‘Wild they’re still around’: WoW players beg Blizzard to lift faction block for casual play

Now that World of Warcraft has cross-faction guilds, players are begging Blizzard Entertainment to drop faction restrictions across the board, especially for casual content. This change would allow players to group up with their friends no matter which faction they picked.

Cross-faction guilds were introduced back in Dragonflight’s Embers of Neltharion Patch 10.1, but there are still many activities cross-faction players can’t do together, including queue up for raids and dungeons or compete in PvP matches. Although WoW‘s long-written lore should prohibit Alliance and Horde players from teaming up, players are simply tired of cross-faction blocks and want them gone—even those on roleplaying servers.

Being able to do everything together would be a huge selling point for jumping back into WoW, especially with The War Within releasing in August, players argued when they called for Blizzard to bring down the walls. Removing cross-faction restrictions would not only shorten queue times and provide more group opportunities, but also give imbalanced factions a chance to survive. As one player pointed out, it’s “wild they are still around.”

It wouldn’t be easy, of course; the lack of cross-faction activities is likely the result of legacy code, lack of manpower, and quests being tied to specific faction-based NPCs, which means changing something so ingrained in WoW won’t be easy or as simple as flicking on a switch. But as players pointed out, cross-faction queues already popped up at the start of Remix, so it must be possible somewhere in the game design.

One big reason Blizzard may have been holding off is faction imbalances. These faction imbalances have been prevalent for some time because players will join one over another purely because their friends are there or they like the faction’s ideals. So, one faction will always be more popular than the other. Blizzard has tried to curb this by locking factions in Classic, and while the devs claim this has been a success, it has stopped players from joining particular servers and factions their friends are in; not ideal for those who enjoy group content. So, it may not be the best long-term solution or one that will work on retail WoW.

Blizzard has not mentioned whether it will officially implement cross-faction queues. Given how quick there were to remove them from Remix, it’s unlikely to be on the cards for some time either, which is a real shame for WoW players.