Rejoice! Cross-faction queueing is coming in a future patch in The War Within (with some limitations)

It’s official! Cross-faction instance queueing will finally be added in a future World of Warcraft The War Within patch… with some significant limitations. The WoW team is working on allowing cross-faction instance queues for fully formed groups. Yes, friends, our frustrations are (almost) at an end. Let’s discuss why this feature is so important and the crumbling bastion it represents.

Cross-faction instance queueing has been a pain point when so many social faction walls have been removed from the game. While you’ve been able to do cross-faction groups since patch 9.2.5 and cross-faction guilds since patch 10.1 (and now cross-realm guilds in The War Within), some ordinary grouping activities have remained blocked on faction lines. Currently, anything you queue for — LFG dungeons, LFR, timewalking, or holiday events — only forms single-faction parties. The upcoming change will allow fully formed groups to queue regardless of individual player factions, which will make it possible to do timewalking and certain holiday events cross-faction for the first time.

But requiring a full party makes other cross-faction queuing a little less useful, since you still can’t fill your party out by jumping into a queue. It could certainly be useful for LFG dungeons, making for a convenient way for an existing party to get to normal and heroic instances. LFR raids seem a little less viable, as it would require a very large group. The pre-made group finder will continue to let you make your own groups and invite people, but none of the LFG tools will automate cross-faction groups.

Based on an interview with Production Director Michael Bybee, it sounds like there are a lot of “gotchas” to conquer before implementation. Bybee emphasized that super pro-Horde/pro-Alliance players should still be able to maintain their faction-based playstyle. But players with cross-faction friends who have already formed a group have already decided to play with the opposite faction, and letting them queue for instances relieves some significant heartburn of that experience.

This is going to be a big step forward for cross-faction play, even though there are still quite a few limitations to the experience. This update will come sometime during The War Within expansion, which at least puts it on a somewhat near horizon, though we don’t know exactly when.

Keep the social improvements coming, Blizzard — we’re ready for them.