Originally I was gonna ask if any folks here knew whether or not if WoW would still have it's Horde/Alliance language barrier now that there's a race that can be played on either side. But instead I decided to turn to Google and found out that beta players have already confirmed that yes there is still a language barrier. Despite the fact that lore wise, Pandaren should still be able to communicate with one another despite being on separate factions. However game play wise they will not be able to.

Tell me I'm not the only one who thinks this is rather silly. Originally to my understanding the whole language barrier thing was put in place because of people just being stupid during PvP. I get the fact Blizzard wants to protect people from the gutter talk of competitive games like this (especially if it's anything like League of Legends) but at least on an RP server you would think people may be civil enough to be able to communicate even if there are a number of bad apples out there.

And with this line of reasoning you may as well keep people from talking to each other when playing against each other in Starcraft 2.

Thoughts?

EDIT: Also why can't the Blood Elves talk to humans? Why can't the Undead talk to Humans? And if I'm not mistaken, weren't the Orcs and Humans able to talk to each other in Warcraft 3?

Its a situation where a specific gameplay feature is being prioritized over logical consistency. There's no point in trying to poke holes in it, blizzard has admitted multiple times that it doesn't really make sense story-wise.

I always liked how well the language barrier did at making players hate the other faction. It is a simple obvious psychology trick, and it works great.

It doesn't make sense, it's a game mechanic thing, the first poster is right.

I remember in the weeks leading up to Wrath of the Lich King where the infested grain was shipped to the capitals, if you got infected and turned undead, you could speak to all infected people, regardless of faction. I thought that was a little neat feature.

It's not much different from how the Undead and Blood Elves don't understand common, despite the Undead formerly being Humans and the Blood Elves formerly being members of the Alliance.