Diplomacy (again)

[Justifried]

I think it would be really awesome if you had to rank up your Diplomacy like rep. The higher rank, the more you could do. from simple grouping to walking the streets of an enemy faction city! Might not work with the scripting but I really would enjoy becoming a proper diplomat in the world. Earn my place in the world, earn the trust of factions the same way you'd earn with say BootyBay or any nuetral faction. hard slog for the opposing factions but isn't that why we're on turtle? for the grind? I love the long lvling, exploring and casual roleplaying (i'm playing hc on my first toon cause hell yeah!)

I know i said it before, it just feels like i didn't earn my diplomacy.

other players have agreed that this would be very fun and so far has been well received

regardless, I've been enjoying what you guys have done and look forward to the future!

Still want that Exalted Diplomat title... :)

(sorry for starting another thread, thought this point may have been overlooked)

thanks again for your time!

[Kazgrim]

A quest to achieve diplomacy would make much more sense than what’s current.

[Mac]

Diplomacy seems to be just a way to address the smaller population, by effectively unsplitting the population and allowing you to talk and group and trade with whomever. Making it easy, the way it is now, is honestly the best way to handle it. Making you have to earn it just puts in more busy work to do, all so you can do basic things like group for dungeons and raids (which is something you can do other servers with higher populations without all the hassle).

That said, I think it would be interesting to expand Diplomacy and have you earn other things on top of it. As for rewards, a title isn't outlandish. Giving an additional discount on vendor goods could also work (as long as you can't buy for less than you can sell). A bonus to reputation gain rates (like the Human racial Diplomacy) would also be a nice thing to give players the ability to gain through Diplomacy grinding. Giving the players an item that ports them to Booty Bay or Ratchet would be fair as well.

As for being able to enter enemy cities? Personally, I'm hesitant on the idea. It kind of changes the feel of a city like Orgrimmar if suddenly you have a bunch of Humans running around. It also makes neutral cities less special. Speaking of which, you don't have to gain the trust of neutral cities to use them: you can enter them and shop and quest and use flightpaths and use their AH and so on with zero faction work. Even if you make it really hard and tedious, you'll eventually have a scenario where there's more Human PCs in Orgrimmar than Orc PCs, and that's just silly to me.

Well, anyway, those are my thoughts on Diplomacy.

[Roxanneflowers]

As for being able to enter enemy cities? Personally, I'm hesitant on the idea. It kind of changes the feel of a city like Orgrimmar if suddenly you have a bunch of Humans running around. It also makes neutral cities less special. Speaking of which, you don't have to gain the trust of neutral cities to use them: you can enter them and shop and quest and use flightpaths and use their AH and so on with zero faction work. Even if you make it really hard and tedious, you'll eventually have a scenario where there's more Human PCs in Orgrimmar than Orc PCs, and that's just silly to me.

At MOST what you'd want to do in that direction would be to allow for faction gain with the opposing factions, up to Neutral. So while with the Goblin towns you can go from Neutral to Revered, with the opposing faction you could go from At War to Neutral.

Still doesn't deal with the problem of auto-flagging for PvP when entering the zone of an opposing faction's city area/volume of space.



A much more reasonable notion would be that with an upranked Diplomacy skill, all opposing faction NPCs OUTSIDE of racial capital cities can become Neutral towards you. That way you can enter and interact with the NPCs of say ... The Crossroads ... but not Orgrimmar/Thunder Bluff/Undercity, as an Alliance Diplomat ... and vice versa. That would then allow you to speak to the quest NPCs of the opposing faction and do their quests, so long as the quest doesn't take you into a racial capital city for a turn in. Basic idea being that as a Diplomat you (in effect) Share The World ... the open world, that is ... while the major racial cities remain faction friendly only.

Easiest way to make this work is a combination of Faction gains and keying the PvP flagging system such that when in PvP mode you are considered to be At War with the opposing faction(s). That way, because you are automatically flagged for PvP when entering the zone boundaries of an opposing faction's cities, you lose the "protection" of Diplomacy for the duration of time that you're flagged for PvP. This then makes the Diplomacy Factor a PvE ONLY thing, rather than something which can be turned into an advantage in PvP.

Needless to say, both Honorable and Dishonorable kills in PvP, OUTSIDE of Battlegrounds(!) would necessarily cause you to lose faction reputation with the opposing faction.



That's about the best possible scenario I can think of to come up with along these lines ... and it's a bit of a kludge effort to make things work (kinda sorta, maybe?) without causing a lot of other things to break really badly. Would still be a lot of work to implement, test and release since there are a ton of edge cases to worry about. Not necessarily recommended.

[Justifried]

Awesome!

I understand it's functionality, it's purpose and why it's easily attainable. It just feels empty. When i read about it on the website Look At My Horse! section I thought it was going to have more to it that's all

I totally agree with your suggestions!

thanks for running with it defining it more. Much better :D

[Balake]

Making a faction's quests cross-faction will never work logically. Some quests in the barrens send you to kill alliance npcs in TWO separate instances. I prefer keeping it segregated, for the sake of logic. If someone wants to experience the opposite faction's side of questing, they should just roll a character of that faction. At least then the quests will actually make sense.

[Roxanneflowers]

Making a faction's quests cross-faction will never work logically. Some quests in the barrens send you to kill alliance npcs in TWO separate instances. I prefer keeping it segregated, for the sake of logic. If someone wants to experience the opposite faction's side of questing, they should just roll a character of that faction. At least then the quests will actually make sense.

Agreed. But sometimes you have to point out the obvious before it can be seen.

[Axoc]

It may end up being most reasonable to expand diplomacy in expansion areas. I know this is something that we won't as players won't be able to weigh in on until the expansion is released, but since every NPC that is being added to the expansion is *theoretically* custom, it may be easier mechanically to set them up as neutral. It may also make more sense from a lore perspective, depending on what all gets added. NPCs that are in areas with obvious common enemies tend to be more open to being faction neutral (Silithus & EPL are good examples of this as actually designed by Blizzard). So if we eventually see a "Vanilla Northrend" (I understand this isn't in the scope of the current xpac but who knows what is down the road) then it would make more sense IMO for those NPCs to be subject to expanded diplomacy than any NPCs in the base game, as most of the world of the base game is built on the lore of there being a pseudo-war between the 2 factions.

[Balake]

It's called world of WARcraft for a reason, and I think it's more interesting to have hostility between alliance and horde as it stops the game from being good guy vs bad guy with wholesome epic heroes and edgy cliche villains. It's more dynamic to know it's all just people trying to sustain themselves in their world and that includes the alliance, the horde, venture co, the defias, etc. I wouldn't say the alliance is good and the defias are evil and that's because it's all subjective and depends on the viewpoint. But if we start phasing out that complex conflict between all factions, and just turn it into alliance + horde vs big bad villain, we are destroying the identity of both the alliance and the horde in the process and turning them into just "the good guys".

Blizzard realized that, even when the two factions team up against a threat, it's always enemy-of-my-enemy and not a friendship because the two factions essentially becoming buddies is not interesting from a story and lore perspective.

Blackrock Mountain is a perfect example, it's a huge part of Vanilla WoW containing a ton of instances and rich in stories. Both the alliance and the horde have their own loose ends to tie, their own goals to fulfill, and their own feuds and vendettas to deal with, yet both of them have their eyes set on the biggest prize and that's conquering the Blackrock Mountain area and claiming it for themselves as it's a very strategic area. It's each faction uncovering one half of the story and seeing it from their perspective, so while the Alliance and the Horde are both working on defeating the threats in Blackrock Mountain, every faction is still it's own thing and there is the hostility that we've come to expect between the two factions.

All of this wouldn't be possible if we went full 100% on the diplomacy aspect. If we let every single player experience both sides of the coin, eventually the distinction will disappear and there will be no more different perspectives. It's just a typical heroes vs villains story.

[Deadcrow]

While I don't disagree with Balake, I and maybe a few others wouldn't mind something like this purely for the exploration aspect without having to switch to alts for that specific area or quest chain. Ultimately this is an argument of purism vs roleplay, I understand that, and an expanded diplomacy system won't be for everyone, but for those who don't care for the greater war and just wish to explore the far corners of Azaroth, this would make things easier.

[Balake]

While I don't disagree with Balake, I and maybe a few others wouldn't mind something like this purely for the exploration aspect without having to switch to alts for that specific area or quest chain. Ultimately this is an argument of purism vs roleplay, I understand that, and an expanded diplomacy system won't be for everyone, but for those who don't care for the greater war and just wish to explore the far corners of Azaroth, this would make things easier.

Doing alliance quests as horde or vice versa remains illogical, it's impossible to roleplay it well when the quest text contradicts your character's identity. How can a human roleplay themselves doing the forsaken quests in HIllsbrad Foothills? I'm not trying to tell others how to roleplay or play the game at all, but I'm just saying this restriction exists for a logical reason and abolishing it ruins the lore and feel of the game and its quests.

Also, if Turtle WoW goes the route of enabling cross-faction questing like previously suggested in the example of a custom Northrend that functions like Silithus and EPL (in other words, almost fully neutral), the overarching theme of zones, and the storylines in them will be designed with that in mind which doesn't make for an interesting storyline. The Cenarion Circle and the Argent Dawn are not the alliance and the horde working together, it's neither the alliance nor the horde. It's a separate faction with different goals. So really when we do quests in those zones and an orc gets a quest from a night elf, they are not doing something that concerns the alliance, they're doing something that concerns the Cenarion Circle. An entire continent or expansion of just this type of zones and quests and the player is no longer an alliance or horde adventurer, they're just an adventurer now with no real identity.

Such protagonist factions need to exist to focus on the villain in a way that links between the alliance and the horde, but it's important to assure that they are neither one, nor a combination of the two. The alliance and the horde still need their own distinct presence, either against the opposite faction or against a hostile enemy. Dragonblight is a perfect example of a zone with many different factions and the player quests for first and foremost his own faction (alliance/horde) and through helping his own faction with the northrend threats they get introduced to both the argent crusade and the dragon aspects. Northrend would not make sense if we jumped straight to helping the argent crusade and the dragon aspects without also helping our faction with it's own problems. I just personally think it wouldn't work, if there was a way to do it logically and in a way that does not make the story too one-dimensional (big good faction vs big evil villain) I would jump ship but I don't think there is one.

[Deadcrow]

Yeah. Realistically the only way I could see it work is to just throw out the main story or at least the players part in it on the macro level. Things happen, events occur, the individual player has no part in the larger story, they are a bit player in the background doing things. Helping here or there to there whims. Ultimately it would have no impact to the larger narrative, you don't play a hero or a protagonist, you're a schmo in the right place at the wrong time. Unrealistic as it is, I think it would appeal not so much to those who played wow and enjoyed the setting and the story of the enemy of my enemy agreeing to beat a mutual enemy, but to those who love the setting of WoW and Azaroth in general and really don't bother with the grander tale and just want to explore, quest and have fun with friends in general. No real wrong way to the game or story. Just different.

[Roxanneflowers]

Doing alliance quests as horde or vice versa remains illogical, it's impossible to roleplay it well when the quest text contradicts your character's identity. How can a human roleplay themselves doing the forsaken quests in HIllsbrad Foothills? I'm not trying to tell others how to roleplay or play the game at all, but I'm just saying this restriction exists for a logical reason and abolishing it ruins the lore and feel of the game and its quests.

Foolish mortal.
It's called Going Undercover Behind Enemy Lines.

As far as roleplaying is concerned, you wouldn't be taking your Human PC ... AS A HUMAN ... into the Horde areas, you'd ideally want to be disguised as a Horde race (which can already be done, but as a temporary spell that breaks on damage).

For RP purposes, think of it as a deep cover assignment from SI:7 or Ravenholdt Manor (and/or whatever the Horde equivalent shadow organization is) to "go behind enemy lines" and gather intel as a mole. What are the Horde doing? What are the challenges to them? What are they "contracting" out to adventurers to do? Who are the "players" in the Horde giving out these quests? You know ... all that Know Your Enemy stuff of spying on the opposing faction.

Start thinking of it in terms of spying, and make the disguises work in PvE but break in PvP (so don't enter capital cities!) and you can start building a scaffolding of roleplay plausibility for what amount to spycraft where the point and purpose is information gathering and intelligence work in which the PC is expected to NOT break their cover while reporting back to their handler.

As soon as you add an angle of duplicity and spycraft to the question, the opportunities for RP plausibility start to open up, even if the quests wind up getting done "as is" on the Horde side, rather than having unique alternative completion objectives (for your REAL faction!) edited in to account for the duplicity angle of quests that can be played for the opposing faction.

[Balake]

Yeah. Realistically the only way I could see it work is to just throw out the main story or at least the players part in it on the macro level. Things happen, events occur, the individual player has no part in the larger story, they are a bit player in the background doing things. Helping here or there to there whims. Ultimately it would have no impact to the larger narrative, you don't play a hero or a protagonist, you're a schmo in the right place at the wrong time. Unrealistic as it is, I think it would appeal not so much to those who played wow and enjoyed the setting and the story of the enemy of my enemy agreeing to beat a mutual enemy, but to those who love the setting of WoW and Azaroth in general and really don't bother with the grander tale and just want to explore, quest and have fun with friends in general. No real wrong way to the game or story. Just different.

While it's true a single player character is not influential to the whole in it's large scale, their actions do make a difference if slight to the people they directly interact with, the westfall npcs that you help out with the harvest watchers are an example. If we put an orc in westfall and let them do the same quests the alliance players can as if they were alliance (not spies as Roxanne suggests) that contradicts their identity. What's a proud member of Thrall's horde doing in westfall, and why are they going around the entirety of the Stormwind Kingdom's realm trying to solve the Defias problem? They're not really horde anymore. I guess there are people that don't care if their character makes sense in the world they live in, and just want to do every single quest out there even if it makes no sense. I can't argue against this, but if it affects future quest design, or breaks the game with bugs, glitches or wonky interactions, or most importantly if it's easily exploitable (I shudder at the thought of Edward being friendly to alliance npcs because of crossfaction questing when he's really just waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike ) then I am against it.

And such problems are inevitable. A lot of opposite faction quests are impossible to finish even by making that faction's npcs friendly, as the mobs you need to kill could be friendly to you as well like the dwarf expedition mobs in southern barrens. And then what happens, you are an alliance adventurer, killing alliance-aligned dwarves for the horde? Do we make alliance mobs neutral and attackeable by alliance players? That would make the player true neutral, not aligned to either faction, works for both and can both interact and attack both. Kind of like a mercenary, only I don't think either faction would tolerate a mercenary that works for both it and its enemies... goblins would have exploited it already if that hadn't been the case

Foolish mortal.
It's called Going Undercover Behind Enemy Lines.

As far as roleplaying is concerned, you wouldn't be taking your Human PC ... AS A HUMAN ... into the Horde areas, you'd ideally want to be disguised as a Horde race (which can already be done, but as a temporary spell that breaks on damage).

For RP purposes, think of it as a deep cover assignment from SI:7 or Ravenholdt Manor (and/or whatever the Horde equivalent shadow organization is) to "go behind enemy lines" and gather intel as a mole. What are the Horde doing? What are the challenges to them? What are they "contracting" out to adventurers to do? Who are the "players" in the Horde giving out these quests? You know ... all that Know Your Enemy stuff of spying on the opposing faction.

Start thinking of it in terms of spying, and make the disguises work in PvE but break in PvP (so don't enter capital cities!) and you can start building a scaffolding of roleplay plausibility for what amount to spycraft where the point and purpose is information gathering and intelligence work in which the PC is expected to NOT break their cover while reporting back to their handler.

As soon as you add an angle of duplicity and spycraft to the question, the opportunities for RP plausibility start to open up, even if the quests wind up getting done "as is" on the Horde side, rather than having unique alternative completion objectives (for your REAL faction!) edited in to account for the duplicity angle of quests that can be played for the opposing faction.

Blizzard did something similar with pvp queues to fight imbalance, they let players queue for whatever faction they wanted as mercenaries. I personally can't say I liked that feature. But this is different enough to need its own judgement.

Fully disguising and assimilating into being a member of the opposite faction is something no one has ever done in WoW's lore afaik, it could be too complex to do, for everyone from a clever engineer, to a resourceful rogue, and even a master of arcanist illusions. The disguises that make you unrecognizable, fail in combat. And the ones that don't fail in combat are just cosplays and anyone could instantly tell the difference.

But besides that, let's assume it is actually possible lorewise for someone to do such a disguise. Is spying on the enemy this way plausible and does not ruin the lore of the quests they are doing? Firstly, lack of information is a big motivation for one's own faction's quests. In contested zones, the quests of a certain faction only make sense because they don't know what the other faction is doing. I don't remember the quests too well but in Ashenvale, I think alliance players need to kill forsaken researchers to loot their items and know what they are doing. If the player already did some of the horde's quests in Ashenvale they would know and their own faction's quest wouldn't make sense.

And secondly... a spy can only go so far... I don't think the average WoW adventurer is willing to go full COD Modern Warfare 2 and commit war crimes on their own people for Makarov just to blend in and get information . There's no way they would help their enemies, spies try to sabotage and get information. We could make it so the player sabotages the enemy faction, but they're no longer doing the same quest now, they're doing something else, and that's just adding spying and sabotage quests to both factions. I would rather all that effort gets spent doing something original and something that doesn't contradict the zones quests and storylines.

[Axoc]

Also, if Turtle WoW goes the route of enabling cross-faction questing like previously suggested in the example of a custom Northrend that functions like Silithus and EPL (in other words, almost fully neutral), the overarching theme of zones, and the storylines in them will be designed with that in mind which doesn't make for an interesting storyline. The Cenarion Circle and the Argent Dawn are not the alliance and the horde working together, it's neither the alliance nor the horde. It's a separate faction with different goals. So really when we do quests in those zones and an orc gets a quest from a night elf, they are not doing something that concerns the alliance, they're doing something that concerns the Cenarion Circle. An entire continent or expansion of just this type of zones and quests and the player is no longer an alliance or horde adventurer, they're just an adventurer now with no real identity.

Such protagonist factions need to exist to focus on the villain in a way that links between the alliance and the horde, but it's important to assure that they are neither one, nor a combination of the two. The alliance and the horde still need their own distinct presence, either against the opposite faction or against a hostile enemy. Dragonblight is a perfect example of a zone with many different factions and the player quests for first and foremost his own faction (alliance/horde) and through helping his own faction with the northrend threats they get introduced to both the argent crusade and the dragon aspects. Northrend would not make sense if we jumped straight to helping the argent crusade and the dragon aspects without also helping our faction with it's own problems. I just personally think it wouldn't work, if there was a way to do it logically and in a way that does not make the story too one-dimensional (big good faction vs big evil villain) I would jump ship but I don't think there is one.

I haven't played any version of WoW post-2.4.3, so I have no idea what Dragonblight, the Argent Crusade (Argent Dawn 2.0?), or Blizzard's version of Northrend are or look like outside of this post (and *tiny* details I've picked up over the years, like I understand that Naxx gets revisited in Wrath). Northrend is a huge continent even in WC3. Since every other zone seems to be enlarged in WoW, I expect that Northrend would be enlarged here as well. To continue using that example, there are definitely areas where there could be faction conflict.

Based on what's shown of Northrend in WC3, potential areas for faction conflict would be: sabotaging enemy beachheads, competition over tunnels, books, riches, etc in the Azjol-Nerub network (WC3 shows us that they span much of Northrend, and could be used as transportation / ambush networks), competition for Muradin & Baelgun's supplies and/or knowledge that they may have uncovered on how to fight the Scourge, establishing alliances with the locals (first that comes to mind is addressing just how many Nerubians managed to escape the Scourge), etc. There are PLENTY of examples of the pseudo-war that goes on in WoW being available in this area.

There are *also* areas where it wouldn't make sense for anything other than faction co-operation. Actually fighting the Scourge, fighting any remaining Old Ones in Northrend (there are probably still more of them underneath A-N...I doubt there was only one based on what we saw in the WC3 levels), clearing out pockets of especially vicious undead Nerubians from Azjol-Nerub's vast network - if you're familiar with EverQuest 1, then the dwarf/spider/orc/"Old One" stalemate that exists in Crystal Caverns in Velious comes to mind, etc.

I don't think it's as simple as "good guy good, bad guy bad" BUT I don't think that there can realistically be pure faction conflict in a situation as severe as fighting the Scourge.

[Balake]

I don't think it's as simple as "good guy good, bad guy bad" BUT I don't think that there can realistically be pure faction conflict in a situation as severe as fighting the Scourge.

This sums it up really well. Every expansion needs both the alliance/horde conflict as well as a uniting threat. An expansion with only one or the either can't work.