Faction change service whaaaaaattt?

[Niley]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18031079410&ST=US-2153775-sL7VLvX731NG9bdZTDcpkyJXc2H5LI0D0pU

omg

[Coltimar]

Oh my . . . this makes my life a ton easier! I hope I can change faction and server at the same time :/ Maybe I should move my ally squad now, lol.

[Gurblash]

HELL YES!!!!!!!!!!! (extra '!' for major emphasis)

This is a change I have been dreaming about for a long time.

[falsfire3401]

HOLY SDGJK:H!

I've been waiting for ages for a way to bring some of my abandoned alliance characters onto my horde realm where I play now!

[Vecter]

Well this sure shakes things up.

Wonder what the fees will be.Yea that's a good question. I can't imagine it will be cheap to avoid overuse (although they could have other means to control that)

I cant tell if this "service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm." means that when you change you choose a race in the faction you are changing to or that they are going to allow racial mix. Should be interesting!

[Jubber]

This is awesome. I can only assume at the moment it means that they will allow you to pick the equivilant. So you can only pick the race that offers the same class availability. It would be even better if they allowed a racial mix and got rid of the 6 class limitation.

[heyaz]

Well this sure shakes things up.

Wonder what the fees will be.Yea that's a good question. I can't imagine it will be cheap to avoid overuse (although they could have other means to control that)

I cant tell if this "service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm." means that when you change you choose a race in the faction you are changing to or that they are going to allow racial mix. Should be interesting!Probably $25-$40 like everything else. From all the hate tells I've gotten from multiboxing, I've found that most people consider that a TON of money.

People think the $25 transfer fee is expensive too. Back when I single boxed we jumped around battlegroups during the early Arena seasons, and just about every time, me and a friend would have to cover the transfer fees of a handful of our players who couldn't come up with $25.

Probably control it by some other means other than cost.

[Greythan]

Funny, I just asked about this earlier today in Nova's thread on his Alliance-based Madoran guild.

Now, how to talk Nova's entire guild to going Horde since we all know..... Horde rulz. :)

[warwizard]

Holy hell finally!

Humm, now only looking at spending 200 bucks to server transfer and faction change!

[Zyxxsb]

I had always thought they would offer this at some point, but when the achievement system came out I thought it would not be attempted.

Just goes to show you what can be done.................. Now if they would just place more emphasis on getting us more Dungeon servers that would be nice.

I sure get tired of seeing "additional instances cannot be launched please try again later"

[Tonuss]

Funny, I just asked about this earlier today in Nova's thread on his Alliance-based Madoran guild.

Now, how to talk Nova's entire guild to going Horde since we all know..... Horde rulz. :)That was the primary reason that I hadn't participated in that topic, because I have a guild full of horde toons. But if this becomes available...

[Marious]

While I find this very cool and I love to switch over to the dark side... which side would that be right? What is going to happen to all the rep you grind with various faction or is there an equivalent faction that you would automatically get rep transferred to?

So lets say cities...

IF=Org
SW=?

What about all the quest? Will you start off with like having done 0 quest for the horde if you where alliance before or viceversa? Lots of things to think about here. This is going to be a tough one for them.

Well will have to wait and see what they bring to us.

[Gurblash]

IF = Org
SW = UD
Darn = TB
Exodar = SMC

[Sajuuk]

This could be very, very interesting.


*dances with glee*

[elsegundo]

i was sooo hoping they would increase the character-per-realm limit first. =[

but it will be very interesting. perhaps even balance some servers. or not.

[Niley]

Now i need to devise a plan to get my whole guild go horde so i can get the damn racials!

[Korruptor]

To handle pvp servers i'm curious if they will have a bulk option to change all the characters (same account) for that server.

This would be really cool if you can pick your destination race so long as it supports your class.

[Mercurio]

This really is an unbelievable change. It totally changes everything I'm doing right now.

I RAFed up a bunch more horde toons to 60 because i wanted a couple more options on my 10-box teams. Was about to start leveling them to 80. Not anymore.

I'd also spent the weekend PLing up some tradeskills on my toons. (Man, that is painful). Not anymore.

Now I can just level up a select group of my ally toons from 70 to 80 and top off their tradeskills. With a quick transfer, I'll have all the classes I could want and all the tradeskills - all the benefit with half the work.

A lot of them even already have their epic flyers.

Thank you Blizzard.

Hmmm.... wonder what will happen to all those Winterspring tiger mounts.... will they keep them as hordies?

[Marathon]

I knew this was going to happen, and been talking about it for years. WOW has just found another way to squeeze a few more dollars out of us.

[Bena]

nice! I was actually thinking of rerolling horde on Mag to join the other boxers but the prospect of leveling up another team is just too painful. With this I'd transfer/side swith my ally team at the same time.. :thumbsup:

[shaeman]

This is great news.

I miss my 70/71 horde hunter and warlock but not quite enough to try and level Alliance versions.
If the faction transfer allows you to do so regardless of level that would be wonderful. Otherwise I'll have to spend some time levelling them.

Of course I'm hoping it's not going to take months and months for them to get it working.

[Momo]

Gonna be able to make some SOLID multibox guilds now though :P

[lans83]

As far as the PvP realm rules only allowing one faction, I imagine they'd change this rule or add in exceptions. Best I could figure they'd do, is make it a 'Paid transfer', let us turn traitor to our own faction. Any rep with faction cities like SW, IF, Exo, and Darn, would be lost and turn to "At War' status and "Neutral" with the Horde equivalent. Cross factions like Booty Bay, Gadgetzan, Shattrath, and the such would probably stay where they are since both sides can do the same quests. They could just add more achievements for us to do and still let us keep the ones we complete, just to add to the game. Ones such as the "# of quests completed on Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdom" would count toward both sides. Maybe even add to these numbers or add another achievement in this line. Or just change the names of them "# of quests on Kalimdor for Horde/Alliance'. Something to that effect would work. Mechanics would probably be tricky anyway, but doable. Once you turn against your own faction, they could grant us a title and achievement to reward/brand us. We'd be able to keep all our racials abilities we have, not change up too much of the mechanics of the game and allow us to walk around in opposing capital cities as the toons we've created. Imagine, Gnomes flooding ThunderBluff, Orcs/Undead in SW, and Trolls in IF accepting quests and using the bank/AH.

[Feardis]

o wow, i was catching up with some mates at a bbq the other day and they all play alliance and i play horde, this just seals the deal for me
they never cease to amaze do they
with regards to things that cant be transferred over
think of anything you have that the opposing faction doesn't have access too
and those are the things that will be lost
faction mounts etc
i'd say all argent rep will be lost and have to be done again, as well as pvp faction rep,
unless they figure out a way to transfer that over
i cant imagine how as can you really compare each opposing race and tell which is its opposite?
i hope they dont take too much away from you.
this is realy cool tho, i havn't played alliance for years i wonder whats changed

[Menthu]

I havnt seen Ellay yet so here it goes!

Poor Ellay for leveling those new shamans! :whistling:

You should have stayed Horde you Alliance scum betrayer! ;)

Junglelove,

-Menthu

[Klesh]

Sounds awesome, but I probably won't switch sides cause I don't feel like wasting even more cash on faction changes for all (or most) of my toons. Even though I'd really like to try some raids with another boxer... :(

[Momo]

Blizz.....

opening up everything to hang onto existing players.

You watch over the next twelve months as the game gets opened up to complete casual content and welfare epix.

It will happen.

[Multibocks]

Calling it now - paid equipment upgrades.

just kidding. I find this change awesome and scary at the same time. I now no longer need to level another set of shaman. WOOT.

[Enndo]

After all these years we are gonna be able to change our toons to whichever faction we want.


http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18031079410

[Mercurio]

I havnt seen Ellay yet so here it goes!

Poor Ellay for leveling those new shamans!

You should have stayed Horde you Alliance scum betrayer!

Yeah, if I would have known this was coming, I could have stayed with my 15 geared epic flying level 70 alliance toons and not made 20 epically geared, epic flying level 80 horde toons from scratch.

Ah well, the journey has been fun. At least RAF made it very efficient.

[Multibocks]

After all these years we are gonna be able to change our toons to whichever faction we want.


http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18031079410

??


Strange post considering that this is what everyone is talking about already in this thread. I feel like you are 5 mins late to the conversation.

[Eveso]

I hope this doesn't cause people to switch factions, and then be completely clueless about what's going on with the other side.

Because that would happen to me. I'd switch to Horde and wonder how the heck do I navigate UC? :P

[Taliesin]

After all these years we are gonna be able to change our toons to whichever faction we want.


http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18031079410

??


Strange post considering that this is what everyone is talking about already in this thread. I feel like you are 5 mins late to the conversation.
I think Enndoh's post was moved in here for consolidation purposes. Originally it appeared as it's own thread. :)

This change will be tempting. I'm alliance only because a couple friends and their kids started a new server and went alliance and I was just playing with them. I always preferred horde, and one of the kids was just agreeing a couple days ago that he also prefers horde as well. A faction change could be in our future, but that's a long way off yet. It would be interesting to start consolidating some of my orphaned toons stuck on horde on other servers, I suppose.

[laaglander]

After all these years we are gonna be able to change our toons to whichever faction we want.


http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18031079410

GJ sherlock!!



sigh alliance ftw..rerolling on same server doesn't mean much for me,

both sides are low populated, but on alliance i have my friends aswell..so its simple for me.

[Tonuss]

Blizz.....

opening up everything to hang onto existing players.

You watch over the next twelve months as the game gets opened up to complete casual content and welfare epix.

It will happen.I don't see a problem with a company making changes designed to hang on to its customers. That's a pretty standard business practice. The question is whether it works or whether it will drive people away. I have a feeling that it won't drive people away, and it could certainly help some existing players stay.

As for opening the game up to casuals and easy gear, they've been heading that way since just before Burning Crusade. Remember that they made the honor gear (which usually required incredible amounts of PvPing, day after day, sometimes for months) obtainable without ranks? At that point the snowball began rolling down the hill. Before very long they were nerfing heroics, nerfing Gruul's, nerfing Magtheridon, nerfing Karazhan, and then nerfing those all over again. And again. And again. WotLK heroics are easier than tBC heroics even after all the nerfing. Now they're going to make easy and hard versions of both the 10/25 man dungeons, which means that there will be a version of 10/25 man content that can be done by pretty much anyone.

Thing is, companies don't make these changes without doing some market research (or if they don't, they risk going out of business pretty quick). If Blizzard is going this far in the direction of making the game more and more accessible, then their research must be showing that these changes are always extremely popular. Sure, people complain vociferously in the forums whenever they announce or make these changes, but the complainers never leave, and the changes are popular amongst the people who don't make a fuss. By now it should be pretty obvious what they want this game to be. We are way past the point of "soon, Blizzard will make this game easy."

[Multibocks]

I suggest you try Algalon(10 or 25) or the Yogg achievement(no helpers) before making the statement, "WoW is easy."

[shaeman]

Blizzard are smart cookies. They will introduce new raids and gear for the hardcore raiding fraternity, so they can still strut around in items that everybody else won't have. I'm sure there will be a gear be a gear difference between easy and hard mode, and 10 and 25 man stuff (it seems only right that there should be).

They put so much effort into building these wonderful involving raiding environments that it seems silly not to cut off loads of people from accessing it.

I'm betting there are far more casuals playing than hardcore raiders , but I don't think it will be too difficult for blizzard to keep both sorts of players happy.

[Enndo]

I cant wait to get all the 70's back that i left behind when i switched to horde!!

[Multibocks]

I got two teams of 80s fully geared out on horde that I can transfer to alliance, woohoo!


Thought: Do you think they will wrap it all up in one service? What I mean is, if you want to switch servers, change factions and your name. The name part is easy, just make a toon with your name on the server before you transfer characters. I hope I dont get dinged 25x2 for each character to transfer servers and then change faction, ugh. That will be 500 dollars! Totally, totally not worth it.

[Fat Tire]

Blizz.....

opening up everything to hang onto existing players.

You watch over the next twelve months as the game gets opened up to complete casual content and welfare epix.

It will happen.I don't see a problem with a company making changes designed to hang on to its customers. That's a pretty standard business practice. The question is whether it works or whether it will drive people away. I have a feeling that it won't drive people away, and it could certainly help some existing players stay.

As for opening the game up to casuals and easy gear, they've been heading that way since just before Burning Crusade. Remember that they made the honor gear (which usually required incredible amounts of PvPing, day after day, sometimes for months) obtainable without ranks? At that point the snowball began rolling down the hill. Before very long they were nerfing heroics, nerfing Gruul's, nerfing Magtheridon, nerfing Karazhan, and then nerfing those all over again. And again. And again. WotLK heroics are easier than tBC heroics even after all the nerfing. Now they're going to make easy and hard versions of both the 10/25 man dungeons, which means that there will be a version of 10/25 man content that can be done by pretty much anyone.

Thing is, companies don't make these changes without doing some market research (or if they don't, they risk going out of business pretty quick). If Blizzard is going this far in the direction of making the game more and more accessible, then their research must be showing that these changes are always extremely popular. Sure, people complain vociferously in the forums whenever they announce or make these changes, but the complainers never leave, and the changes are popular amongst the people who don't make a fuss. By now it should be pretty obvious what they want this game to be. We are way past the point of "soon, Blizzard will make this game easy."All good points. I dont know if blizzard has given up trying to increase market share(havent seen WoW has reached 13 million subscribers! and i doubt we ever will), but they have begun aggressive marketing to retain or attract already canceled players back to WoW. Obliviously these extra "services" are very profitable for Blizzard as they add a nice chunk to the profit margin at least during the intial release. I believe when the merger happened with Activision they were forced to become a more accessible game. I am sure market research told them that people dont have a ton of time to devot to the game and most want easier access to improving their character on a more consistent basis and that they are willing to pay for it. These current changes are only the beginning.

One has to think that there is some internal conflict going on inside of blizzard between the "pures" and the "casual" of the development team. With the upper management forcing the hand of the developers for the sake of the shareholders. We will see alot more casual, even more than the upcoming content and just alot more of these types of pay services as blizzard continues to lose market share.

Hey I gotta admit I would pay for certain things myself. 100 bucks for a lvl 80 in full current season pvp gear? You could say no way will they ever do this and I will just point out what they have said they will never do and then turned around at implemented it.

[falsfire3401]

I hope this doesn't cause people to switch factions, and then be completely clueless about what's going on with the other side.

Because that would happen to me. I'd switch to Horde and wonder how the heck do I navigate UC? :P

Fortunately I've played both sides to 80 so this wouldn't affect me lol.

Looking forward to being able to transfer my abandoned "original" wow toon, an 80 rogue with a handful of epics, over to the horde side and join my horde guild where I play now.


Me and my guildies were talking at great length about this on Vent last night and we sorta figured out a consensus on how WE think it might work:
* paid service, probably around a $50us fee
* rolls together character transfer, character re-customization, name change, and change race to an appropriate race of the new faction
* pick your new realm/account immediately on the website if you're transferring, or leave at default to stay on the same realm/account
* when you login to the game on your new realm, you have to customize your character before entering the game world. Pick a valid race/gender, customize their appearance, input a new name (or keep the same one)
* when you login you are teleported to the racial start location (or maybe Dalaran) of your new race, IE undead get teleported to Deathknell. Your hearthstone is reset to hearth you to the same spot (in case you're in a now-enemy city or have your hearth set at a now-invalid innkeeper)
* can only be done at level 80, long cooldown (like 6 months)
* automatically receive all faction-specific flightpaths of your new faction. Neutral flightpaths you obviously still keep.
* all factions translate over accordingly, IE SW->Org, Honor Hold->Thrallmar OR POSSIBLY all factions of your new side get set to their default starting levels for your new race, ie undead are friendly with silvermoon/uc and neutral with the other cities. If you want to raise it then you have to do all the lowbie quests or cloth turn-ins or go back to the argent tournament grounds.
* all achievements translate to the new faction's equivalent achievement, IE For The Alliance becomes For The Horde
* On a PvP realm, in terms of having characters on both factions, you can no longer create new toons until you resolve the imbalance by either converting all toons or deleting/transferring toons of the old faction. ***OR*** the fee is perhaps higher than $50 and converts ALL toons on a PvP realm to the new faction, does NOT do this on a PvE realm as many people on purpose play both sides there and wouldn't want to be forced to move all their alliance-horde or vice-versa.


I've already decided my female human rogue, if I get to choose her new race, will become undead. She died to the plague but was fortunate enough to retain her free will when she came back to undeath.

[Multibocks]

Hey I gotta admit I would pay for certain things myself. 100 bucks for a lvl 80 in full current season pvp gear? You could say no way will they ever do this and I will just point out what they have said they will never do and then turned around at implemented it.

Hey I called the pay for equipment service first! =P

[Taliesin]

Thought: Do you think they will wrap it all up in one service? What I mean is, if you want to switch servers, change factions and your name. The name part is easy, just make a toon with your name on the server before you transfer characters. I hope I dont get dinged 25x2 for each character to transfer servers and then change faction, ugh. That will be 500 dollars! Totally, totally not worth it.
I would suspect so. The $25 fee may go unchanged for the current server/gender/name changes and add the faction change into the process so you can switch faction, server, gender, and name all at the same time. The price might go slightly higher, but I would expect the huge wave of new transfers would be enough for them to justify keeping the price the same.

Besides that, I'm more inclined not to speculate about the changes, since we're most likely going to be surprised one way or another about the final features of the transition. There are too many ways that this could go that we're flipping coins as far as what we think is going to happen.

[Tonuss]

I suggest you try Algalon(10 or 25) or the Yogg achievement(no helpers) before making the statement, "WoW is easy."I mean in terms of how far within reach the gear is. In vanilla WoW a non-raider, or any player who didn't have the time or inclination to get 40 people together regularly, (or who didn't want to PvP for 10-18 hours each day) was likely to fall behind by several tiers of quality in terms of gear. Heck, they would be lucky to have one or perhaps two epics, and those were probably BoE. This changed a lot in tBC, from the changes to the honor system, to the implementation of arenas and the ease of getting gear even if you did badly, to arena and badge gear that kept players within a tier or two of the leading edge guilds. Karazhan was nerfed to where even 'non-serious' casual guilds (the one I was in at the time, for instance) could farm it in 3-4 hours.

In WotLK this has gone a step further, with all raid zones raidable by a 10-man raid, and even the future 25-man raids will have, in effect, "normal" and "hard" modes. The badge/emblem and even the reputation systems have given players a path of progression that doesn't even require them to step into a raid zone at all. Mind you, I think that all of this is great. But it's become very easy to gear up regardless of your play schedule or play style.

Sure, there is some content that will remain the purview of only the best players, and I think that makes sense-- it keeps the leading edge guilds interested in the game the way they like it. But the ability to "purple up" is there for nearly everyone now. It's gotten much easier to continue on a path of gear progression than it was previously, and I think that this has been the case since early/mid tBC.

[Darelik]

nowai! to quote wowinsider:

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.wow.com/media/2009/06/danielw_hordliance.jpg

[TheBigBB]

It's about time! You spend SO much time with one faction's characters that it becomes unthinkable for many people to ever even play the other faction seriously. This will also help guild recruiting and the ability even within this community for people to join up. I mean, imagine you are alliance and wanted to join the Zerg boxing guild? Now you can without rerolling. Of course, I'm sure there will be some huge consequences of switching.

[Perrigrin]

This is awesome. I can only assume at the moment it means that they will allow you to pick the equivilant. So you can only pick the race that offers the same class availability. It would be even better if they allowed a racial mix and got rid of the 6 class limitation.If they allowed race / class combos to be anything and only through this service I would move my tauren druids to alliance and then back just to swap race :P

[Iceorbz]

Gonna be able to make some SOLID multibox guilds now though :P

Beat you to it. :)yeah i would interested in this lol, multiboxers and extra paladins for healers for pvp :)

[Tonuss]

This will also help guild recruiting and the ability even within this community for people to join up.I hadn't even considered that. That could be one of the primary reasons for the change, to make it easier for raiding guilds to recruit.

[Multibocks]

Please let their be a mass move option!! $100 bucks!

[Taliesin]

Please let their be a mass move option!! $100 bucks!
Ditto. I hope there are cost-saving options for transferring an entire server on an account over to the other side.

[kadaan]

They never had a mass server transfer option, so I don't think a mass faction change will happen... but the whole you-can't-have-both-factions-on-a-pvp-server thing will be interesting.

Mounts and factions I'm sure will just transfer over 1:1. If you're exalted with 4/5 alliance cities you'll be exalted with 4/5 horde cities. They're adding the Ravasaur trainers mount as well, so winterspring will be able to translate over to horde.

They're either having to have to have a way to change your race on the same side (IE, $25 to go from gnome mage to human mage) or prevent you from doing a double faction transfer to switch races. Personally I think they'll just make you go back to your original race when switching back. If not, all my new alts will be human if possible for the 10% rep bonus, then switch to something else later ;).



The service is a great way to play with friends on other servers/factions instead of having to completely re-roll. It also effectively DOUBLES the pool of potential recruits for raid guilds, BIG WIN! :D

[Multibocks]

omg faction bonus, lol. What a great idea! Although their pvp bonus ain't nothing to sneer at either!

edit: now that I think about it, I bet every PvP arena group that is capable of being human will try this "feature." Who doesnt want a free trinket??

[Tonuss]

They're either having to have to have a way to change your race on the same side (IE, $25 to go from gnome mage to human mage) or prevent you from doing a double faction transfer to switch races.They appeared to say that you will have a choice of which race to select when you do the switch (limited by your class, obviously), but that you will not have the option to change your race under other circumstances (ie, if you want to change from tauren to undead or gnome to human). I figure that they're saving that for later. If you switch factions and then switch back, you can only switch back to your original race.

Of course, they haven't finalized it, so this could all change. But they updated the initial post to answer the flood of questions people were posting.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Pessimist thought: Blizzard says "we realize the desire to join friends on the opposite faction of the same server," and also say re: faction balances per server, "We are taking great care in how we implement this new service in order to maintain balance between the factions on the realms but do not have any further details to share. "

In other words, congrats on being able to join all your friends on <server>, that is, unless their faction is overpopulated already, then you're SOL unless they all pay the fee and switch to YOUR faction.

Yeah, blah blah <better than nothing> blah blah <why poop on everything> blah blah. /whatever

Still, I think it would be some seriously funny stuff to watch one server's entire horde minority switch factions to alliance in protest. :P

[Sychosys]

I am just happy that it doesnt end up being SUCH a mistake to have started collecting all my vanity pets and neat TCG Loot items on an alliance character when I mostly play Horde... Heck there are alliance zones I have only ever walked through and Ive been playing WoW since it came out.. Duskwood? Oh thats the place I run through to get to the swamp :) hehe

[Silence]

I'm surprised to mainly see positive responses to this change...

I myself balked at the mention of this. I'm in no way a roleplayer but Blizzard always said this would never happen, it would be against the spirit of the game blahblahblah. I really feel that the financial department is running the show these days and not the actual people who create content like when it just started.

Every day we play we look at models that are more then a year (sometimes even more) old, but yet they spend resources and time on stuff that doesn't improve actual gameplay or the experience in any way. The only recent achievement is Yogg, which turned out awesome, the rest is close to crap however. The new raid/instance we're getting is, again, filled with old shit models. It's getting a tad annoying ;p "Oh great! we can finally fight a boss we've been killing for years already, he just looks green now..."

This is just one more on the list of "how to make money without actually doing something".

[Tonuss]

I really feel that the financial department is running the show these days and not the actual people who create content like when it just started.That could certainly be the case, that after the merge with Activison and the purchase by Vivendi, they're being pressed to generate cash. I believe that in Vivendi's 2008 annual report, they claimed that WoW was actually a cash drain on the company (but I am not 100% sure, I don't know if I'm reading the report correctly or not). So pretty much everything is on the table now, lore or continuity be damned.

[Bigfish]

Not particularly surprising. Don't really care, since you don't retain your race.

[Mosg2]

What they said would ruin the continuity and that they'd never do is allow Horde races to defect to the Alliance side and vice versa. That's a far cry from a paid service to change the actual race of your toon(s).

Personally, I'm on cloud nine. I love the look of Dranei and I've wanted to have Dranei Shaman for over 2 years... But I've never gotten an Alliance toon past level 2 and my boosting characters have always been and continue to be Horde. When I can do 1-60 in 6 hours played I have no motivation whatsoever to roll on Alliance, race be damned.

[shaeman]

Blizzard said they would never allow non pvp to pvp realm transfer. They did. The sky didn't fall in.

There's a lot of emphasis about how it's all about fleecing the customer, but it's actually about giving the customer what they want (And they can charge for it too).

I posted many months ago how I wish I could swap faction. It's been something that I've seen a lot of other people have wanted.
I swapped to alliance because everyone I played horde side got jaded with the game and quit. I knew some folks that had rerolled alliance and so I did the same.
I had to level characters all the way back up just so I could get to play at the same level of content I was at before (Thank god for RAF).

I rolled mostly different classes on the alliance side, as i didn't see the point of levelling the same ones again.

Now the time invested in those horde characters wont be completely wasted. And I'll gain the use of all the professions I left behind.

Personally, I can't wait.

[TheBigBB]

What they said would ruin the continuity and that they'd never do is allow Horde races to defect to the Alliance side and vice versa. That's a far cry from a paid service to change the actual race of your toon(s).

Personally, I'm on cloud nine. I love the look of Dranei and I've wanted to have Dranei Shaman for over 2 years... But I've never gotten an Alliance toon past level 2 and my boosting characters have always been and continue to be Horde. When I can do 1-60 in 6 hours played I have no motivation whatsoever to roll on Alliance, race be damned.GREAT point: Blizzard claimed they would never allow defection to the other side, but they didn't say they wouldn't allow the creation of a new horde/alliance character which just happens to retain the same gear and such. That's what this comes down to.

[falsfire3401]

What they said would ruin the continuity and that they'd never do is allow Horde races to defect to the Alliance side and vice versa. That's a far cry from a paid service to change the actual race of your toon(s).

Personally, I'm on cloud nine. I love the look of Dranei and I've wanted to have Dranei Shaman for over 2 years... But I've never gotten an Alliance toon past level 2 and my boosting characters have always been and continue to be Horde. When I can do 1-60 in 6 hours played I have no motivation whatsoever to roll on Alliance, race be damned.GREAT point: Blizzard claimed they would never allow defection to the other side, but they didn't say they wouldn't allow the creation of a new horde/alliance character which just happens to retain the same gear and such. That's what this comes down to.

It'd be kinda neat if they did allow defection instead of a paid faction+race change. I always wanted my human L80 rogue to be horde...but still be human.

At least lore-wise I can make her an undead and say she died on one too many Naxx-25 PUGs, but retained her free will when she came back to undeath and the alliance would thus no longer accept her in spite of the fact she did so many damn quests for them, has existed since retail launch, killed all those 40-man L60 raid bosses, reached the rank of Knight-Lieutenant, etc...so she joined the Forsaken.

I really wonder about the specifics of reputation when you xfer factions...will they do an equal mapping ie Honor Hold->Thrallmar for the faction-specific ones, or will all your faction-specific ones start at their default level ie 0/3000 Neutral for most cases. And flight paths...will you get all the equivalent flight paths? And how about quests? Will I be reset to 0 quests completed and have to redo all of them, even the neutral ones, will I be somehow Sons of Hodir honored / Ebon Blade revered without having done any quests for them? Or will I still be at the same number of quests completed but now have a super easy time going for Loremaster and Ambassador because I can do all the horde-specific quests for every zone starting at high rep levels...

As Nethaera wrote, there's ALOT of factors they have to take into account when doing this.

It might just be we get a "premade" toon of our chosen race, with the exact same gear, and all the 'neutral' factions set to the exact same level (for purpose of rep reward gear and enchants etc).

Or maybe they just edit some DB entries, changing race, flight paths, faction-specific reps, etc. It's all still such a mystery how it will work.

[blast3r]

So this means all you Alliance no lifers can transfer to Magtheridon and join up with The Zerg no lifers. hehe

[Tdog]

Hmmm, so basically the fact that I have both a team of shaman and a team of paladins on both horde and alliance means I just wasted ALOT OF TIME!!! X(

[Tonuss]

GREAT point: Blizzard claimed they would never allow defection to the other side, but they didn't say they wouldn't allow the creation of a new horde/alliance character which just happens to retain the same gear and such. That's what this comes down to.To be honest, I think that it would work better to allow your character to defect. There are 'traitors' on both sides, and there are also NPCs who have helped the other side at one time or another. After paying your fee to switch factions, you could be sent to either a neutral site (Shattrath, Dalaran) or simply to one of the capital cities of your new faction, with your new factions reset to friendly or neutral. If you were to pay to switch back, they would do the same thing (ie, if you'd gotten your alliance factions to exalted and then switched to horde and back to alliance, your alliance factions would now be neutral). Having your character suddenly disappear without a trace and re-appear as a character on the opposite faction pretty much pulls you out of the continuity. Then again, I guess it's not that different from a server transfer (disappear from one realm, and re-appear on another).

None of these changes bother me in particular, as they do not affect my game play negatively. And if at some point I want to take advantage of the service, it's nice to have it there. My speculation on what they're doing or why they're doing it is separate from whether or not I happen to like the ideas.

[Mosg2]

I don't think that they'll ever have an option to defect. In my mind there are a few lines in the sand so to speak, and that's one of'em. It would really ruin any sort of immersiveness.

[Multibocks]

It's too bad really, I would level a NE hunter to 80 just to defect to horde and laugh as everyone spit on me in Orgrimmar. IM ON YOUR SIDE NOW GAIS! /hug