by Alicia Hollenbeck

Created on: June 20, 2008   Last Updated: May 08, 2009

As the gaming community's love of World of Warcraft now begins to fade, it is more important than ever for Blizzard to look for new and exciting ways to bring the community's favor back. However, it is just as important to respect the wants and needs of those who have remained with them through these bleak times. Although a neutral faction could potentially bring in some new players or bring back some defunct players. it would alienate many of the current players and possibly end with disastrous results.

The only practical reason why anyone would want to play a neutral character is to avoid any player vs. player (PvP) combat. It can be frustrating, particularly when leveling a character. On many PvP servers, it is not uncommon for someone to be escorted by another player of a much greater level, who will likely kill anyone of the other faction who happens to run by. Not only is it extremely irritating to have to run back to one's body every time this happen, a whole series of events are likely to happen. The person who was just minding his own business, trying to level on his own, will whine to his or her higher level friends. One of these friends will come out, track down, and kill the offender. That player will resurrect and singly target the low level character who is still trying to complete quests. After being killed again, the player of the low level character will switch to his or her maxed out character, track down the offender, and kill him with the help of his friends. The group will sit on top of the offender's corpse, and, once resurrected, the offender will be instantly killed again. The offender will now whine to his friends, most likely omitting the fact that he started the whole mess. Two hours later, there are more maxed in Stranglethorn Vale than there are leveling characters, every factioned non-playing character is dead, and the original questor has just lost two hours of his or her day.

This is not, however, a reason to make playable neutral characters because Blizzard already has a solution for this: the Normal realms. The aforementioned event can only happen on a PyP realm. On a normal realm, players must flag themselves for PVP in order for characters of the opposite faction to fight them. If a player doesn't want to spend his questing time getting slaughtered repeatedly by characters of a much higher level, he simply doesn't flag himself for PvP.

Not only is there not a reason to allow neutral characters, the creation of these would lead to many problems at the root of the game. These characters would not be able to participate in battlegrounds. They would be able to play in Arenas but without the gear purchased through battleground honor, the grind for the superior Arena gear would be nightmarish at best. The neutral characters would not be able to communicate with players of either faction as they would definitely serve the function of translators, which would violate the communication barrier, one of the few policies that Blizzard is actually strict about.

Yes, it can be frustrating to level on PVP servers. Yes, PVP servers are less progressive than their Neutral counterparts because everything takes a little bit longer. Yes, people gripe a lot about how the opposite faction is played by a bunch of immature brats who would rather waste away their days tormenting others instead of bettering themselves. Yes, that's the downside of the whole point of the game: Warcraft. The rough leveling process gives the player the motivation to truly compete with those of the opposite faction when leveling is complete.

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