Honesty it would make more sense to me if the game had open world PVP and was factionless like other MMOs such as Lineage 2. The game is already showing signs of an older style of MMO with public dungeons (which I am all for). It just seems to me like it has become some sort of unecessary standard for factions to be in MMOs since WOW with SWTOR and GW2 following in the trend.

Elderscrolls games so far have been about all races interacting with eachother at will, and seperating players by race through these factions seems a bit redundant.

There are a lot of factions in the TES world. How can you say there isnt?

The factions in the TES world have never been racial. The lore from before this time, and from after this time, has racial mixing in the various provinces.

There are some racial exclusive factions like the thalmor for example.

That's a very dull way to look at it, isn't it? He means Large warring factions which encompass every member of their own race and no others.

As far as I know, GW2 doesn't have factions.
In WvW, 3 servers go all out against each other, not factions.
Players on their own server are not part of any faction.

The thalmor are pretty big >_> They are scattered all over the dominion territory. A small faction is one like the knights of the thorn. Now that's small

Yes, you can come up with examples where factions are made up of one race. But you cannot come up with a TES faction that includes all the members of a race, allied against all the members of another race. That's the problem with the layout of this game, and I will be interested to see how they manage to shoehorn this "lore change" into the history of Tamriel without making it all sound ridiculous.

The Aldmeri dominion (only High Elves) attacked the other provincies of Tamriel before conquering them.

You either misunderstood, or answered a a straw-man of your own making. I said you could not come up with a faction that includes all the members of a race, and you cannot. There are Altmer living all over Tamriel, as citizens of those "other provinces."

Truth of the matter is, players like factions. They are in virtually every MMO out there and give players a sense of identity as well as building a distinct community within an MMO. Regardless of TES lore and what it may or may not prohibit, factions are a necessity for this game, especially for the PvP they are going to implement. If there are no factions, how could there be any huge, epic battles? The game would be much too fragmented and chaotic if everyone was just running around in their own personal guilds killing each other. TES lore has shown huge epic battles between the emperors of old claiming territory and dominion over all of Tamriel. ZOS wants to give us a taste of those large, epic battles that we have never seen in a TES game before. I'm all for it as I believe the large faction battles could truly make this game special. Who cares if they are based by race? It's a necessary evil to make the factions distinctive and give players in the same faction more commonality.

Guild Wars 2 also does not have factions. They have WvWvW based on a frequent rotation of different servers. I personally think that will dilute the PvP and make it less meaningful as you can never grow any sort of rivalries with your enemies and you will never know anyone. This is one huge advantage ESO will likely have.

Not only is it better for PvP (as ive explained quite a few time) and Faction Identity.

Apart from that i am sure not all Members of a Race are restricted to certain Factions. For example we KNOW from the Flythrough that the Tribal Orcs in Skyrim do exist. The catch is, the Player Characters are restricted to be in that Faction. Not all the Races. In TES you could always decide what kind of Character you want to play, well BESIDES the very beginning. You cant decide to play a Character thats not a Prisoner in the beginning. You cant play a Character thats not the Dragonborn in Skyrim.

And here you cant play a Character whose Soul isnt stolen by Molag Bal and is member of one of those Factions.

Why Factions to control PVP? Because non-factioned open-world PvP which allows one to be ganked by anybody, anytime and anywhere is not popular among the vast majority of MMO players and is something called for by only those who WANT to be able to gank anbody at any time and anywhere, or those in the extreme minority who enjoy that level of risk. You may not like the truth for what it is, but it IS what it is.

The Lineage 2 matter has been discussed too. PvP should be for everyone. Not just people in large Guilds. Generaly anything that needs you to be in a large Guild is too restrictive to actually work for an MMORPG. Sure its awsome. I love the Idea dont get me wrong. But this cannot be your GENERAL Idea of PvP besides Free for all (because FFA is just one thing: Ganking) Of course Guild owning certain Strongholds is nice. If its embeddet in the PvP weve got going on in Cyrodiil. Afaik GW2 has this too with Guilds taking over Fortresses to defend them better and if im not totaly mistaken something simmilar to this has been announced for TESO too.

As much as i don't like it from a lore perspective, I understand why it was done for gameplay.

this game needs factions because matt firor the producer says so nuff sedd

People need to start understanding this is seperate product from Zenimax. Bethesda is still making single playing games. Only thing in common is probably IP.