ildon

One thing to note is that 3.2 finally evens out the total number of mounts available to both factions with the Ravasaur trainer, the extra night elf 60% mount and undead 100% mount. Remember previously, when the mount achievement was the only factor, a 60% undead mount was considered "good enough" because the total number of mounts available from the primary factions was equal.

This is probably a direct result of pre-planning for the faction change service, where each item a character could possibly have will have a 1:1 conversion for the opposite faction, and anything that doesn't have a 1:1 conversion is simply lost.

It might also be notable that the troll racial was (generally) buffed, bringing it more in line with similar racials.

 

KasumiRevy

I'm reading this as a fine tuned premade being handed to you, not simply a race or faction change where you keep items/achievements/reputation.

 

Franklin

The quality of the information in the announcement is interesting and I think give an indication the feature will be activated sooner rather than later. I would assume that if this is a medium (3.3) or long term (3rd expansion) feature Blizzard would take their time on the announcement and have more specifics ready for the questions that will inevitably be asked.

I tend to agree with the other comments that recent activities look things are being paired up to facilitate like-for-like trade of pets and mounts. I'd hope that achievements/reputation would be transferred. Gearing a character isn't the challenge it once was and I know from personally losing what I've achieved in the past is a major factor in any main-swap. The cynic in me also thinks that as this is a paid service you don't want to reduce your potential customer base.

 

Aezoc

We're probably both reading too much into a single post, but I'd counter that the verb you left out being "transform" indicates the character actually being converted from one faction to the other.

Beyond just nit-picking over the wording, I would imagine that the target audience for this service is people who have spent a significant time investment on a character, and then later on decide that they want to play with friends on the opposite faction (likely also on a different server, at least from my experience). Assuming that's true, I'm not sure that a premade character would hold a lot of value. I mean, leveling from 1-70 is pretty trivial already; moreso next patch with the mount changes and another 10% experience from heirlooms. The 70-80 grind is fairly boring after you've done it a couple of times, but it's still over in a reasonable amount of time. Given all that, it seems to me that the biggest draw of this service would be in preserving the time investment you've put into your character, while being able to play with your friends - not in getting a level 80 character. If it's really something along the lines of "your epic'ed out character with 100 mounts gets deleted, but we'll give you a premade of the same class", then I have trouble seeing Blizzard actually making much money from this. It also wouldn't seem to be as complex and require as much testing as the blue post implies, if it was essentially the PTR premade process.

 

Endus

I'm thinking more that the easiest way would be to assign equivalencies.

Stormwind = Orgrimmar, or more broadly, Human = Orc. So Stormwind Reputation becomes, exactly, your Org rep on converting. Similarly, all your Human faction mounts instantly become Orgrimmar faction mounts, and ditto for faction rewards like the Argent Crusade gear items.

Quests is a bit trickier, since the main reason I would want to do this would be to experience quest lines without having to start from scratch and level up. Even there, you could assign equivalencies; many of the quests are identical except for quest text. Letting people run them for gold/gear rewards but not faction rep would remove most of the potential for abuse. Sure, you can get more gold and such, but it's a grind to do it, and it's really not any faster than other ways of making money.

 

lichdawg

I am very dubious as to the timing of this change and its announcement.

When Blizzard realise that players are loosing interest in their game (if that is the case of course) they can do one of the following:

-Bring a new tier of raid instances.
-Bring out a new extention.
-Implement something that players have been asking about.

At the end of the year, games like Aion are coming out. I might be cynical but it looks like blizzard could be scared of a this non entity of an mmo?

In terms of implementation, I do not think this is very difficult. Blizzard will have to make difficult choices, each horde faction will have a corresponding alliance faction so that changing side means moving reputations from one side to the other. All quests counters can be reset and all factions quests reopen, ie flagged as not done by the player. A list of faction specific item can be drawn and have their equivalent for the change to take effect or be removed on transfers.

 

Cosa

Orb of deception already have scheme for switching sides that will maybe work:

Gnome Male <-> Tauren Male
Gnome Female <-> Tauren Female
Human Male <-> Orc Male
Human Female <-> Orc Female
Night Elf Male <-> Undead Male
Night Elf Female <-> Undead Female
Dwarf Male <-> Troll Male
Dwarf Female <-> Troll Female
Blood Elf Male <-> Draenei Male
Blood Elf Female <.> Draenei Female

Alliance paladins would become Blood Elf
Horde shamans would become Draenei
Night Elf druids would become Taurens and vice versa
Draenei Warriors would have to pick any other horde race since there is no Blood Elf counterpart.
Gnome mages and warlocks would have to pick race.
Tauren hunters would become night elf.

I think that's all.

 

gia

That's how I read it as well, there are far too many potential problems with a cross faction character copy. The way I can see them implementing this is if they simply gave you a premade character template with baseline reputations and quests completed and then just copy over your gear and inventory on top of it, maybe professions as well.

 

Camaris

Now.. the real test. If you copy your character from Alliance to Horde, and back again.. do you end up with the same character you started with?

I doubt the Ravasaur will have the same kind of insane grind as the Wintersaber. So can you go Hordside, buy the ravasaur, transfer back a month or so later and get a 'free' Wintersaber?

I wonder why you would actually switch sides though. For raiders, cross-faction guild recruitment is basically all I can think of. For the explorers and lorebuffs that want to experience the other faction, starting a level 1 still seems a better idea. Maybe there is a big market of more casual players that are willing to pay to play with friends?

 

Franklin

The Wintersaber grind isn't what it used to be - I think it's broadly inline with a lot of the TBC reps in terms of time taken to complete.

 

Endus

Not having to play through EVERY new quest, just the ones necessary to see the new content you haven't seen yet, for instance the major questline in Dragonblight that takes you to Undercity. Not so much the "kill 20 wolves" stuff. This is more of an issue with the 1-60 content, too; Outlands and Northrend has less overlap I believe. Plus, not having to pay for Epic Flight all over again would be nice, even if the grind is much easier now.

Also, the fact that leveling from 1 can be annoying if you're used to running several 80s with easy access to thousands of gold and the new BoA gear. I've got several 80s, and I don't think I'd pay to transfer more than ONE, but I can definitely see the advantage. Wouldn't do it right now, but if my guild fell apart and I were gonna server transfer anyway, I'd definitely consider a faction swap instead. Hell, I played Horde when I started, and then started my Alliance shaman when I came back pretty much solely BECAUSE I'd seen the Horde 1-40 grind a few times already.

The one thing I hope they do with this is to prevent any ability for "farming" other-faction content. The mounts and rep and such should all either convert to faction-specific stuff in your new home, or be unuseable and unseen on your character and not count towards any of the achievements they're based on.

 

Lileith

Wow is quite an old game now, many players have been playing for years and gathering a lot of "optional" things for their characters : reputations, vanity pets, mounts, legendary weapons, titles, and since 3.0 achievements.

Players who care about those things feel that they are stuck with a class / race / faction and they are more frustrated when they have to face issues/unbalance with their own class. Also even if there is no class balance problem, sometimes playing another class, or switching from healing to damage dealing can be very enjoyable.

Rerolling is easier than ever, with RAF system, increased experience from questing, BOA shoulders/weapons and soon chest.
Some players enjoy it a lot, and love playing multiple characters (One they will play as a main for PVE, one they will play mostly for PVP and some Naxx25 pugs).

Personally I just can't reroll, I'm quite fond of achievements, and I feel that even if I would love to experience something else (like healing in raid). I would have to give up too much, considering the time I invested in my achievements grind.

I don't think that getting a character to lvl 80 is an issue nowday, even getting a character to lvl 80 and 2*T7+2*T8 will be trivial next patch with the new badge system. That's why I think that faction changing must at least transfer most of your achievements / vanity items, otherwise there is just no point, or they could just call that "buy a premade".

With the next extension coming everyone expect a new hero class, will that class also start with 0 achievements points /1 mount and 0 pets/title/reputation?

 

Azumi

I somewhat agree with you, but what happens in special cases like - I have my old main, a human with a Palomino mount (unattainable since early 2005). How does this translate over? I could see it being possible with all races but undead and blood elf - who do not have old school mounts without armor.

 

Aezoc

I thought about that too, but there's a lot more racial mismatches that would cause problems. In the end, I think you get a system with so many special cases that it's worthless. Also, NE priest->UD priest would work fine, not sure why that would be a special case.

• Trolls can be mages, dwarves can't.
• BEs can be warlocks, draenei can't
• Humans can be mages or priests, orcs can't
• Gnomes can be rogues, tauren can't

There's probably more I can't remember too. By the time you're done, you really just end up with an unlucky subset that doesn't have the option to pick their reroll race, and a bunch that can. I think given the incongruities between the class/race combos available, you'd have to let everyone choose.

 

Samelina

Probably the biggest red flag that I see is where they said this.

When I read this I think that my current character will be deleted and a new one created on the other faction. While this would solve a significant amount of the logistical factors it will create problems with people that want to keep their achievements and other character specific items like their gold and bag/bank contents.

 

Faldrath

Using an old, vanity item like the Orb of Deception to determine race options would be foolish. I think people are over-complicating this. It's simple: you're a Horde warlock, you get to choose between gnome or human. You're a druid or a shaman, you don't get to choose, etc. That's it.

WoW is pretty symmetrical overall when it comes to gear, reputation, vanity items, etc. The main problems are, as stated, racials (which, then again, only matter for the min-maxing population which is a very small percentage of overall WoW players) and quests. Quests are the complicated part here.

 

tesk

I can only imagine the amount of Alliance players that will exist once they implement this.

Any serious raiding guild that is currently Horde will switch in a heartbeat. The +hit racial from the Draenei is just that good. It will allow your raiders to get that little extra bit of str/sp/int/crit/haste. Add that together over 15-20 dps classes and it truly is a significant advantage.

Unless they homogenize the racials across the factions this game will become even more one sided than it is.

 

Kumar

EQ2 implements something similar, where you can betray your City and align yourself with a City of the opposite "faction". Althought its easier for EQ as they have sort of setup similar classes on both sides (Good and Evil).

The easiest way to implement this for WoW would be to allow the user to select which Race he/she wants to eb based on the Class. So if the BE Lock wants to switch they would be given the option to select a race from Alliance that supports the warlock class.

 

Jezz

I think it will be very interesting to see where Blizzard goes with it, I think one possibility that has been mentioned would be like how pre-mades work on the PTR. Every class is assigned a race; I am not sure what logic, if any, is used on the PTR but it would follow the same basis as that. The obvious problem would be that you get a huge amount of the same race/class on one realm but it isn't a huge problem but probably an unpopular solution.

The second is following the same logic used on the orb of deception, each class/race combination is assigned an equivalent of the opposite faction and you have no choice in the matter. Should mean that you still see a good amount of variation on servers.

Finally would be allowing you complete control over what race you become, possibly functioning the same way a 'character re-customization' does, obviously not allowing you to choose races that your class can not be. The problem with this is that it would almost inevitably mean that Blizzard would have to allow race changes within factions at some point, that is if they aren't included from the release of this feature if they decide to take this path.


It is going to require a huge amount of work to get this to work especially, as already mentioned, it will require people who want to min-max to be paying out to do so unless there is a huge overhaul of racials. Though, as far as I am aware, Blizzard haven't explicitly stated that it will be a paid service although it is fair to assume it will be.

 

Siddown

While I am sure Blizzard is always aware of what is going on with other MMOs, I'm sure a change as insignificant as this (as opposed to say releasing another Expansion or releasing new Raid Content) has nothing to do with Aion or any other MMO for that matter. Remember when Conan and Warhammer were supposed to chew into WoWs revenue? Well, that really didn't happen. WoW is the big boy on the block, and I really can't see any other game in the same genre (high fantasy) knocking it off the top any time soon.

To me, this is a simple, logical extension to Server Transfers. Currently the only choice you have if you wish to switch factions on a PvP server is to either buy a second account or delete all your characters, to most people, this isn't worth it. Now, paying something like $25 to switch your 80 level, half geared out character on the other hand, now that's something more people might do.

On a personal note, I actually seem to be in the minority and believe that people might switch from the high population side to the lower population side. Now that level in BGs is on the way, those who love PvP might want to be on the low population sides to a) lower BG queues and b) increase the likely hood of world PvP. Back in Vanilla, a buddy and I bought second accounts so we could play Horde on our old heavy Alliance populated server for those very reasons.

 

Tunch

This is a perfect chance for them to completely remove racial bonuses from the game. It's unfortunate that they won't have that much foresight.

With as much as they seem to push their E-sport viability, I just can't see why they haven't done this already. There are some serious imbalances with racials in both PVE and PVP content. Removing racial bonuses would be very easy, and would not have any large negative impact, while going a long way to removing imbalance as a whole. Obviously the class-based imbalances will always exist in a class-based game with any type of diversity, but this would be a very welcome change for a lot of people, I would think. Ah well.

 

OzzymandiasKJ

Honestly I would assume that everything would just be reset if you decided to change factions. Reputations would be neutral/friendly accordingly, vanity items and racial mounts would be lost. It's a conscious decision to restart anew as a member of the opposing faction without the annoyance of leveling up again.

 

Darian_TruBlade

I suppose it's possible for them to remove the racial bonuses much the same as they removed the Priest racials, but I don't see the current racials as being anywhere near as imbalanced as those were. You had the ridiculously overpowered Fear Ward for Dwarves, and the ridiculously useless Feedback/Elune's Grace for Humans/Night Elves. Current racials are all situational, but the situations are fairly common for each such that none can really be considered useless.

If specific racials are overpowered in Arena situations, the simplest solution is to exclude them from use. That would likely cause less uproar than removing them outright.

"A man's IQ, yearly income, sexual prowess, ingenuity, physical appearance and generally every other aspect of his character can be condensed down to four digits: his Arena rating." - Zechsy [70 Rogue - Skullcrusher (EU) - 10/23/2007]

 

Tunch

Racials are such that there is almost always a correct choice for PVE optimization. When I used to play a raiding Orc tank, I always hated that Taurens had such a large advantage.

At inception, they had some ideas for their game. Obviously the booming success has caused them to flip-flop on many of their classic philosophies. Paladin/Shaman faction-specificity is one example. This is one of the last steps toward homogenization (without greatly harming actual variety and interest).

Alternatively, having a separate point-pool to pick and choose your own racial bonus combination would be acceptable. Clearly it would have to go by a different name than "Racial", but it's a nice solution to appease both sides, I'd think. Tanks can have their hit points, arena players can have their WotF, stealth detection, etc.

This is getting into a slightly off-topic discussion though, so whatever. Ultimately this service, if executed properly, should be very helpful.

 

barrettj

I second the removing of racials - though instead of removing the abilities entirely, I'd just have them be unrelated to race. Have them be separate specializations entirely, like (terrible names incoming, really can't think of anything creative at the moment, though):

• "Master of the Earth" gives you the (previously) tauren racials of Earthstomp (Warstomp), + Herbalism, and + health.
• "Master of the Flesh" gives you the (previously) undead racials of Cannibalize, Longer underwater breathing, and Enduring Will (Will of the Forsaken)
• "Master of Magic" gives you the (previously) blood elf racials
• etc...
  

This would make character race a purely cosmetic/class restriction mechanic (assuming class restrictions are lore based) or if really necessary for balances, make some specializations unavailable to certain classes.