Why we'll probably never have neutral playable races in WoW

Anne Stickney's most recent Know Your Lore post on WoW Insider about the Pandaren got me thinking about something I often wished for in my earlier years as a WoW player: neutral playable races. The idea appealed to my carebear sensibilities (I am not ashamed to admit that I am a carebear); I didn't care for PvP, and I was also interested in seeing what the quests were like on the other side. I also thought the precedent was already there; we had the goblins of the Steamwheedle Cartel, who are certainly willing to ally with anyone for the right price (this was way before we knew that goblins were going to be the new Horde race). The furblogs of the Timbermaw tribe were also willing to trust anyone who earned their trust, and more recently, the tuskar seem to not be big on this whole faction conflict thing. The pandaren, too, would probably make a good neutral race. So there are (and were) certainly enough races to make it happen, so I thought, why not let me experience both sides at the expense of being able to engage in PvP?

Well, as I became more experienced with the game, the reasons why Blizzard couldn't do such a thing became more and more apparent to me. The most obvious reason why we couldn't have neutral races in the game is that PvP is just too integral a part of the game. Aside from the inevitable regret of players who rolled a character of a neutral race and then wished they could get into PvP, but couldn't, there's also the issue of PvP being required for some PvE oriented parts of the game. The neutral races would either be cut off from completing What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been due to not being able to complete the achievements that require killing other players, or they would have to be made exempt from completing those achievements to get the meta, which would cause the players who play non-neutral races to cry foul. Either way, cutting off a player from PvP would probably result in some form of complaining about the holiday PvP achievements, in addition to the player regretting his choice when he wanted to try out PvP, so that makes the possibility unlikely.

But issues of game mechanics aren't that difficult to overcome, and the precedent for a solution already exists with a mechanic found in Grizzly Hills. When killing the Frostpaw and Redfang furblogs for the quest A Possible Link, killing furblogs from one tribe causes you to be covered in their blood, making furblogs of the other tribe neutral towards you. Of course, killing a furblog from the other tribe switches the effect. Perhaps this could be applied to players of neutral races, as well. Upon killing enough Horde or Alliance NPCs (killing players could count, too, but players on PvE realms would be hard pressed to find enough players of the opposite faction to kill for this purpose), the neutral character would gain a temporary debuff that would decay in real time and allow them to fight for one side in battlegrounds, though at the loss of being able to interact with the other faction. Fighting in battlegrounds could reset the debuff for convenience sake, and allowing time to pass without fighting anyone would cause the debuff to fade, returning the character to his/her previous neutral state.

Of course, while the mechanics might exist to support the inclusion of neutral races, the lore precedents, to my knowledge, do not. Of all the neutral races and factions out there in WoW and the Warcraft universe, the ones I know of fall into one of two categories, neither of which players would fit in to:

1. Races that keep mostly to themselves. These include the aforementioned Pandaren, who, though they do occasionally ally with a member of one faction for some reason or other, don't do so on a large enough scale or often enough to draw the ire of the other faction. Players of neutral races, though, would be doing numerous quests for the Alliance and the Horde, rather than keeping to themselves. That's the draw of playing a neutral race, after all. As such, players would not be keeping mostly to themselves (or, as a logical extension, limit themselves to doing quests only for neutral factions), and this would inevitably draw the ire of whatever faction the player wasn't doing quests for.

2. Factions that gives quests to players from both sides. This category included the goblins of the Steamwheedle Cartel, in addition to many other factions like them. These factions work with players from both factions without drawing the ire of the Alliance or the Horde, so why couldn't they serve as a precedent for neutral races? The key thing that would differentiate these factions from players of neutral races is that these factions accept help from members of both the Alliance and Horde without declaring an allegiance to one or the other. The reason neither the Alliance nor the Horde are hostile towards the factions that fall in this category is that they simply have no reason to be; the factions in this category never help out nor hinder the Alliance or Horde. We players, on the other hand, would be helping out the Alliance and the Horde whenever we do a quest for them, so we wouldn't be so exempted from the ire of the main factions.

Now, while there are some factions that do offer assistance of some kind to both the Alliance and the Horde, these factions don't provide the precedent for neutral playable races. The dragons of the Wyrmrest Accord, for example, helped both sides during the battle at Angrathar the Wrathgate, but they did that at a rare moment of Alliance/Horde cooperation. The Cenarion Circle might seem to help both factions, but they really enlist the help of players from both factions to fight for a cause that benefits both factions equally. The fact is that most factions are recruiting members of both sides to their cause or to help them, rather than providing that help to factions of both players. Thus the precedent doesn't exist.

Of course, that doesn't mean we'll never see these supposedly neutral races as playable races. The goblins were once completely neutral, and now a new cartel of goblins is joining the Horde. There could be other lore events that cause one of the neutral races (furblogs; pandaren, even?) to ally with one side for convenience and safety's sake (likely whichever side helps them first), so who knows? Maybe in WoW's fifth expansion pack, we'll see two new races we never thought would ally with one side become playable.