Bring in factions.

[Fungaahhh]

Look my dudes im tired of being the good guy its lame and cringe is there anyway factions could be introduced?

[Eclipse12187]

Your grand company is your faction

Jokes aside, what would adding factions even add to the game, to the story? This is a PVE mmo first and foremost and revolves around it’s story. PVP exists without the need for a faction as well, it’s just not open world.

[aveyond-dreams]

Look my dudes im tired of being the good guy its lame and cringe is there anyway factions could be introduced?

Likewise. I would jump at the chance to formally ally myself with Garlemald or Ishgard as opposed to the utterly boring original 3 city states.

[Ransu]

Not having factions is literally one of the best parts of this game. Splintering the community pointlessly between factions is beyond dumb. At least WoW finally recognized that and allows both factions to group up and do group content together now.

[Cleretic]

Tangible factional divides are a pretty terrible inclusion unless the game is built like, from the ground up to be basically entirely about them. And even then, there's a low of ways to blow that; WoW's gone on long enough to have run into most ways to screw it up by itself, including the ways that contradict other ways.

If you just include factions without going through any meaningful effort to differentiate them, be it in gameplay or story, then it just won't really matter. It'd be like the grand companies, like Eclipse said; if all it really changes is where you do faction turnins and what icon appears on your character sheet, then it ceases to be meaningful beyond what color your rewards are, or minor metagaming situations like 'the Flames have the closest HQ to an aetheryte'. We've already got that situation, and you most likely already ignore it, what would adding another, more moustache-twirly faction add if that's all it is?

Now if you want to big it up, that's an angle, but again it's an angle that basically needs to be game-spanning to reach a point where it actually matters. That doesn't necessarily mean every faction needs to have an entirely different story--The Secret World got pretty far out of just crafting a handful of faction-specific cutscenes and quests and having all the mission turnin texts be faction-specific, most of what unfolded was identical--but in FFXIV's case it would kind of have to be, because there isn't really any smaller component you could change out. Swapping out the 'HQ team' sounds largely plausible for A Realm Reborn, then you've landed in the TSW situation where you swap out the Scions for different people, but... well, you don't have to think very hard to notice that idea gets progressively more impossible the further you go in the expansions. For that to function in FFXIV you'd basically be writing two mostly different stories, and there you run into another problem with factionally-divided MMOs: they're always super lopsided. I remember at one point, a City of Heroes developer got asked why the villain side tended to get less content, and he responded that only about 20% of the playerbase actually played villains. Once the numeric divide comes in, it's going to quickly become clear that working on one of those stories gives significantly less return on effort invested than the other, and at that point, you're gonna start writing with that in mind, either by half-assing the minority faction's content (what CoH did), writing overall content that favors the majority side (what WoW did), or just not bothering to do the faction-specific content entirely (what TSW did).

Also, I'm tired of playing MMOs with that factional element. If I wanted to keep playing those games, I would be; I'm here in large part because this game doesn't have that, and I find the community largely better for it. I feel like the factional element does weird and unpleasant things to the playerbase of an MMO with it, particularly the roleplaying side that I tend to get into. Either people take the factions really seriously and start treating people like crap for daring to pick different from them (or the sub-type, 'a portion of the playerbase picks the Obvious Bad Guy Faction and then use it as an excuse to be dicks'), or the playerbase just rejects that side of things at all and often scorns the people who do try to bring in that part of the game, despite it being... y'know, a part of the game.

So yeah. You can't just 'bring in factions', doing so would be a terrible idea on basically every level it's possible for that to be a terrible idea.

[Enkidoh]

Not going to happen beyond "the city state/Grand Company you signed up with is your faction".

This is a FF game first and foremost, you're always the 'good guy' fighting the evil Empire in the FF series (despite some shades of grey in morality of alliegence in some). If you're expecting that to be added, then you're going to be disappointed I'm sorry to say, as it will never happen here.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

If factions aren't going to let me jump someone:s face and gank them, I don't see the point.

[rainichan]

You can find more info on how to start factions here.

[AmpelioB]

Look my dudes im tired of being the good guy its lame and cringe is there anyway factions could be introduced?

join gridanian, they are racist

Join lominsan they are racist

join ul'dah, they are racist AND snobs.

[SentioftheHoukai]

Funny, if this MMO in particular has taught me anything, it's the good guy factions that spawn the "intolerant dicks". And, for all FFXIV cultists love to point the finger at WoW for literally everything wrong with the genre factional warfare is one of the least contributing factors to its recent decline. If you're gonna start throwing shade, at least get your facts straight. ESO does factional combat perfectly fine and has a healthy playerbase. WoW's new dual-faction gameplay remains optional, Horde vs. Alliance warfare RP has hardly magickally vanished due to its inclusion. So, in summary frankly this idea isn't the cataclysmic suggestion some seem to labor under the delusion it would be. And, it's not as if FFXIV doesn't have its fair share of toxicity. Let's as a community stop pretending to be morally superior to all other MMOs, shall we?