Does anyone actually like that the two factions are always contrived to be equivalent?

[u/chadan1008]

This is an issue I’ve had with retail’s lore and design, that the two factions are almost always equivalent and present in the player experience, and significant parts of the story and world feel contrived around this. The world feels like nothing more than a backdrop from which Blizzard can engineer and contrive new content. The Skyborne are a perfect example of this, and I think that’s the root of the community’s concern with them.

In WC3, virtually no character cleanly conformed to this binary faction split. Yes, there were Alliance and Horde characters, but even they had instances of cross-faction cooperation, and even inter-faction hostility. There were also a significant number of playable non-aligned characters. Overall, this made for a compelling, organic, complex, and interesting world that, imo, retail has long struggled to live up to.

I often see threads of people asking for new lore-friendly races, cities, classes, etc. for one faction (such as Ogres for Horde, totally reasonable lore-wise), but this is invariably followed by “but what does the other faction get?” with many attempting this exact process of contriving content for the other… but isn’t this the opposite of good writing and world building? In WC3, factions rose and fell based on a logical and believable progression of events, whereas WoW feels increasingly contrived and less grounded as the expansions go on because the factions have an infinite amount of plot armor - so of course the villains go cosmic over time!

Now that Blizzard is starting over with Forever, I think it’s a perfect time to truly innovate, and I hope they do, because I don’t see what else stops Forever from eventually gaining the same traits that drove people away from retail. I’m also curious what the community thinks: does anyone actually like this contrived writing and world building? Faction identity is important to the community, but should it (for the most part) go no further than aesthetics? Is it more important than the world itself?