by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Blizzard has unveiled a new entry about an in-development feature called Mercenary Mode, which will allow players to circumvent long queue times for Ashran and unrated Battlegrounds by fighting for the other team.

Get all the details here and come back for a bit of analysis after the post.

They say, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”—and soon, you’ll be able to do just that.

In an upcoming patch, we’ll be adding a feature that allows you to act as a mercenary for the opposite faction in PvP. Whenever your faction is experiencing a long wait time to get into Ashran or unrated Battlegrounds, agents of the enemy faction will appear in your base in Ashran (Stormshield for the Alliance, Warspear for the Horde). These agents will allow you to enter Ashran or Battlegrounds disguised as an enemy player, and actually fight as the opposite faction.

When you compete as a mercenary, you’ll still earn all the same rewards you would have by winning or losing as your own faction (with the exception of faction-specific achievements). You’ll also have your race automatically changed into one appropriate for the opposite faction while you’re still inside the Battleground or Ashran. Perhaps most importantly, however, you’ll experience much shorter queue times, as our matchmaking system will be able to fill up groups much quicker!

Our goal with Mercenary Mode is to allow players who want to participate in Ashran or unrated Battlegrounds the ability to do so without having to wait through long queues, while still maintaining the spirit of the core Alliance vs Horde fantasy. We’ll be testing this feature soon on the Public Test Realm, and look forward to hearing your feedback!

The immediate problem I can find with this is the grief potential, where players decide to troll the faction they’re merc-ing for by joining up and then essentially forcing a loss. While that potentiality results in more games being played, it’s never fun to get into a game knowing that someone on your team actively worked to help you lose. And while not all players are so partisan about the factions that a majority of them will do this just to spite the other team, I think there’s a non-trivial number of players who will.

The second thing that immediately comes to mind aside from griefing players directly is just straight-up harassment in the chat. Long-time veteran players may remember that there once was no language barrier between the factions. PVP basically created the language barrier because the trash talk between the two factions got really, really messy. The Forsaken language is called “Gutterspeak” specifically as a callback to this.

The third thing that comes to mind is how this essentially puts the final nail in the coffin of the Horde vs. Alliance faction conflict as a narrative throughline for the Warcraft franchise. Arena matches being faction-agnostic was the first step, but four expansions after that, we’re finally able to say that the Horde and the Alliance have got literally zero reason to be fighting against each other, and PVP-centric areas like Ashran and all of the battlegrounds are just artifacts of a past conflict.

Does this mean Blizzard shouldn’t make PVP zones in the future? No, they should totally continue making them if they’ve got good gameplay concepts they want to put forth. My only wish is that they dispense with the notion that the Alliance and Horde have any authentic aggression for each other at this point and just play up the new zones as war games or training exercises.

Stay tuned for more details, since we know this will be getting tested on the 6.2.1 PTR that’s on its way up. When we know more, so will you.