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Blizzard: Faction switching "in the works"

June 29th, 2009 Chris Anthony Leave a comment Go to comments
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From the official forums:

We wanted to give everyone a very early heads-up that, in response to player requests, we’re developing a new service for World of Warcraft that will allow players to change their faction from Alliance to Horde or Horde to Alliance. There’s still much work to do and many details to iron out, but the basic 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. Players who ended up creating and leveling up characters on the opposite factions from their friends have been asking for this type of functionality for some time, and we’re pleased to be getting closer to being able to deliver it.

As with all of the features and services we offer, we intend to incorporate the faction-change service in a way that won’t disrupt the gameplay experience on the realms, and there will be some rules involved with when and how the service can be used. The number of variables involved increases the complexity of implementing this service, but we plan to take the time needed to ensure that it lives up to expectations before officially rolling it out. We’ll go into much more detail on all of this here at http://www.WorldofWarcraft.com as development progresses. In the meantime, we wanted to let you know that because this type of functionality requires extensive internal testing well in advance of release, you may be seeing bits and pieces of the service in the test builds we use for the public test realms moving forward.

Let’s not everybody get too excited here. Yes, they’re planning on letting us switch factions. No, we have no damn idea how it’s going to work. Maybe we’ll be able to pay a one-time fee and redesign our characters from the ground up, only on the other side. Maybe we’ll have to get sponsorship from someone on the other side, guild-charter style. Maybe it’ll be race roulette (thanks to Anea), where you can switch factions but everything is randomized. We don’t know.

I’m aware that fandom rule #1 is “If a situation is ever unclear, assume whatever it would take to drive you into a blind rage.” Please resist that urge. This probably won’t be out until WOW 4.0 at the earliest, so be patient and rational, and withhold judgment until you actually know what’s going on. Okay?

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Categories: World of Warcraft Tags: ,
  1. June 29th, 2009 at 15:00 | #1

    If it’s “race roulette” (which would be pretty freaking interesting, imo), then I want a way for gnomes to be priests… since they’re the only race without a healer option.
    divinebubbles´s last blog ..Pew……pew…………lazrs? My ComLuv Profile

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  2. MasonK
    June 29th, 2009 at 15:30 | #2

    Oh, come on. Gnomes have a buff to Engineering, which lets them have jumper cables, which let them raise the dead! That’s a healer option if I’ve ever seen one!

    <- tongue firmly in cheek

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  3. June 29th, 2009 at 16:50 | #3

    @divinebubbles, I dunno. If gnomes had healers, they’d have been able to Abolish Disease on Gnomeregan! ;) Hopefully, the next expansion will bring a healing hero class, which will address that issue. (I wonder if the next hero class will start at 65…)

    @MasonK, see, that’s the argument I’ve always used! Nobody ever seems to go for it, though. :(

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  4. June 30th, 2009 at 06:18 | #4

    I would be very happy is all horde rolling ally had to play gnomes and all ally rolling horde had to play belfs.

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  5. June 30th, 2009 at 21:23 | #5

    As entertaining as that would be, I suspect that they won’t be quite that stringent. :)

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  6. July 21st, 2009 at 12:08 | #6

    Hmm – see I really like this option. After playing as Alliance since the start, I know my 10 man group is chomping at the bit to swith factions. I’m not overly excited about having Jazz Hands (I’d love to be a Tauren Paladin), I am pretty pumped about switching my NElf warrior to a cow.

    It’ll also be nice to win pug BGs…

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