cross-faction-raiding
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The Queue: Memorize
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Remember Me released back on June 3. The game turned out to not be quite what I was hoping, but the soundtrack is excellent. Do recommend. It's on Spotify! HerrKlolbok asked: With the coming of flex raids and the emergence of Virtual Realms, what do you think about cross-faction grouping and/or raiding? Do you think chances are good we might even see cross-faction guilds in the next x-pac (if it indeed is a legion-based x-pac)?
RIFT is breaking down faction walls and normalizing PvP in 1.10
"In 1.10, change is happening in a big way," RIFT CM James Nichols proclaimed on the forums. He then went on to announce that RIFT's two competing factions, the Guardians and the Defiant, will start to make steps toward unification in the final pre-expansion update. According to Nichols, while the two factions will remain philosophically opposed, they recognize the greater threat to the world and are coming together. For players, this means that there will be a lot more inter-faction communication and interaction. To start with, both factions will be able to join together for public groups, trading, the dungeon finder, raids, instant adventure, and weddings. The team also has plans to open up chat channels, quest sharing, guilds, friends list, and more between the two sides. There will be exceptions to some of these features on PvP servers, however. RIFT is also preparing to implement PvP normalization, which means that all players competing in PvP will do so with the same stats and no benefits from gear. Trion Worlds promises that there will still be "meaningful PvP progression" but that this should put the emphasis on skill rather than gear. [Thanks to Warbs and Marc for the tip!]
Breakfast Topic: Further discussion of cross-faction raiding
Matthew Rossi recently discussed the possibility of cross-faction raiding. Those ideas always generate heat worthy of further discussion, so that's exactly what we'll do this morning. With Real ID, the impending BattleTag system, and the increasing prevalence of social media usage in the World of Warcraft community, it's highly unlikely that all of your friends are on the same faction. In both the real world and the virtual, it has become easier and easier to meet people on the other side of faction lines. Even if all of your friends are on the same faction right now, who knows if that will remain true? You meet new people every day. It doesn't feel good to meet a new coworker, find out they play WoW, only to learn they're on the opposite faction. You'll never be able to play together. Well, you can, but you sure need to jump through a lot of hoops to do it ... like ditching your main character. The social landscape of the game has evolved, but the binary faction lines remain static. Why not allow cross-faction raiding? I'm not calling for the abolition of a two-faction system entirely. Two independent stories for each faction still makes sense. The conflict between the Alliance and the Horde is still a part of the world we play in. However, if players are on our Real ID or BattleTag friends list, we must know them well enough that those faction lines don't matter. Why continue to use those faction lines in content where they are unnecessary? Some raids do have unique content based on faction, that's true. It would be weird to fight for the Alliance as a Horde player in a raid such as the Argent Tournament, wouldn't it? I'm sure some creative Orb of Deception kludge could overcome that obstacle. What say you, WoW Insider?
