June 30th, 2009 | 
Author: 
Ummm…Oh my God…are you kidding me? Wow, I am really taken aback by this one. Blizzard poster Nethaera has revealed that the WoW dev team is working to implement a new service which will allow players to change their faction from Horde to Alliance or vice versa. There is still a lot of work to be done, but the idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm. Ok…I’m sorry but I have to say it again…are you kidding me??
This seriously messes with the storyline behind the game, I mean I am not a “Lore Nerd” per say but I do enjoy the storyline as part of my WoW experience.
In my opinion this comes down to Blizz wanting to make more money off of us…seems to be the theme since Activision came into the picture.
Well I guess it’s no secret how I feel, so what about you guys? Are you liking this idea or do you think it’s just plain dumb? Please comment…I would love to hear from you!
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THIS IS AWESOME!!! Though, I don’t think they should implement this as a “service” like the character transfer or name change, but as a (very) long questline. Kind of like how you can betray your faction in Everquest II. I thought they were hinting at this feature when they introduced the TCG Servants of the Betrayer. Not exactly, I guess. But I’m glad this is in the works. The only downside I can see is that, a lot of people realize that the Alliance is full of nothing but stuck-up, conservative, squeaky clean types that will report you just for tarnishing their pristine world with a curse word or fart joke. The balance may be thrown into chaos. I wonder if Blizzard will also have to implement emergency character transfers to low populated servers so you don’t have servers that have 9,999 Horde and that 1 cranky old Ally. It would make sense that Blizzard would have to take a hard look at the census and have players agree to a possible yet necessary realm transfer when they go to apply for the conversion.
Hey Spug, Long time reader, love your updates, WAYY better then looking up the patch notes, First time to your sight, and first time commenting. I would like to say WHAT THE FU*K!? I love th idea of being able to take my ally friend off and bring them to hord, but think about how the low pop ally < hord servers are gona be? If I was them first thing I would think when I see that patchnote is "YAY!!! no more being ganked doing dailies" I mean, Blizzard has a great idea here, but they have to controll it some how, or it will be crazy.
You hit the it dead on, this is absolutly rediculous, Faction changes are going to ruin this game, it was bad enough that Blizzard decided to make this game so easy a three year old can play it in the next patch… But Faction changes?! Come one Blizzard, you have enough money, don’t ruin the game even more than you have.
I would never change the name or looks of my main. (My main is the same troll mage with whom I started playing the very first time)
He doesn’t even have the haircut achievement, so changing his race would be something I would never even think about.
There are some changes in WoW which I do not like, things like mounts for lower levels or gender change. But I can live with those. Changing faction sounds like Blizz wanting to make even more money like you said, and I would really hate a change like this.
Well, if they will indeed – just as that – swap your character’s race and faction, it would be a disgrace to WoW’s storylines. I think they should make it into a special questline that explains how the character ended up on the other side. (If they make faction-switching possible) Asking extra money is a little mean in my opinion, because this allows richer players to benefit from this trick by collecting faction-specific items of both factions.
To say it short and simple, I agree with you.
just because you have no desire to change factions doesnt mean that it is a scam to get more money out of you. i for one have wanted to be able to do this for a while. say for example one horde server you are on dies and you friends start playing on a alliance server. you really dont feel like leveling another char you can transfer. the closed mindedness of you guys is simply laughalbe
I do not mind this too much as a paid change in race, but I really dont want to see a bunch of human, NE, etc horde running around because they changed factions or also the reverse, tauren, troll, etc alliance. This is just my $0.02
I think that it is about time that they let us change sides if we want to. What I dont understand is how that affects the game at all. The storylines are not dependent on switching sides or not. My main is Horde and will stay Horde, but some of my alts i would like to change to the ally side. Just to see that side now that I am getting bored with the Horde side. 4 80’s on one side can do that.
If you read it says a roughly equivalent character. You would not see a human-horde or a troll-alliance. What it seems to be is your lvl 80 NE druid could become a lvl 80 tauren. It would have to meet the class/race specifics so any paladin on alliance would have to be a BE and any shaman on horde would turn into a Drenai. I don’t think it would be that bad of a change. If it were on a pvp server you would have to give up all of your alts to stay on the same server in order for it to work. I for one would never do that since i have 4 70’s on one server so I would have to realm hop to make it worth it (yes 70’s haven’t played the horde server since before wotlk). I have toons on both a horde server and an alliance server. In the last year or so all of my horde friends left or transfered. I have a really good friend that plays on the alliance server and I would love to be able to take any of my alts or my main hordes over to his server since I have no real reason to play on that server now. Not sure I would want to pay money for it though. My 2 cents.