Faction change service whaaaaaattt?

[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:

[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!