusion now, for which it is of course still much too early, then I would say: Blizzard made a good decision. The groups have not become any more toxic with the merger of the Alliance and Horde than they were before. Sure, the feature isn’t embraced by all players, but it doesn’t offer any real downsides to those who prefer to keep to themselves. In contrast, the number of potential players has grown slightly (Horde) to massively (Alliance). And that can only be a good thing in my opinion. Now it will be exciting to see if and how this will affect faction balance – but we’ll deal with that another time.
Reference-www.buffed.de