InsaneJournal

Current location:	Tanaris
Current mood:	busy

Why do I do these things...
A second post in a span of 24 hours! Gasp shock!

Well, mostly because I don't want to go back and edit the other one. Anyhow.

So I had an idea for a snazzy addition to the faction politics aspect of WoW: Defection!

Okay, before you get your panties in a bunch about humans defecting to the Horde or something like that, that's...not quite what I mean. Rather, what I'd be interested in seeing is third-party faction defections: You can't defect from Alliance to Horde, but you CAN defect to the Cenarion Circle, or the Argent Dawn, or the Scryers. The basic mechanic would be along the lines of loyalty gains--once you hit Exalted with a third-party faction, you gain the ability to defect to that faction from your starting racial-based faction (Alliance or Horde).

For the sake of explanation, I'm introducing J. Samplefeather, the night elf druidess. She's level 68, has exalted with most of the Alliance factions, but has decided to defect to the Cenarion Circle.

A character can only defect ONCE in her lifetime--no take-backs or do-overs, so you'd need to choose very carefully to which faction you wanted to defect. As a further disincentive, defecting wipes your slate clean with your home faction (no one likes traitors), meaning your reputation goes, not back to friendly, but to neutral. It could be brought back up to friendly/honored/etc. with work, but without it, you're back to square zero as far as reputation with the Alliance/Horde goes. BUT, conversely, you suddenly gain reputation with the opposite faction--they go from automatic hated + at war with no option to change that to being Unfriendly (so yes, you could go into their cities and hang out, but not reap any benefit from said cities), with the option to grind up to Neutral to gain access to vendors/flight paths/banks but little else.

And, much as you can with the goblin factions, you can opt to be At War, not only with the opposing faction, but with your starting faction as well, should you so choose, with all the consequences that brings.

In order to limit people picking up factional rewards where they shouldn't be, most quests/vendors/etc. could be tied to honor like a lot of the Outland factional vendors are. Samplefeather, having defected and done a brief rep grind to get herself to Neutral with Thunder Bluff, can now buy reagents, food, and repairs there, as well as avail herself of the wind rider taxi (unfortunately, this doesn't connect to any Alliance flight points--she has to stop at Gadgetzan and switch to the Alliance flightmaster if she wants to fly on to Rut'theran from Thunder Bluff), but she can't pick up any quests, nor buy items designated as 'factionally exclusive' (recipes, etc.) that require at least a friendly rep with the Horde factions to get. Similarly, she can't train skills from tauren druids, nor purchase trade skills from the various representatives in TB. But she can get to her bank, use the mail, and hearth to the TB inn if she so desires.

However, this doesn't dissolve the language barrier. Samplefeather is now hanging out safely in Mulgore, but she can't talk to tauren players, nor get any information on them. This, too, could be bound to rep now--if you have less than friendly rep with a faction, you can't party with/inspect/talk to players who belong to that faction, with the exception of those who belong to your 'starting' faction (Alliance or Horde). (This would also avoid this change in rep from affecting Forsaken or Blood Elf players who hadn't done any rep-grinding with the other Horde cities.)

BUT, what about Samplefeather talking to Samplehoof, a Tauren druid who's also a member of the Cenarion Circle? Obviously, it would be silly if half the players who belong to the Cenarion Circle can't talk to the other half, right? Thus we introduce factional languages--people who have defected to the Cenarion Circle take a short quest right after defection to get language proficiency in Druidic. Poof! They can now talk to everyone else who belongs to the Cenarion Circle, access the Circle's chat channels (which I think would just need to be like the World Defense channel--one for all Cenarion Circle members everywhere, while the local channels they join belong to their starting faction), and party with other members of the Circle. (Members of some of the factions that wouldn't reasonably have their own language may need to have one invented or shoehorned for them--Argent Dawn battle language, maybe, for the Dawn; Scryers could have a derivative of Thalassian; Aldor a variant on Draenei; Violet Eye (lolwhat) could have Kalimag, it keeps going.) Neat!

Of course, this brings back the problem Blizzard discovered when allowing the Forsaken to speak Common--namely, people were using Forsaken intermediates to bash the hell out of the opposite faction. Not so good, yeah? I'm not sure what the immediate answer to this would be, other than the process of defection is going to be difficult enough that people who just want to casually defect so they can translate obscenities for their friends across faction lines...are probably not going to defect. Plus, it would require at least three players cooperating to do so--if Samplehoof's friend Samplebones the Forsaken Warlock wants to inform Sampleshortie the Gnome Warlock that her mother is fat, and Samplebones and Sampleshortie are Horde and Alliance, respectively, Samplebones would need to talk to Samplehoof, who would then talk to Samplefeather, who would then have to talk to Sampleshortie. This makes it far less likely that people will actually play the Telephone Game just to dis each other; a simple /fart in someone's direction when you see them next would suffice. (And presumably, if members of the same faction were getting verbally abusive with each other, they'd simply settle it the same way they do now, with a report to a GM.)

Speaking of hostility, this is going to make PvP, especially WORLD PvP, a lot more interesting. What side to Samplefeather and Samplehoof join when they enter AV? Is there a Cenarion Circle side? If Samplefeather and Samplehoof jointly capture a Spirit Tower, who does it go to--the Circle, the Horde, or the Alliance? If a Horde player flags around this mixed-race party belonging to the Circle, who gets to attack him? And so on. I think the easiest way to address this is to go by what factions one's at war with, and what factions one has a better-than-neutral standing with. For the sake of world PvP, it may be simplest to do one of two things: a) keep people in third-party factions (the Circle, Argent Dawn, etc.) from participating in PvP at ALL, or b) linking one's PvP behavior to whether or not one's at war with a major faction. If Samplefeather is not at war with either the alliance or the horde, she will not be able to capture Spirit Towers, attack flagged players, or go around nuking PvP NPCs. (She may, however, still go into battlegrounds, but she'll be limited to doing so on the Alliance side--with the consequent risk in AV of not being able to carry out some of the PvP quests there; though she can still attack other players, she won't be able to attack some of the NPCs.) If she decides she's had enough of her stuck-up cousins in Darnassus and sets herself at war with the Alliance, she can now attack *Alliance* players and NPCs, though she does so at risk of losing rep with the Alliance for every one she kills. Captures she makes in world PvP (spirit towers) now count for the Horde. Possibly, she could enter BGs from the Horde battlemasters and fight on their side. But if Samplehoof is at war with the Horde, and Samplefeather is at war with the Alliance, and they're partied, they can't engage in any PvP activity as a group, nor enter a BG together.

If you wanted to get really fancy with PvP, though, the various third-party factions could have their own PvP objectives and dependencies. Players who'd defected to the Scryers (rather than just being friendly with them) can now flag themselves for and PvP with players who've defected to the Aldor. Attacking a Scryer NPC sets you PvP for Scryer players to attack--and so on.

And, as a closing note, I think for the sake of sanity this would probably need to be limited to mostly-humanoid, mixed-species factions; no defecting to Timbermaw Hold or the Brood of Nozdormu, even if they do have a relatively large story-line part to play. (Similarly, since the Stormpike Guard and Frostwolves and other Horde/Alliance Forces factions technically count as being part of the Horde or Alliance, albeit a part that doesn't automatically like you, you couldn't defect to those either. It would be silly.) Obviously, you also wouldn't want to defect to...the Bloodsail Pirates, or some of the other small, area-limited factions that don't have much in the way of quests or rep rewards. Or have reason to be at war with most of the other factions; if you thought being friendly with the Bloodsails limiting your ability to visit goblin towns was bad, imagine what would happen if all the other old-world factions hated you... Yeesh.

My short list of defectable factions: Cenarion Circle (and Expedition), Scryers, Aldor, Argent Dawn, Violet Eye, Steamwheedle Cartel, Netherwing Flight (and the Illidari, as a shout-out to Ayrion; ilu, tiny boomkin ♥), maybe Tranquilien. Mostly factions that, lore-wise, have strong reasons for drawing people out of the "big two" and into further involvement with their causes, rather than just furthering the Horde/Alliance War Effort while also getting phat lewts.

ANYWAY. I will probably pimp this out for comments at a later date; until then, you may tl;dr at it freely. Hoorah!

IMPORTANT EDIT OF EDITINESS: Auction houses! Just to keep the neutral AHs from being even more useless than they are now, I imagine even if Samplefeather were neutral with the Horde factions, she couldn't access their auction house. Just the bank.