Also since Anime was an alternative form of story telling, it was easy to use exotic locations and using exotic actors/actress. So many anime took advantage it by using Caucasians when the story setting is surreal or futuristic.

One other 'factor' i could think of... One person I know won't play Tauren, despite what we tell him and the fact that he'd be interested in playing Tauren. The reason why? .. he believes they run slower... he believes all the horde races run slower. Orc's were slow in WC3 (and by extension trolls and taurens i guess) and he thinks the undead can't possible move quickly... and that these elements translated into the game.

Of course he has no trouble believing that gnomes run normal speed and rolled one...

That's actually also an old MMORPG problem and a real one at that. Short races 'feel' like they are running faster. It's a standard parallax problem due to the perspective being closer to the ground combined with an animation issue that makes it seem to an observer that they are racing along. It is not quite as bad in WoW at least, given that few people play in 1st person mode, but it is still a bit strange.

Of course all races (assuming they are smart enough to enchant their boots) run along cheerfully at the same pace. They do very much feel like they are moving at different speeds though and that's bound to be a soft factor indeed.

My Tauren is almost permanently in Deviate Fish mode, because of that one main factor. Taurens walking *feel* like they move slow. This is due to slower animations, since they obviously cover more ground with one stride (or would in reality), and also the fact that their focal points stand so much farther off the ground than other classes. I'm well aware of these factors, and the fact that every race does in fact move at the same speed, but being in human form (ninja/pirate) just feels so much smoother and overall better than being in Tauren form.

I actually have a similar issue. I know gnomes and taurens (and everyone else) runs at the same speed, but since taurens are so big, for me it feels like they are running slower because you're further up from the ground in 3rd person perspective. Looking at a gnome you are always much closer to the ground so it feels like you're running fast fast :)


edit: I should read all the replies, Northerner said what I said further up :>

Its the same reason I hate popping Winterfall Firewater. I feel like Im running slower and it annoys me.
Still have to use it thoug, still a buff (unless you runs to heigans room and get stuck in the blody shrooms).

I hadn't thought about the walking animation issue, but indeed I have great difficulties playing anything taller than a Dwarf! It's worse with Tauren and Orcs than with Elves and Trolls however, because each in their own way, the latter two seem to move along with more grace than the Tauren and Orcs.

The question is, did the majority of the players chose race first or faction first? There's a major difference (if we measure the importance of this soft factor) between "I want to be a Dwarf, guess I'll have to be Alliance!" and "I want to be Horde, but since Tauren are annoying to play with, I'll roll Undead".

By the way, Tauren *do* have a bigger melee range, 9 yards vs the normal 5 yards. (but can be hit by melee from 9 yards away as well instead of the normal 5 yards, but in my experience as warrior that's less often a disadvantage than the advantage of having a bigger melee range). For instance it's an advantage when tanking Huhuran, who sleeps the closest 10 persons, so you can stay a little further away than the rest of the melee and not get sleeped. Or a small advantage when chasing fleeing opponents.. At least it makes character size actually influence gameplay.

I think a large proportion of people don't get a chance to choose if they want to roll horde or alliance, as they intend on playing with friends. When i first bought the game, the friends (who convinced me to buy WoW) had already setup alliance characters when my copy arrived. So for me, it was a case of 'which alliance race should i roll?'

That reminds me of learning Firemaw. I have never been in a true progress guild, so our tactics were mostly copy-paste. Not being able to get healed as Gnome tank in the original position was rather "interesting" :p

About deviate fish: I absolutely hate it, cause male humans run as if something is stuck up their behind.

Faction first, definitely. I knew absolutely nothing about any of the races, but the Alliance just looked gay. Orcs have been my favourite characters since the peons in Warcraft through to Relic's Dawn of War, but I ended up rolling undead as the group I started with were all playing undead. Had I known that that very first character I rolled would be the one I still play today, I would have rerolled Orc in a heartbeat. They look great in virtually everything, they've got the best dance (at least since Taurens lost the peanut butter jelly dance), and they have more humour than most of the other races combined.

Another thing that used to be possible for a Tauren was to outrange Fankriss' Mortal Wounds debuff. That's been fixed for a while now, but I can still remember the surprise when we had one of our few Tauren Warriors not get the debuff at all for the entire course of the fight.

When we started a disparate group of freinds and friends of friends all knew we were starting. As the first person with a copy and able to log in I chose the server.

Due to a comedy of errors one half of the group had been talking and decided Horde, whilst the other was undecided. Come the day, I asked around the Horde guys what they were taking and nobody had taken a Troll or a rogue. I'm always the guy who takes the 'last pic', I took those. Given I'm a lanky sod IRL, kind of fitting.

In hindsight, I might have chosen Mage instead but I'm very happy with my rogue so musn't grumble.

Ironically, the other half of the group got the 'choose Aggramar' message, but not the 'roll Horde'. And promptly rolled Alliance, leaving us with a nice 50/50 split.

By the time we found out, I was furthest Horde side (leaving the Barrens) and the Allies had reached Duskwood. Too much investd! We're not going to switch now! Over time, only one of us has made the Horde - Alliance switch.

Bottom line is that the soft factors of the game didn't influence me at all, and all bar two none of my dozen or so friends either.

For the first character I made on my own, it was *class* first. I wanted to play a mage badly. I've always loved casters and I naturally gravitated towards the "pure" caster dps class (no pets, no heals). That didn't limit me in faction, but it limited me in races and of the mage choices available I went with gnome for the cuteness factor. I wanted to play a night elf mage... but sadly that wasn't possible. I'm a sucker for long hair and pointed ears.

Had blood elves been an option when I bought the game- I would have made one, and once settled in a horde community with a few friends, I doubt I'd have ever left. As it stands now, I have over a year and a half on my server in the alliance community- people know me by name, I know a ton of people- there's always someone to talk to when I'm leveling- I simply can't walk away from my faction, even if I will occasionally mourn the blood elf mage that will never be.

That's another soft factor for folks to chew on.

Once you're established within a community, be it server, pvp, pve, faction, guild, or just a very close knit group of friends- many (but not all) people find it more difficult to walk away as time goes on. I'll always be an alliance raider on Skywall at heart. I could move to a "better" server and get in a "better" guild, but I have far too many ties to leave. It would take a guild disband to force me out... but a disband would probably force me off the server entirely since I'd have a hard time mentally adjusting to being in one of the other raiding guilds. The only thing that could pry me out of the alliance is if I suddenly lost access to all 3 of my 60's at the same time that my guild disbanded and everyone scattered to the winds.... basically if I had to start over from scratch.

It puts some serious weight on first impressions given how quickly players can get involved with communities. That said- I walked away from Earthen Ring after 2 months there because I had no end game options and I wanted to get involved in a fresh community that I could be in on at the start, rather than trying to break in months/years later.

When I first started playing the game, my roommate (who I leveled with) had some die-hard obsession with rolling a paladin. I really really wanted to play Horde, mostly because I knew more people would be on the side of the "good guys" and I liked being outnumbered.

Now that he has quit the game, I had a chance to stop playing my druid and I picked a new character. I was going to roll that Horde character I'd always wanted to, but then my brother (who I play most of the time with now) decided HE wanted to play a paladin and didn't want to wait to level a blood elf. So I guess now I'm alliance 4 lyfe.

Can't you jump in? For almost a year tauren couldn't walk into booty bay inn from the lower level door. You could get in only with noggenfogger/deviate fish or by carefully aimed jump, so you went through the door with your knees bent.

Orgrimmar bank has the same feature. Try ace mod Automaton, it has an option to skip the dialog at bank.

I can confirm that NEs with something that increases size (like firewater), cannot enter the SW bank via walking. You should be able to do the aimed jump trick to bypass it though.

Because there is some lowbie quest that has the bank dude as an intermediary, so he needs a gossip box. :angry:

>_> The things you learn every day. Never knew about the aimed jump thing either.

You can enable/disable individual parts of Automaton. I have it mainly for the auto-accept rezzes. =)

Be glad I am not a Druid in your raid. :P

The discussion in the last few pages seems to be about aesthetic features of the game.

To some extent, I think the accessibility of WOW is a "soft" factor that keeps people playing. I'm not referring to the fact that the game is easy (leveling is easy) but to the ability to access underlying data. It's analogous to making a FPS game highly moddable. One obvious example is the floaty number you see when you do damage. Other more subtle examples can be found in the combat log.

Another example is the fact that Blizzard allows addons. Certainly this is a technical feature and not an aesthetic one but personally, if the user interface were not as customizable as it is, I probably wouldn't still be playing. It's a feeling of control that I didn't have while playing Lineage II (my only previous MMO experience) but maybe it's there in other games in the genre.

It was missing from the LOTR beta as well, and I think I tried one other beta of Hero (something like that) and kept finding myself missing the feeling of control you get when you customize your interface.