Reflections From The Pond

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, when I had just started playing WoW and was taking my first stumbling steps out of Northrend Abbey into Elwynn Forest I remember meeting a weird-looking player in Goldshire whose name tag above his head was not green or blue but yellow. He spoke unintelligible things and challenged a lot of us lowbie players there to duels.

My son, the resident WoW expert due to his having played way much longer than me, told me that it was a Horde player and his nametag being yellow meant that I could attack him if I wanted to. He recommended me not to because if I were to attack, the Horde would retaliate and I’d be dead.

Later on, I learned that not attacking Horde only protected me from being killed if I were in the Alliance starter zones, and that encountering any Horde outside those areas was likely to be associated with one or many corpse runs. Playing on a pvp server but sucking at pvp ftl.

Sometimes you saw Hordes amassing at Thorium Point, a 40-man raid assembling to go for Molten Core or Blackwing Lair, and as a little Alliance rogue you quickly rode away.

The Horde was truly alien. You could emote at them but you could not speak with them, and it was not until Outland opened up and Shattrah became the new central town that you actually saw Horde on a regular basis and for longer than the usual few seconds that was my estimated lifespan when meeting them out in the great wilderness.

On a normal server the Horde are even more remote. You know they are out there, but as you not normally are flagged for pvp you don’t really see them. When I transferred from my original pvp server to Aerie Peak it took me a long time to realise that half of the players outside Karazhan using the summoning stone were actually Horde, so conditioned was I to interpret blue or green name tags as friendly and only react when I saw a red tag.

It’s the same in Dalaran. The Horde are there but you don’t really see them and you don’t interact with them at all.

You do Wintergrasp battles against them, you do the other bg’s and fight the Horde, perhaps you gather up to kill the Horde leaders for that black bear and the achievement, but apart from that, they might as well be thin air or insubstantial ghosts or not even there, so little do they affect your actual everyday game play.

My son played a gnome mage on the same pvp server I started on, and one of his friends played a Horde char of some class or other. Sometimes they’d meet up in the wilderness with headsets on so they could communicate and go slaughter boars or help each other with quests in that area and just play a little together. Being on a pvp server, it was generally a pain when they ran into some other player who often would attack whomeever was of the opposing faction, sometimes despite the hurried attempts to explain that this was a friend and not to be killed, please!

Seems friendships across the faction barrier were destined to be hard to maintain.

And then I read something in a post by Sudiin over at (Gnome) Tank for Life which intrigued me. He was talking about alts and how Blizzard seems to go out of their way to encourage people to create and play alts, and he speculated a bit about the future in asking:

With people running out of new avatars to play will they finally break down the Horde-Alliance social barrier?

Now, as readers of this blog probably can guess, I think that would be wonderful.

I know there are a lot of old bad blood between the two factions, but if Horde and Alliance already can co-exist in the cities and even fight battles together (Veteran of the Wrathgate anyone?) I see no reason why we should not work on bringing this peaceful co-existence out in the world.

Even before Shattrah and Dalaran, the druids of both factions managed to co-exist peacefully and share Moonglade, why should the other classes and other races not be capable of this?

I know it would take a lot to turn the other cheek, to decide to if not forget then at least forgive old wrongs and grievances, to make that conscious effort to start anew with a peaceful and patient mind. But would it not be worth the effort?

And while the faction leaders negotiated and signed this peace treaty, and would be expected to make their best effort to keep it, there would still be contested areas where battles and skirmishes would be fought, like in Alterac Valley and Arathi Basin, – maybe this way you would find out if it’s really true that the Horde always pwn Alliance in bg’s.

And there would still be disgruntled faction members out in the wild who would fight this peace and attack what used to be enemies on sight, world pvp would not go away just because a new and fragile peace treaty exists.

Think of the possibilities it would open up!

You could learn the languages of the Horde and go visit their cities as a tourist and you’d (probably) be safe as long as you didn’t wander into the really dark alleys.

You could run dungeons and raids with Horde that were friendly to Alliance, or possibly friends that play Horde.

You could try out all the quests Horde-side, all of Alliance could help out and perhaps finally Mankrik could stop looking for his wife.

Making the Horde and Alliance green to each other would not be necessary; they could still be yellow to each other (on pvp servers) and thus attackable. But if you worked hard you would gain rep with the Horde factions, going from neutral to friendly to finally Exalted and then you would be green to everyone, friends with everyone.

Friends with everyone – wouldn’t that be awesome?

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