IGN posted an interview yesterday with Ion Hazzikostas that shed a little more light on the new cross-faction grouping announcement coming in patch 9.2.5 in the near future. Some interesting information includes:
- The decision to make this change now came about as part of a larger reexamining of World of Warcraft's fundamentals that started in 9.1.5.
- The team has been revisiting community requested things that they have said "no" to in the past.
- Your faction is something that you are born into. It is not a choice you make. It it assigned based on class and the team wants to stray away from the idea that because you are "born an elf, you must hate trolls and nothing can change that" mentality.
- Communication has evolved a lot since WoW was created. People form communities outside of the game and not necessarily through their factions anymore.
- They realize that they reached a tipping point awhile ago, but were stubborn and traditionalists and the thought of uprooting this foundational pillar was scary.
- For now, the they are not ready to dissolve factions and let a bunch of humans run around Orgrimmar.
- The scope of this change is a massive technical undetaking.
- They eventually want you to be able to access all legacy content dungeons and raids so you can farm transmog with friends, but it will take more time to address instances such as Battle of Dazaralor.
- There probably won't be a story acknowledgement about the gameplay change since the factions are currently in an armistice.
- It is unlikely they will every do an 'all-consuming faction conflict expansion again," but stick to wider ranges of perspectives on the divide through characters, such as the survivors or Teldrassil, Genn Greymane, and the Forsaken.
- They want players to decide for themselves how they think about the opposing faction.
- Ion says the team is open to expanding the feature in the future to include things like cross-faction guilds. They want to start conservatively and grow it from there.
- The foundational pillar of Warcraft has always been adventure and not necessarily the war between the factions. It has often acknowledged that we have more in common than what separates us.
https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/10 ... -Interview
