Faction Switching Coming to World of Warcraft

The immensely popular online MMO RPG game World of Warcraft has a bigger fan base and player count than any game around. Since the games release in 2004, the developers at Blizzard have created a plethora of different services for WoW players that lets them modify their gaming experience, for a fee that is. Some of theses services included paid, and even free, server transfers, name changes, the option of editing your character’s physical appearance and gender. But there is one change that many fans have been begging for and it seems that Blizzard is finally going to give it to them.

One of the biggest things some players didn’t like about WoW was that when you started a game, chose your class and character and starting gaining rank, you were stuck with that character. Well, you weren’t stuck with that particular character forever. If you desired to switch up what you were playing with you could, with one little defect. Switching your character in a game required you to restart at a level one player. So, if you got tired of being a level 65 Blood Elf and wanted to switch to something like Dwarf, you would have to start with a level one Dwarf, loosing all the time and effort you put into your previous character. But now, it seems, that Blizzard wants to change that for you and allow you to switch from one class to another(Horde to Alliance, Alliance to Horde) without losing all of your rank and other things.

A poster for Blizzard named Nethaera claims this about Blizzard adding faction switching to WoW: 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 ti 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 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 www.WorldofWarcraft.com as development progresses. In the meantime, we wanted to let you know that because of 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.

The development of this service is going to take time due to things like faction specific quests, achievements, and items that will take longer to implement. The idea of a faction switching service is getting mixed responses from the gaming community. Some people love the idea, stating that they can easily change to the faction most of their friends are playing on without losing progress. Others are against asking what the point of choosing sides is if you can just change it willy nilly? But it has been stated that this service will cost gamers a fee to use, though no specific charge has been announced. But what do you think? Is faction switching for WoW a good idea or not?

By: Zack Duncan