Cross Faction Cooperation

WoW Insider has been bringing up the possibility of Cross-Faction Raiding a lot lately. This is actually something I've been thinking about for a long time. When I first started playing, my college roommate was playing a Horde character, and despite the fact that I wanted to play a Paladin (in Vanilla WoW, for you newbies, Paladins were restricted to only Humans and Dwarves, and thus only Alliance, while Shamans were only Orcs, Trolls, or Tauren, and thus Horde-only) I wanted to play with him, so rather than create the human paladin I wanted (yes, I know choosing human is boring, but that mage in the original cinematic just looked so badass fighting off all the infernals!) I instead made my tauren shaman (and then made the paladin about a week later, who is now my main.)

With Real ID and cross-realm grouping, a lot of the barriers that held players apart from one another are coming down. However, there's still one big one: factions.

World of Warcraft's conflict between Alliance and Horde is clearly a very important aspect of the story and game mechanics. We are told, and indeed we see, that both factions have a pretty high level of hatred for one another (well, we see the Horde hating the Alliance more, but I've already talked about that.) Yet at the same time, it's also constantly reinforced that only when both factions can put aside their differences that they can actually get anything done, from Quel'danas to Ahn-Qiraj, even going pre-WoW and looking at the Battle of Mount Hyjal. And when it's not a coalition of Alliance and Horde, the faction usually laying the groundwork for the big operations (raids) is a neutral one - the Kirin Tor in Ulduar, the Ashen Verdict in Icecrown Citadel (which is, itself, a coalition between two factions that hated each other,) and The Wyrmrest Accord and Earthen Ring in Dragon Soul.

Despite the major conflict, we spend about as much time helping neutral factions as we do limited to our own side.

When I was writing about the lore problems with the Alliance I mentioned that a big part of what makes a faction interesting to play is choice: "do you like Garrosh as a Warchief, or do you hate him?"or "are you in favor of Sylvanas' new aggressive tactics, or do you find them deplorable?" These give us new ways to define our characters. Something that I think has been implicit in all of WoW's history, but has been difficult to demonstrate on your character, is what you think of the faction conflict.

For instance, Jarsus, the prot paladin, wears an Argent Dawn tabard (I started playing after Naxx-40 came out, so I had to wait for the pre-Wrath event to get it) whenever he doesn't have a faction to grind. I like to think that Jarsus is a member of the Argent Dawn. He has no problem with the Horde - or at least he is in favor of a reconciliation. Jarsus understands that things like the Scourge, Old Gods, and the Burning Legion are a far bigger threat to everyone than the Horde, and that in fact, the Horde and Alliance are more similar than different. So it wouldn't bother him - in fact, he would probably prefer - to go fight the good fight alongside Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, Blood Elves, Goblins, and yes, even the Forsaken, as well as his familiar Alliance comrades.

Player characters are often referred to in-game as "adventurers." They don't have an obligation to perform any specific duties like a typical soldier. Effectively, they're somewhere between a Knight-Errant and a Mercenary. It strikes me that such a free-form adventurer ought to be able to choose whether they are vehemently opposed to the opposite faction or if they have a more progressive outlook.

So if we allowed cross-faction cooperation, how would it work? Well, I think it's clear that faction-specific settlements would remain barred to those of the other side (as much as Jarsus might want to make peace with the Forsaken, the Undercity's guards probably aren't all that interested in making peace with him.) One would also have to figure out some workaround for dungeons and raids that have faction-specific stuff (the only ones I can think of are The Nexus, where you could just use the kind of phasing that changes which type of motorcycle you see outside of the engineering shop in Dalaran, the Frozen Halls, which could use the same thing to switch Sylvanas and Jaina, the Chess Event in Karazhan, which you could just solve by having people play the side most people are from, and probably most problematically ICC, where you'd just have to choose a gunship and deal with it.)

Blizzard says they want to ramp up the war between the Alliance and Horde, and I suppose that's all right, but both from a standpoint of making the game more fun for its players (I'd love to be able to take my Enhancement Shaman on raids with the guild) and a lore standpoint of giving us a choice to make for our characters, I would love to see a means by which to play with the other side.