Blizzard tentatively announced that they might be working on a potential change to the game that may make it possible for you to some day, maybe, change a character’s faction. For a fee, presumably. And they aren’t making any promises or saying anything else about it. To quote Nethaera:
We plan to take the time needed to ensure that it lives up to expectations before officially rolling it out.
The thread in which she said that, less than 18 hours ago, is already 141 pages long!!
Players have a lot of questions about such a service. Will you be changing the race of your character? (Almost certainly) Will your choice of desination race be limited? (Blizzard could allow you to change to any of the five destination races) Will you have to give up some of your faction-specific stuff? (Probably) Will there be a faction/race-change quest? (Probably not)
What is your biggest question about changing factions?
I’m pretty sure races selected will be limited to the class you are playing. For example, if u play a Tauren druid…I don’t think you can be a Dwarf druid….wouldn’t make much sense.
The question is how long is the cooldown of changing factions? It better be sufficient enough so that you cannot keep switching factions. Also they should just make it 1 fee to change your faction, rename your character, change your realm and as well as change your looks. Should just be a flat fee and should be on 1 long cooldown. That way people can’t try and abuse the system.
The funny thing about this is that a week or two ago a few blues were saying that this was never going to happen.
I’m assuming that the Alliance bitched enough about wanting to become Horde that Blizzard finally had to cave and do something about it. For the Horde!
My question is regarding the faction specific achievements. If people have already completed all of their faction related achievements will those still apply when the faction change is made, thus allowing people to completely fill out their achievements both Horde and Alliance. Or, will the faction achievements be swapped for equivalent achievements for the opposite faction?
What are your thoughts?
The biggest concern is over population of one faction. If you’re into PvPing and in your BattleGroup, your faction always loses, you might be compelled to switch factions. I personally won’t change faction for PvP purposes.
I spent a good 2.5 years as alliance. Only in the past year did I roll horde and that was because I found out that some kinda distant family members played WoW too. I had to start a character all over and eventually I left behind 3 high level ally toons. If I had the choice, I would had rather changed faction and servers than level a brand new character.
Either way, this probably won’t affect me too much. I’m expecting more ally turning to horde players, so that means more people for raids and stuff.
I just really hope this change doesnt skew some horde to ally populations in some realms and some are already really bad : /
I think the biggest problem for Blizzard will be how to properly integrate Achievements when someone changes factions. There are any number of difficult Achievements that could be made easier by being able to switch factions, the chief ones being Loremaster and Seeker.
I’d pretty much resigned myself to this never happening- but I’m glad it is. Can’t wait to switch my main over to the Horde. I’m assuming that we will have to choose a new race (limited by class requirements), which is too bad because it would be really funny to have a Horde Gnome. I suppose when I switch (if and when I mean) I’ll be undead, since that makes the most since in an RP sort of way.
For one thing you choose your race and faction at the start of the game. I can understand that if your new to the entire game and want to experiment with what works best – but for those of us who are experienced in the game it just doesn’t seem viable to have. You either pick one side or the other and stick with it. It’s like having a family. You don’t leave it expecting to be adopted by some random family. Or do you? No I’m certain you don’t get adopted right away after just up and leaving a family. I could see some Alliance switching sides to join the Horde, specially since we own Wintergrasp so often. lol
i think this is the wrong way to go. I’d rather see Blizzard work on a way to gain rep with the opposite faction. Maybe a couple of quests that get you neutral with the other faction so that you can at least visit the other half of the content they’ve created.
Just my thinking…i’d like to hear what you guys have to say.
On the other hand, let’s say you have a high level character that you worked hard on. You meet some cool people who play WoW and want to play with them. But oh no, they are on the other faction! You don’t want to play with them on your cool character. Now you can.
PS, This is a game, not a family. I have level 80 characters on both factions and I don’t feel like I’m betraying anyone by doing that.
First, I’d like to say nice going on the angry whining forum guy. Awesome imitation there. I personally think that faction changing is retarded. The way they set it up makes factions and races so convoluded in the first place. I feel faction changes should not require a service out of the game, or even require to change your class, but that you should simply choose to side with one faction or another, reguardless of class or race. It should be done simply, with reputation penalties out the wazoo. Your items, non-reputation related currencies and anything else should stay the same. Rep should be reset as hated by the group you changed from, and neutral with your new faction and any reputation gains are reduced by a HUGE amount and any losses increased. Through all this however, there is a question. With this kind of change, if and how are they going to resolve the problems that are going to occur from future massive changes to an already unrealistic (in my opinion) main faction system? Anyway, good luck out there, and keep popping those shows out.