Would you have chosen a starting area where you could join the Empire?

[Cleretic]

What's so bad about wanting to play (or roleplay as) the "bad guys?" It's fun and a refreshing change of pace from the sterile perfectly goodie two-shoes hero arcs. Or hell, it would be interesting playing AS the WoL hero despite being a believer in Garlemald. It would serve to humanize an otherwise very one dimensional faction. I find it hard to believe you'd have never played this game just because it was an option available to people.

So, there's two ways that this could go depending on how they'd take it. And for the most part I haven't really seen either of them be all too especially pleasant. (Warning: I'm gonna get pretty long here.)

Possibility A: Garlemald is made playable while also being explicitly villainous; basically, we get 'a bad guy faction'. I can't speak to Star Wars Galaxies, but I think the problems here are more akin to what you saw from some eras of World of Warcraft, and what I saw back in The Day on City of Heroes/Villains; people generally don't enjoy playing the bad guy, but that hits weird problems when the writers either listen to that and soften them, or make them the bad guy anyway. People have very different tolerances for how evil they want 'a playable bad guy' to be (I remember that two of City of Villains' least popular story arcs were because they were too heroic and too evil, respectively), and it's really hard to walk that tightrope. Again, for the most part people don't want to play that sort of character in full, and the people who do... well, look to the post below yours for why I generally worry about those people and don't much enjoy sharing a game with them.

Possibility B: Garlemald is made playable in a way that makes them morally equal to Eorzea; essentially, an opposed but different good guy faction. That's what you saw from... some other eras of World of Warcraft, but most of my experience with this actually comes from The Secret World. There you've got three playable factions, all of which are different kinds of morally grey and based on different kinds of secret society, which in theory is very cool; the Knights Templar and the Illuminati are ultimately just as bad as each other, but in very different ways. But my experience is that this, contrary to what you'd expect, breeds more animosity between factions. At least if you've got a faction of Actual Bad Guys, everyone knows who the problem people in the room are, and sometimes those people step up to the plate. But in my experience, if you go 'everyone is shades of grey' in an MMO setting, the main argument people gravitate to over time is to declare themselves The Good One, either by declaring their faction to be the moral best, the other faction(s) of being the moral worst, or by writing their character as participating in none of it. Specifically, on TSW the community largely gravitated to either A: Templars declaring themselves to be the moral superior (easily done because a big part of the Templars' form of control was 'look like the heroes and people will assume you are'), or B: opting out entirely and saying their character was non-factional. The people who wanted to actually play the political game were a severe minority.

On top of that, with either of these you face an issue of splintered playerbase. Remember how FFXIV has stopped doing ongoing job quests in part because they're a lot of work for only a small segment of the playerbase? That's also something that happens with faction-split MMOs; if you know that the majority of your playerbase is playing Faction A, why would you make content solely for Faction B? This was actually said directly by City of Heroes' devs; only about 20-30% of the playerbase regularly played villains, so there's just a lot less reason to play it. While never outright stated, the same problems hit The Secret World and led to them canning faction-specific content. I'd say this is a bigger issue for option B than A, because while you can let 'heroes and villains' sit without further commentary and people will get it, a faction conflict intended to be morally ambiguous stops working as intended once you stop giving people content.

So, yeah. I've seen this break bad in two different ways, and I wouldn't have bought FFXIV if they were doing those things. When it comes to an MMO (particularly one I intended to RP in), I prefer a game that puts everyone on the same side and lets us sort it out, and I'm sure you as someone on Balmung know that we very happily do that ourselves!

EDIT: And as for an example that hits closer to home, it also often screws over PvP. This one actually already happened in FFXIV, so we know it would've happened with a factional FFXIV; back before a change in Shadowbringers' patches, Frontlines was divided based on your character's actual grand company, but that led to a snowball effect where people who wanted to PvP would join the grand company that tended to win (usually Maelstrom), and avoid the company that tended to lose (always the Flames). That's actually present to an even worse degree if you make the factions qualitatively different; suddenly, the good guys always win because people usually want to play as them anyway. PvP was bunk in both CoH and TSW for that reason, the playerbases were skewed from minute one.