Quote Originally Posted by znushu View Post
Yeah and that's one of the major issues with how Blizzard conducts itself with World of Warcraft. Over the years they've done effectively nothing but praising the Horde at events while just using the Alliance as more of a target for the Horde. Sure it's toned down abit in recent days but it's still very evident they prefer the Horde more even in 2021. This behavior has grown a issue at there cons where being a fan of the blue team over the red effectively puts a target of aggression on your back from the attendees. I remember one of my friends saying they had to pretend to like the horde at blizzcon so they wouldn't get harassed because they liked the alliance over the horde.
In my experience it was often the opposite. Alliance players would spent a lot of time positioning themselves as the 'good guys' and claiming that the various Horde races had absolutely zero ground to stand upon and should have just rolled over and died instead of daring to oppose the Alliance in any and all capacities.

I don't think the faction model was a mistake so much as it should have maybe had a third faction to allow the various playable races to be distributed in a way that made more sense for their mentality, methods and goals.

As for FFXIV, I think it's actually hurt significantly by the lack of any meaningful faction based choices. I find the selection of playable races to be very bland, since any racial lore present in the background never shows up in any prominent way. There's also no unique starting zones for each playable race, so many just don't feel as though they're an actually part of the game world but just a different 'glamour' that can potentially be used when the player character makes their way through cutscenes occasionally nodding in agreement with whatever the Scions want from them next.