This is completely wrong. It absolutely does save you the cost of the last 10 points. I was able to level using [Superior Wizard Oil] in TBC well after the skill had gone "gray" at 360, to get to 370 in game. Not having to level the extra 10 enchanting skillups back in Novemeber when WotLK was first released, saved me close to 1k gold worth of mats at the time. Hardly worthless, in my opinion.

Do you think this is because love Tauren so much though and not because they're forced to (Druids) or because of War Stomp/Endurance? I play a Horde Druid because, after a hiatus from the game before BC, I played Horde, and the people I was going back to play with were all still Horde. I played a Troll Shaman beforehand and wanted a change, but retaining the flexibility my Shaman offered...and as everyone remembers, there was a glut of Paladins early on so I went with Druid, even though frankly I hate how Tauren look but I absolutely love the Druid class.

I would hope that the change really is "as close to a reflection of the other faction as much as possible." otherwise I can't see the market being very big. My Druid has a lot of achievements and I certainly wouldn't want to sacrifice them - as has been already pointed out, if I wanted to, I would have rerolled already. Levelling is not the hard part.

That may be, but once they implement a way to change to a different race of a different faction, what would be the justification for not having the ability to change to a different race of the same faction?

These two thing together make no sense, it is completely arbitrary to disallow same faction race change with this. It seems like a missed opportunity for revenue too.

Which just proves the point that their goal is not revenue but to add a service that players have been requesting for a long time. I'm sure that for the majority of their services, the price is more there to prevent abuse or to make using the service a decision you actually have to think about instead of something you just do all the time on a whim, or at most to simply recoup the development/maintenance costs, rather than as some secondary revenue source.

I believe they're disallowing the inter-faction choice specifically to limit the amount of people that would switch just for different racials. They don't want to have to completely rebalance the racials again. They're trying to make them (more or less) equivalent already, but we all know how that's gone.

If they allowed inter-faction race changes, then while it would garner more changes (due to people wanting that 1% increase in character ability), it would also be pointing a finger at one of Blizzard's biggest failings -- the lack of parity in racials.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not defending the decision. I can, however, see some of the reasons for it. I'm glad there won't be people swapping simply to get the FOTM racial every arena season (or month? /shudder).

There's still going to be plenty of people that use this service for the explicit purpose of getting new racials. The difference is that those people are going to affect the faction and/or server balance (if they are forced to move on a PvP server) every single time instead of only part of the time, because some of those folks may have just switched races within their current faction.

If anything, the fact that they are planning the entire development of a feature around this just seems like an open admission that they don't intend for racials to really be balanced at all (unless the deployment of this feature coincides with the removal of racials altogether, which isn't very likely). We're still going to see an increase of UD Rogues, they're just going to be ex-Gnomes or ex-Night Elves instead of ex-Trolls. It's completely arbitrary and points to a very large design failure that they have to make such large considerations in the first place.

I wonder how Blizzard will control the faction change in terms of which server, and alts on the same server as the character you wish to change.

I can only see the option as if you wish to change faction, it would have to be to an alternate realm, or to delete alts if on the same realm, or to move them. Otherwise we would completely lose the current world order which Blizzard originally created by not allowing factions to converse, or to have one of each faction on the same realm.

Could make for some great neutral AH abuse otherwise, could completely destroy the economy.

I expect that the faction-change facility will look at the ratio of Horde/Alliance before proceeding. If the number of horde on a given realm is too high, for example, the facility will not allow you to move from Alli.

It will be interesting to see what they put in place to address faction imbalances. As of yet we haven't seen any limits on server transfers based on faction. We have seen a couple of free transfers that are faction specific but it never disallowed transfers to the larger faction. If they do limit it, it would be logical to extend the limit to server transfers as well.

People wanting to move chars to the larger faction who already have established (level and/or time) characters there, would have little or no impact on the imbalance, and should be allowed to transfer. I'd be afraid that any simple limits would overlook this.

And if they limit faction transfers but not server transfers by faction, you could simply transfer off, swap and transfer back in 30 days. Granted it costs extra money.

In reality, some servers are so unbalanced and there's really nothing they can do to fix them. There is very little incentive to move to an underpopulated faction, especially on a pvp server, and a lot of incentive to move away from one.

They already have a track record for ignoring things like this, and forcing the restrictions despite the presence of other characters on that account at the desired destination. At one point when server transfers to Zul'jin were locked, I had 2 or 3 max level characters on the server that I was playing regularly, and wanted to transfer a couple others here (mostly to abuse their professions), but even though ZJ was obviously my primary server I was unable to do so. I talked to a GM and had some e-mail "conversations" with customer support, but all I ever got were canned responses saying that transfers were locked and to check back regularly, as the lock might be lifted at any time.

From the /LFGuild forum:
"The creation fee is not there to merely pad our pockets; it also serves as an effective deterrent to those wishing to recruit for their comedy/vanity guilds and for those unwilling to craft a thoughtful advertisement."

A cooldown on faction transfer is all well and good but attaching a fee to it also adds quite a bit to the idea that this isn't something that should be done "willy-nilly." Rolling a new character is easier than ever and if all you want is to play the opposite faction, then that should be the obvious choice.

Faction transfers need the restrictions of cooldowns and fees to impress the seriousness of the change and impart a sense of permanence to it.