Let’s Talk: Faction Identity & Grouping
Please note that the below is due to be updated following Community feedback and should be considered out of date unless this message is removed.
From the offset we have stated that we will be supporting cross faction features, however we have been apprehensive of concretely stating some of the more important aspects of that. We waited until we had both gathered feedback and opinions of the larger community as well as further discussions about what our own aspirations are for the project. However we feel it's time to definitively state what can and can't be done across faction boundaries and the reasoning for it.
The Basics:
- Calendar invites between players will be cross faction.
- Basic chat features such as Say, Yell, Emote, Whisper will be cross faction.
- Chat channels such as World, General etc will be cross faction.
- Who List will display both factions.
- Adding friends will be allowed cross faction.
- Inspecting another players talents will be allowed cross faction.
- Sending Mail between players will be allowed cross faction.
- In person trading will be allowed cross faction.
- All auction houses will be linked and cross faction, this includes those found within Gadgetzan, Everlook, Booty Bay and Ratchet. There is no additional costs associated with using Neutral auction houses.
Dungeons, Micro Raids and Pugging
The primary purpose of leaning into cross faction features is specifically targetted at improving the World (Adhoc Groups), Dungeon (5 man) and Micro Raid (10 man) pugging process. To put it simply; no matter the size of a servers population for farming content, running attunements and more casual focused activities the increased QoL that comes with having a larger pool of players to source from means you get to play more of the games primary content with ease.
We still firmly believe that the concept of a random group of non-faction specific adventurers delving into a dungeon feels appropriate with numerous similar activities being performed by NPC's throughout the games lore.
With that in mind the content that we deem as intended for pugging and including cross faction support will be defined as only including Dungeons (5 man) and Micro Raids (10 man). You are freely allowed to group with anyone for this content.
Guilds
Guilds have been a topic of lengthy discussion with regard to cross faction features both internally and within the community. We have formally decided that cross faction guilds will be supported. If development time allows this may include an explicit opt in for your guild within the game itself however if we do not accomplish that then we will simply default to this feature being "on".
The primary benefit for this is to aid social guilds that most often stick within the semi-casual boundaries of World, Dungeon and Micro Raid content. Alongside this RP guilds may decide to form their identity across faction lines where their own story dictates.
However for many this might feel like overstepping into ignoring much of the spirit of Vanilla, the larger faction competition involved within the PvE and PvP ecosystem itself and many aspects of Warcraft lore. With that in mind we have made key caveats that you can see in the below sections.
PvP
While we believe that it is perfectly reasonable for a short term collusion between adventurers of both factions makes perfect sense for simpler PvE content when it comes to battlegrounds there is one simple fact that we feel should be prioritised: It's World of WARcraft and the skirmishes out in the world at Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, Alterac Valley etc should be explicitly viewed as a contest between the two factions.
With that in mind we have no intentions to support cross faction battlegrounds unless it was needed due to dire battleground queue times. We do not expect that to be the case so as a baseline we consider this content faction specific. This should naturally lead to more hardcore focused PvP guilds remaining on faction boundaries.
Arena teams however are explicitly a contest between small isolated groups so we will be allowing cross faction arena team creation and queuing.
World bosses will be restricted so that only the faction of the player who initiated combat will be elligible for loot when the world boss is downed and the battle is won. This means that this key aspect of World PvP gameplay will remain single faction focused. If need be we may increase the severity of this to explicitly split raid groups that have cross faction members that engage a world boss.
In previous betas we have experimented with limitations that prevent other World PvP actions such as healing or buffing a cross faction member of your party while they engage in combat with a Warmode or PvP flagged member of your own faction. These will persist into the live environment ensuring that anyone engaging in Warmode have an even fight no matter the faction composition of their opponents group.
Major Raids
We define a Major Raid as being 25 man and this features instances such as Molten Core and Onyxia's Lair. We believe that these large scale and difficult encounters should have some form of faction based competition involved. With that in mind we will be restricting these raids to only allow single faction groups. This will encourage more hardcore raid focused guilds to remain focused on one side of the fence and reduce recruitment across faction lines.
From us as designers the most interesting benefit however is the long term effects. We believe that it is important that Epoch carves its own path through existing lore and that you the player should dictate aspects of that path. By limiting raids to only a single faction group we intend to track which faction is the first to complete a Major Raid and weave that into the lore of the game. Did a Horde guild kill Onyxia first? Canonically that will have always been the case here.
How would the Alliance NPC's react to the Horde stealing their payback on Onyxia herself? If that occurs then future patches in many ways can and will directly reference and canonise those events.
Closing Statement
We hope that the above info has clarified the intent and bounds of cross faction interactions on Project Epoch. While there is no way to satisfy everyone we believe that this both encourages faction identity in the most important aspects of the game while also providing the undeniable QoL benefit of being able to pug content that is intended for adhoc groups with greater ease and lower timescales.
