Add a neutral player faction to World of Warcraft?

For starters, adding a neutral faction would be highly impractical, difficult for Blizzard to do and largely pointless in my opinion.

A bit of the background World of Warcraft is a massive multi player on line game where players choose one of two factions. These are either the horde or the alliance. Different races ally to either faction but once you have created your character most of the tasks you perform are for your faction. Whether you are doing quests, fighting in a battleground or engaging in world player combat you do it in the name of your faction. This competitive style of player against other human players is one of the more appealing parts of the game.

Now the game is called World of Warcraft and historically in the Warcraft games it was humans versus orcs. This has merely been expanded to horde and alliance in world of warcraft. The entire game series has been built around this.

Some players could not give a monkeys about their faction (if this is you play on a PVE server so they cannot kill you in world PVP) however look at it from this viewpoint. What would stop a player of either horde or alliance allegiance wanting to kill a neutral player? Both sides would most likely hate a small neutral faction. Players already have the option of declaring “war” on neutral factions such as the various goblin towns why should a neutral player be any different?

I hate world PVP or being ganked (killed by a superior level character). Does that describe you? Blizzard already thought of this one, that why they have both Player Versus Player (PVP) servers and Player Versus Environment (PVE) Servers. In a player versus environment servers with a few world pvp zones excepted players are more or less able to ignore the enemy faction if they so desire.

Problems with a neutral faction. In theory a neutral player would not be hated by either side. As it is an alliance player is automatically hated by the horde and vice versa. This makes it more difficult to enter enemy areas and cities, as they will attract attacks enemy guards and players. A neutral faction would enable them in theory to enter both horde and alliance areas, would this give them access to quests and auction houses from both sides? If they were able to access both auction houses I suspect it would quickly destroy some servers economies. Now if you curtailed this and gave them access to one faction’s quests and auction houses only, you remove the point of being a neutral faction. It would require an impossible amount of work to give a neutral faction their own chains of quests and areas to take them to level 80.

Both sides are also quite balanced. For example despite the lay out and populations of the alliance and horde cities varying both contain the same vendors, the same trainers, the same battle masters. Yes you get the idea so what would a neutral faction gain?

Excluded from battlegrounds. A neutral faction would have to be excluded from battlegrounds as these essentially pitch the alliance against the horde in battle. If you allowed the neutral faction to fight, you would simply be creating a third faction. This would seriously affect game play and would generally find the third faction allied to either the horde or alliance. If you looked into world of warcraft lore you will find some sides (Taurens for example) were reluctant to take sides, however to save being destroyed by both sides they choose an alliance.

Well that’s my opinion enjoy your gaming, what ever your game is.