So this tweet came out like 2h ago and as someone who has been playing for over 15 years (with breaks) my only reaction is: WHY? WHY NOW?
I played nearly exclusively on Horde from 2005 to 2014. I had a few lowbie alliance alts on random servers, and then one Rogue in a guild on the same server. I joined that guild full-time when I came back for BfA. Then I transferred my main off last summer, to another Alliance guild.
Had this been in the game in 2018 I wouldn’t have had to level all chars again on the other faction. Well of course no one pressured me to do this but I would have absolutely stuck with my old “Horde” chars if I could’ve played with my guild. Not all toons of course, but I would’ve led my old three main chars through all the content.
So yeah, there are no cross-faction guilds, but I maybe would’ve raided on my Troll Warrior in Castle Nathria and Sanctum.
So I guess, personal history with wishing for this feature aside, it’s a good change, but I’m not sure it’s as tremendous as it sounds, if there are no cross-realm guilds. There are some players who are mostly on their main, would they even notice when someone is asking for a group in guild chat where they are not? The people who always seem to be on alts.. those could probably be in the guild. It gets complicated quickly, if you don’t have a dedicated chat channel – or if your guild is not advertising guild dungeon runs on Discord, and honestly why would they? Only if a sizable percentage of people might be on their other-faction chars. I dunno, it seems half-baked.
I’m not mad, just disappointed. (And I am 100% not mad for “grr Horde, grr Alliance” reasons – that ship has sailed. We have worked together cross-faction since WotLK with the Argent Crusade.
Personal PS: If they would manage to get this live for the 9.2 raid, I might actually do this on my Blood Elf Warlock and raid with my Alliance guild. But she’s still cross-server, so maybe it doesn’t work out again anyway, so probably nothing changes at all… And I simply don’t believe that this will be live for the 9.2 raid.
They have sort of been creeping very slowly towards this I guess. They did the thing with battlegrounds quite a while back where they would balance sides by filling out the short faction with people from the opposing faction. The first attempt to fix faction imbalances on servers was the server groups thing, but now they’re finding that even that is starting to falter. It is probably a good thing for those still playing, but it would be better if they worked on some content that would get more people playing.
In general, yes. But I think there’s no other solution for raiding. I don’t have the numbers handy but I think it was like 80% or more of Mythic raiders being on Horde side already. Seem not a problem in the bracket I reside in (finishing AOTC, aka Heroic on time for the achievement) but maybe there’s already a pipeline problem here. My two alliance guilds seem to have been mostly recruiting friends & family already…